This probably doesn't mean much.
I wouldn't look into it very far beyond "higher graphics fidelity" and "crashes are fixed". All this hype around 'remake' is absolutely nonsensical and not based in logic or science.
There's a ton of misinformation about what 64-bit actually is, and what it means.
Even in amateur circles such as these, there's some people still thinking 64-bit is a sole, magical way to a remake.
Reposting what I posted on FOHGuild's forums:
Quote:
The only reason to do this is the reason outlined in JChan's post; they are simply running out of addressable memory for the application, even with a 4GB ceiling - and this is commonplace for most 00's-10's games that want to push graphic fidelity and utilize modern GPUs, but cannot because the textures and other addressable elements required to store data are simply too small.
The other issue which will likely follow is an upgrade of DX9 -> DX11/12, but that would require a complete rewrite of their graphical engine because of their heavy usage of the fixed function pipeline versus shaders that drive the game's integration. It's why DX9 was a simple upgrade for EQ, but DX10/11/12 is 'out of reach' for most teams that have downsized their staff but still use in-house engines. So seeing Daybreak do this, unless it's already done for them, is likely out of the question and this is the next best option.
The reason for the above comment is that EQ has historically 'gotten away' with tricks that allow them to bypass the need for that graphics engine / directx api rewrite. DX7/8/9 are 'pretty much' interchangeable... if all you use is the fixed function graphical pipeline. However, you're missing out on modern optimizations like texture pooling, caching, and other GPU-offloaded tasks such as render call batching. EQ doesn't suffer as a result of not using those.
However, they hit a roadblock with graphics fidelity and memory - if there's too many different assets loaded 'on-demand' and they run out of addressable memory (GPU or otherwise, it doesn't matter if the application cannot tell the GPU where it resides in memory), they cannot work around this without converting the entire application to use a 64-bit address space.
This is, of course, a workaround - it will still require users to have more memory to run the game. Thankfully most have 8GB of ram or more in 2021, as Windows 10 simply requires that to run these days. And whatever you can't put in physical memory, putting the game's assets into the paging file ('swap file', if you would) becomes a viable option, and the OS will natively handle putting the assets it can't store in physical memory into swap memory as the game can address that memory, even if it's on the disk drive temporarily.
I think it's a brilliant solution, personally, and it's the one I would pick if I was in their situation. In fact, I am actually in a situation like that right now in my professional day to day, and I'm doing it alone - at least Daybreak has a team doing it with them, I'm doing it alone!
EQ doesn't require a demanding GPU currently, it's a bit heavy on draw calls at most. So they can use the DX9 solution for now, and maybe stuff a lead or two in a room together, or hire external talent to write that graphics upgrade, and in the meantime, the game won't crash due to out of memory - it may just be 'laggy' for those with 6GB or less RAM on Windows 10.
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I'd love to do a Twitch stream or something to show what the actual differences are between an application compiled in 32-bit versus 64-bit.
Let me know if that would interest you all.
EQ Live to release 64bit clients / end 32 bit
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