How unstable is 64x?

[skeevy]

As yet another alternative, it's dead easy to setup a USB stick with Linux & KSP on it - no need to even touch your precious hard drive. A 4GB stick should be enough, 8GB is definitely enough.

I'm surprised that the KSP Linux community hasn't made a distro or a respin of something designed to run off of a USB stick. Even though is a bit rough around the edges and sometimes requires a terminal command or two to fix things, my suggestion would be to use a distro like Manjaro Openbox Edition because it has two Steam versions (standard one that uses Ubuntu libs and a second one that uses system libs), proprietary drivers are easy to install and switch back to open source versions, it's a light-weight desktop, based on Arch Linux so it really up-to-date (and can use the AUR for a lot of stuff), it's a rolling release so it never needs to be reinstalled or have a messy apt-get dist-upgrade to update to the next version, and it has friendly developers and community members.

[eataTREE]

Another satisfied x64 Linux user here. The difference between 32-bit OSX and 64-bit Linux performance on the same hardware is amazing. I would test to see if this applies to other Unity-platform games if I ever felt like playing a game that is not KSP

The only downside is that I'm going to spend money now on more RAM, since I can load as many mods as I want, and apparently I want a lot of them.

[micha]

I'm surprised that the KSP Linux community hasn't made a distro or a respin of something designed to run off of a USB stick.

I actually did look into this briefly, but as I was on a business trip and totally swamped with work at the moment I had to regrettably shelve it. Something to revisit, although I daresay by the time I get around to it, Unity5 might be out rendering the whole exercise somewhat pointless.

[Frozen_Heart]

In 0.24.2 the x64 version worked perfectly for me. No crashes at all.

However in 0.25 it doesn't work for me so I've had to return to the 32bit version.

[AengorKerbow]

I used the 0.24 64-bit version to start out with. I had no issues at all, until I tried to use the Crew Manifest mod. It wouldn't work, so I switched to 0.25 32-bit.

[Commander Jebidiah]

So, I want to try 64x to be able to use my pc's 12gigs of ram so I could run more mods. My internet isnt too great so i dont want to wait a few hours for 64x to download and then find out it was a waste of time.

I normally use it and it's stable for me but I use 32 bit for mods that disable themselves in 64 bit, I'm looking at you NEAR

[John FX]

Wait, so I could get a 32Gb flash drive (got one lying about somewhere) and put linux on that and boot from it and my tiny tiny SSD would not have to have any more precious space taken up and I wouldn`t have to dual boot every time, just to play KSP?

I am interest. Anyone got more info on how to do that for someone who has never used Linux?

When I ran 24.2 64 bit I found it much more stable than 0.25 32 bit for a small or large amount of mods TBH YMMV.

I would also say not to bother with 64 bit if you just run one mod.

[Padishar]

You would still have to reboot your machine from the USB stick to start Linux...

[sal_vager]

You'd also have to install graphics drivers, that's not really feasible when using a live image in a USB stick unfortunately.

You'd be better off with a HD partition.

[micha]

You'd also have to install graphics drivers, that's not really feasible when using a live image in a USB stick unfortunately.

THere's a distro I looked at briefly to use as a basis which auto-detects the graphics hardware and dynamically changes the config at bootup time. Hadn't seen that before in LinuxLand, but not enough time to chase it up further. Also, can't find a bigger USB stick than 2GB at the moment so can't play with it anyway.

[prophet_01]

I have no problems whatsoever (windows 7 64 bit). Runs like a charm with a ton of mods. I can run EVA and b9 at the same time without texture reduction. It's heaven

As far as I've heared it pretty much either works perfectly or horribly. Not much in betwen. No changes from 0.24 to 0.25 for me.

[Senshi]

Running at 6,8GB working set (7,1GB private bytes) upon reaching the main menu, deliberately not using ATM or LoadOnDemand and enjoying my full-size crisp textures. Which increases when playing.

Experience one ominous crash per 5-6h of gaming. Which is much preferable to the one-crash-per-30min I had with 32bit due to hitting the memory limit all the time.

I play Win64 since the first "hack" came out, and there's just two real bugs/quirks you have to get used to:

One being the "left-click-becomes-right-click" in Windows after starting KSP64. Easily solved by right-clicking once.

The other being the more annoying: Sometimes, right-clicking a part only works sporadically, requiring a click-orgy to get it working. This seems to occur more often when the CPU is stressed (e.g. due to a lot of physics calculations taking place), but can appear and disappear seemingly random.

Not a single mod-bug could be traced to be Win64-exclusive on my game setup. Whenever I encounter a mod bug, I double-check it on my KSP32bit version that I have installed in parallel (shifting the mod subset to be as close as possible). So the mod-bug risk doesn't seem to be that particularly pressing.

Yes, Win64 is experimental and a very fickle beast, with the stability apparently being highly dependent on hardware. I had a lot more crashes in 0.23 and early 0.24 before my last hardware upgrade from Phenom II X4 965 to Xeon E3 1230 (mainboard changed to Z87-G45), which now runs KSP64 very smoothly.

The opinion and discussion about 64bit has become a bit toxic, which is a pity. I would welcome a more open and healthy discourse about investigating issues and causes for stability issues some have and others don't. Obviously this should be entirely OUTSIDE the mod threads, more of a "KSP64 self-help group" if you will.

I also felt the deliberate exclusion of Win64 by some mods to be very patronizing, though I understand the modders' points of view entirely. To be fair, a majority of KSP32 bug reports also are rarely well-formatted or useful on their first try (I'm always amazed how ferram, Nathan etc. don't go crazy from having to process this neverending mess in their threads).

The Win64-"shutout" wasn't too bad for me, because I just invested half an hour of googling to compile a Win64-enabled version of the provided sourcecode on my own (currently FAR and Real Fuels).

Both mods which for me - and probably many others - have become absolutely elementary for KSP. I cannot enjoy the game without them anymore. But I also can't be without all my other part-heavier mods (KSPI, B9, ScanSAT, Nova, KW...), which is why 32bit simply won't cut it either. Yes, I tried to find a cut-down mod subset to run KSP32 after 0.25 came out and I failed. I always was too close to the memory limit, crashing the game after ~30min of playing.

[Madrias]

0.24 x64 wasn't too bad for me. Very stable, in fact, more stable than x86 mode.

0.25 x64 has pushed me back to x86 mode. Too many crashes just after reaching the SPH and thinking of picking a command pod.

[sedativechunk]

I for one have been playing in 64 bit windows for a while now and the game runs perfectly fine for me with multiple mods installed. I'm even on Windows 8.1 as a matter of fact. .24 was a little crash prone with mods but I have deleted several mods and am running 0.25 perfectly fine.

[kormer]

I also felt the deliberate exclusion of Win64 by some mods to be very patronizing.

I agree with everything you wrote, but especially this part of it. I understand that for most mods we can do our own recompile, but I think a better solution would have been a config file change.

Edited October 30, 2014 by kormer

[G'th]

From what I've seen, the stability of x64 varies from computer to computer.

Mine is perfectly stable despite packing a TON of mods into the game. Actually haven't had a crash in .25 yet that wasn't actually caused by a mod (which happened to be DebRefund, which I hadn't realized hadn't been updated yet. Removing that and I've yet to have a crash after 10+ hours).

[NWM]

If I see a game with 64bit Windows Unity engine, I'll run away screaming. All is buggy for me - mainly dependent on memory usage. The Linux-64 versions works perfectly.

[John FX]

It seems the answer to the question posed in the OP is `very very unstable but the next version based on a newer version of unity sounds more stable`