Dear Ironclad/Stardock
There's been a lot of talk on the forums lately calling for a multithreaded 64-bit version of Sins of a Solar Empire and a lot of talk about why it supposedly cannot/won't be done.
I understand the reasons why Ironclad made Sins of a Solar Empire a 32-bit game at the time and why rewriting Sins of a Solar Empire in 64-bit would be expensive/time-consuming for a company like Ironclad or even Stardock, but in my opinion it is completely necessary. The game works about halfway for those of us who rarely play Multiplayer. Even on an excellent computer, late game lag becomes completely unplayable. Turning the settings way down doesn't help. It is just unplayable when you try to play the game on large maps the way it was designed and advertised to be played.
As somebody who bought Sins of a Solar Empire, Entrenchment, Diplomacy, Rebellion, and has bought and gifted copies to multiple people (and looking forward to the DLCs) I am a huge fan, but honestly, the fact that Sins runs so poorly late game, even on a computer which vastly exceeds recommended specs, makes me feel very cheated as a player, a fan, and a consumer. To the point that I will not buy Sins of a Dark Age or any future Ironclad and/or Stardock games if the issue is not fixed.
Remember Stardock's Gamer Bill of Rights? One of those rights was:
Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer.
To put it simply, when it comes to mid-late game—Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion doesn't play adequately even on minimum or even well above recommended specs. I'm just stating facts. I'm not hating on SoaSE:R. I love the game. But its unplayable. And I think the fans who bought the game have every right to demand that this be remedied.
Here's the thing though...even though I firmly believe that I've more than paid for it already, I'd pay for the fix. I cannot speak for the entire community at large, but the Sins players I know personally have all said they'd pay a little bit for a 64-bit fix as well. Clearly people want a 64-bit build, the threads pop up again and again and again. So here's the thing, why doesn't Ironclad and/or Stardock start a Kickstarter or some other crowd funding source to get the funds together to do 64-bit build? Doing an overhaul though would be a huge undertaking for IC/Stardock and may not be all that viable financially. I am sympathetic to that fact as I'm sure others are as well. So, if we want 64-bit Sins bad enough we can toss in a few bucks to make it happen. I think that's more than fair. Let us help you do what we all deserve. Give us the game we love in a playable state and help Sins of a Solar Empire live up to it's full potential.
Sincerely and with much love and respect,
Cripple X
I'll put down 80-100 bucks towards such a crowdfunding if/when it is put up.
I'm in.
the DLC is the funding because 100,000 downloads is $500,000 for a job that took maybe 3 or 4 engineers at a cost of maybe $100,000 to $200,000 a year. They need 300,000 dlc downloads to bank over $1 million.
While we greatly appreciate the interest in expanding the Sins' engine, these types of feature are in the realm of sequels.
oops, Yarlen confirms that theres a sequel and its in 64bit with a pinch of multi-threading. I can't wait for the ad campaign to start!
That didn't sound like a confirmation, more like a taunt that it there won't be a sequel
Then again my perspective sucks when it comes to messages...
You'll learn its best not to take RiddleKing too seriously... most of the time. In fact its kind of hinted at in his name.
GoaFan don't be jalous--- and there accusations that you are not playing on ICO but instead are spending time in the forums. Shame on you!
glhf
RiddleKing
Our local troll. He is friendly though.
Friendly trolls? Blasphemous!
You know I'm more of a modder than a online player. You should be getting mad at me for not coding 24 hours a day!
Would we think he's friendly if we didn't have to live through the reigns of terror of Quar and Mecha Lenin though?
I've always thought he was friendly. He has always shown that his trolling is for LOLs.
Quar and Mecha Lenin were jerk trolls.
ICO teaches you that patience is the key to winning and Vasari is OP so your more likely to win the war or be at a stale mate where you Cannon yourself to someones home world and force a rage quit due to exhaustion. Friendly trolling is profitable and Jerk trolling leads to liquidation or exhaustion.
Edit:
Quick Question:
Which is more difficult: Creating a 64bit engine without multi-threading or creating a Multi-threaded 32bit engine?
I realised that engineers are going to be paid the same regardless of the workload but the cost is determined by the time it takes and the number of engineers working on it. So my second question is which is more profitable: 64bit engine or a multi-threaded engine?
Brad has already mention that dx11 is also involved in helping out with the workload of 64bit processes so in either case i think dx11 and 64bit go together to some extent.
I think going GPGPU (dx11), 64bit and multi-threading is very expensive.
At this point, our opinion (Stardock) is that you need both 64-bit and multithreading to make great AA-AAA games. 64-bit is important so that you're not constantly fighting between what you want to do and what's possible due to memory constraints (not talking about requiring 8GB RAM, but actually having access to more than 2GB per process would be awesome). Multithreading it important for performance, but is a lot more difficult to do from what I've been told. You've got to be able to deal with those threads properly or BOOM! It's especially difficult in multiplayer.
I think the time to start building a multithreaded 64bit engine is already here (that said if you plan on doing it at some point). If you wait for people to adopt these things in even bigger numbers than they did until now, that might IMHO never happen, as these people may just replace their current PCs for shiny new tablets, which wont be neither 64bit, multithreaded nor x86 at all.
The future of gaming is 64 bit. Tablets will be useless in that regard. Which makes the PC a viable platform for some more years to come.
TBH i would rather have a big ass gaming rig. With a huge ass monitor (or even a hook up to a 50 inch 1080p lcd tv), and surround sound. Than a tiny screened crappy sounding portable device. I doubt consoles will take over the gaming role of a PC, because there is only so much even the next gen consoles can do, and those games are made specifically for the consoles.
That leaves the PC. 64 bit PC's.
On the OP. I don't think Ironclad/Stardock ever intentionally misled us. If we all thought that Sins would have died in its first year of release. When Sins was conceived 64 bit computing was in its infancy. In 2007 (when Sins was in Beta) We were all still using 32 bit systems with Windows XP. You have to understand Sins is at least a 6 year old game. Older if you count the pre-beta development time. Vista was just released at the same time Sins was. 64 bit computing skyrocketed after that.
If SD/IC are on board with this idea i would support it. However. I would hope if they started a project like this that it would not interfere with any potential sequel.
It certainly would be interesting to play with 200 planets and no late game lag, although that might be too much even for a multithreaded engine on an 8-core processor.
Mostly I play with less than 60 planets to avoid this problem. Sins II will hopefully have all the great features that the forum fans want!
On Ico we play games with like 98 Planets on a single Core/thread, GPU, dx9 and a 2gb 32bit engine.
If your going to use a 8 CPU Cores/ threads, GPGPU (dx11/12) , 4GB+ of Ram and a 64bit engine then your 98 planets quickly seems like a fraction of what the engine would be capable of - assuming graphics remain the same. Who would want to play on ICO with such a massive number of planets and drag a game over a period of one month? This will also overload the empire tree or steam updates the game and breaks the saved game file.
That is greatly disappointing, but thank you for at least taking the time to respond. It is appreciated.
That said, I cannot see myself purchasing a sequel to Sins of a Solar Empire. Not because I don't enjoy it, but because as I outlined in my original post and below in this one, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, in my own experience during late-game play, fails to live up to the standards of quality that Stardock has outlined for itself. I certainly don't mean that to be rude and I do appreciate the efforts you all have put into the game to this point (as I have shown with my wallet), but that is how I feel.
As I mentioned in my original post. I absolutely understand why the original release was 32-bit and I have no problem with that at all. I'm not saying that Ironclad/Stardock intentionally misled us either, but I am saying that Rebellion does not meet the standards laid out in the Fifth Right in the Gamer Bill of Rights. I'm not asking for utter perfection, but I am asking for playability. My issue is with the fact that Rebellion popped out last year and is being supported with DLC next week. 64-bit Computing certainly exists now and it existed last year. I paid full price for Rebellion which is about 85% stuff I already owned/paid for and it actually plays worse than Diplomacy when it comes to late game despite the fact that I'm playing on a much better computer with identical in-game settings. I don't think it was unreasonable to make the proposal I did in that light. Not at all. I only wish Stardock didn't see it outside the realm of feasibility for their company.
You seem to think that it's trivial to make a game 64-bit or to multithread it 6 years after the fact. It is not. Doing so would take us more than a year and a great deal more than $100,000 to accomplish. No expansion or DLC is going to offset that kind of investment.
We feel that we've held to what we set out to do and to our standards. Clearly, not everyone can be satisfied and we'll have to leave it at that.
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