Mini News: 17-year-old Start Wars game gets updated from 32bit to 64bit

[shermantanker]

Summary

 The 17-year-old RTS Star Wars Empire at War has received a surprise update that moves the game to a 64-bit code base that is intended to increase the amount of memory available for the extensive list of total conversion mods still being produced for the game. Several unit balance updates, multiplayer stability improvements, and more mod support were also mentioned. Petroglyph started updating the game again back in 2017 by first reenabling multiplayer and adding official mods support via Steamworks, and since then has pooped out a new update every few years with various improvements requested by players and mod developers. The game still hovers around the top one hundred of most played games on Steam and has an overall community rating of 97%.

 

Quotes

Quote

Greetings!

It’s been a while, but we have been working behind the scenes to update Star Wars: Empire at War™ and Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption to 64-Bit! This has many benefits, the most important of which will solve any “Out of Memory” issues you might have been getting on certain machines. In addition to this, we’ve made stability improvements to multiplayer and fixed a number of gameplay issues that have been surfaced up to us by members of the community. This includes updating several maps, graphic assets, and core functionality of some of the units used in space and land battles.

 

Please note that with this update, older save games with the 32-bit version will not be compatible. To access your older 32-bit save games, switch to the 32-bit version by selecting PROPERTIES -> BETAS -> 32-bit_version

This work has been done with support provided by the outstanding team at Lucasfilm Games. We are profoundly grateful for their unwavering dedication to the game and community. A heartfelt shout out also goes to the indispensable community leaders whose tireless efforts of reporting bugs, rigorously testing builds, and offering invaluable feedback have truly made a world of difference.

 

My thoughts

 This is excellent news for people who are still playing the game, and I am looking forward to what modders do with the extra memory. I imagine it is unheard of for a game to get patched to 64-bit so long after release, and the continued support from the developer after all these years is very encouraging. Petroglyph has indicated interested as of a few years ago to make a sequel and my fingers are still crossed that something will happen there. If you haven't played the game before, I would highly recommend checking it out for yourself.

 

Sources

 Patch Notes

[LHJKO]

Start.

I guess when you have the license to a huge game like this you should use it. I wonder at what point does it become a new game they could not just slap an entire new game mode in there to keep the star wars name could they.

[Quackers101]

nice to see, I guess, hopefully it works.

[Forbidden Wafer]

Petroglyph = Westwood. 

They have always been top notch.

 

Next is Red Alert 2.

[TheLuciferPhenotype]

Modders almost never do anything interesting with extra memory because they are universally pretty lazy. You also dont need x64 to pull off pretty amazing things if you actually care as that one off unicorn. Photo is of incomplete project im working on. Link is if you are into Star Wars and want to see the most balls to the wall x86 id tech 3 game in the world. Unfortunately the amount of work I put into this stuff I cant just push it out for free, although its super cheap if you wanted to check it out. I will have to reupload a better video in the future since the depth buffer operates 1 frame behind and thanks to Nvidias driver programming when you use DLDSR it locks me at 30fps which obviously makes the delayed geometry shader effect worse. The point is the texture mod works on all level compiles and isnt a scam. For more photos I have a moddb presence under Remastered Retro PC. Which should be Remastered Retro Games but it has a limit thats somewhat oppressive there so I couldnt use my desired full name.

On the subject of DLDSR and framerate the driver has some bizarre behavior that doesnt occur when plugged into a G Sync 1080 monitor. Only every TV ive used which is super strange because it almost implies they want you to buy their G Sync module partnership product or get slammed with being stuck at 30hz. And you cant change it in advanced graphics settings in windows. However, in at least one case there is a way around it. For example Prey 2006 runs at 30hz until you switch to the mod. Then suddenly the Nvidia driver lets you go into the 60hz club as something about it seduces the bouncers. They have no incentive to change this and they are no stranger to calling freesync G Sync on at least the ROG notebook I had despite not having a G Sync module. Its kind of a trade secret thats very open if we bother looking. I know because I modded the crap out of the notebook and even its firmware. So if they did change that in drivers id appreciate it, but its definitely not going to happen. Its probably there looking at the evidence, as a market feature. 

Now going back to Prey 2006 with a over 50GB texture file, im pushing shader model 2.0 to really unheard of levels. I have to literally optimize the render in specific cases to a RTX 4090 or suffer pauses as it compiles enormous assets presumably into the shaders with a 60hz frametime. So ill be forced to make two versions scaling from the fastest to more typical hardware, something like a GTX 1070. Upgraded from RTX 3080 12GB so its definitely mostly the GPU responsible as the huge 4nm cache on Lovelace allows significant performance increases. Though I believe its actually both the CPUs rate of feeding information as a factor of latency, and the GPUs ability to process that stacking together.

DXT1 diffuse, DXT1 specular (4bit greyscale DDS is deprecated so can no longer use), DXT3 sharp transition alphas, DXT5 gradual transition alphas, RXGB DXT5 for normal maps, RXGB/DXT1/DXT5 for heightmaps which the way id tech 4 uses them and how each asset behaves determines what is used. Once you start hitting incredible resolutions more lossy compression is actually desirable just in the way it scales. Tried to use TGA RLE to save memory in specific cases but id need access to the source code and programming skills to allow the engine to use DDS and TGA alongside eachother which is impossible in its hardcoded out of the box state even playing with the config. Being efficient with memory matters confined to x86. Its the hardest mod ive ever created, and to be entirely honest with you the "competition" is super lazy. The quality difference once I drop demos for these mods in the future is going to be obvious. WIll care about marketing when I have more than 1 or 2 products. So if you want to see whats possible join me for this time machine adventure into the past. If I got gud with 3D Studio Max I would also consider bumping geometry on character models, the combination of which if we ignore some of the janky stencil shadows would start to make it easily confused for a modern game in the case of id tech 4. Not so much id tech 3 though. Plan is to do all the classics I can under id tech 3/4 and that texmod supports to the limit of the engines potential, and to a level of quality that makes people shocked its a lone individual with no life, and blatant autism, lacking a multimillion dollar studio.
 

 

[dalekphalm]

Empire at War is a great game - though the mods certainly take it to the next level (I always got annoyed by the 20 unit cap in space combat scenarios for example - I could only have 5 ISD's!

 

The ground combat always felt like an add-on, and I rarely played the ground combat missions when not doing campaigns.

 

So the fact that they're still updating the game here and there is fantastic.

[Forbidden Wafer]

11 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

The ground combat always felt like an add-on, and I rarely played the ground combat missions when not doing campaigns.

They are awful. Galactic battlegrounds is way better in that regard. However the hard AI is an absolutely brutal cheater.

[Stahlmann]

This game is great and it'll be interesting to see if big mods like Steiners Advanced Units and Republic at War still keep stuttering on my 5600X / 3080 system. This game's galactic conquest mode is amazing.

 

Now here is hoping we will get a decent Star Wars Battlefront 2 remaster without forcing Battlefield into the game. (i know it's not petroglyph, but one can still hope)

[TheLuciferPhenotype]

1 hour ago, Stahlmann said:

This game is great and it'll be interesting to see if big mods like Steiners Advanced Units and Republic at War still keep stuttering on my 5600X / 3080 system. This game's galactic conquest mode is amazing.

 

Now here is hoping we will get a decent Star Wars Battlefront 2 remaster without forcing Battlefield into the game. (i know it's not petroglyph, but one can still hope)

The game is from 2006 so there is some probability its using 2 threads since the Pentium 4 and Athlon 64X2 existed but its more likely without personally owning the game to test it that its using just one. There are several ways to fix stuttering.

DXVK wrapper especially with the multithreaded shader compilation fix. DG Voodoo. IF these are supported. OpenGL games generally are not. Though ive found exceptions and I also have found multi wrapper workarounds to daisy chain a result which in very rare cases can be counter intuitively faster, if for no other reason they get around bugs despite added overhead. I should also mention that modern APIs even when using hardware abstraction can skip steps required by the older API which compensates for the added overhead of handing off draw calls.

Process lasso to force windows thread scheduler to use core 0, 2 for the game (disabling logging) if it uses multithreading, or core 0 if it does not. At least for that specific CPU which has logical cores. Timer resolution rarely helps but is noteable.

The biggest difference is often the thread scheduler because the game will bounce core to core which each time it does induces the L3 cache to dump in whats called context switching. They did this to spread heat load and usage across multicore processors but it incurrs a performance penalty which is exaggerated when the game logic is needlessly, especially the main thread is being computed on the logical processor as it will on and off, which can be seen in the process lasso UI which is the easiest way to see how the game is programmed. If you want more in depth information DM me and I can walk you through when I have time.

And the game is old enough that it might be hiding a intel compiler dark secret, which you can spoof the CPUID with a patch a computer scientist named agner created to allow SSE3 to run on AMD machines. Intels compiler would literally skip using the instruction in favor of a slower path, covertly. Im the guy that pressured Blizzard Entertainment to patch StarCraft II. The performance difference on even modern AMD CPUs was literally 30%.

Intel Antitrust Rulings | AMD

It is unknown how many games are effected. A readily demonstrable example is Carnivores Dinosaur Hunter Reborn and its offspring release that superseded it. The performance difference is absolutely massive. In some cases however its very subtle. When this practice began was probably around that time since AMD was obliterating intel. I would give it a try though because it might suprise you with a non stuttering experience. I think a former developer of StarCraft II told me about it on their forum by the name KnowBody. He recommended using a VM which in part defeated the purpose since it ate resources, but it led me to finding agners solution which is far superior. He replied to my optimization thread which was mostly about the thread scheduler since the game at very high framerates you can definitely take advantage of that knowledge. 

Its also entirely possible that you could have a corrupt driver, though in my experience with that my RTX 4090 was stuttering in every game and even on youtube videos. Fresh install fixed it. 5800X3D.

[williamcll]

Talk about dedication, not a lot of games out there gets patches for over 10 years.

[leadeater]

Wow I actually have this game, awesome. Or irrelevant haha, I don't know if it actually matters.

[SansVarnic]

-= Moved to PC Gaming =-

Sorry as cool as this is and I have this game as well, you're missing some posting requirements.

 

Quote

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[SansVarnic]

Same thing is happening to other games, there is a trend to update older single player games to make relevant again.

 

 

On 11/21/2023 at 6:37 AM, Forbidden Wafer said:

Petroglyph = Westwood. 

They have always been top notch.

 

Next is Red Alert 2.

Westwood & LucasArts were my favorite game developers until EA bought them out.

[Forbidden Wafer]

13 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

Westwood & LucasArts were my favorite game developers until EA bought them out.

They were amazing. Tons of great games that can easily be remastered and have success.
Even the Lion King game for SNES was a product from Westwood. And it is fantastic too, except for the second phase which has that stupid ostrich running and you have to jump twice in a row with very precise timing.

And don't forget Pandemic (sister company from BioWare), that EA axed even though Battlefront I & II were good.

[Andreas Lilja]

Is legit pay $200 for a definitive edition of Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds.

[TheLuciferPhenotype]

On 11/23/2023 at 9:38 AM, SansVarnic said:

-= Moved to PC Gaming =-

Sorry as cool as this is and I have this game as well, you're missing some posting requirements.

 

 

Prey 2006 gets a 4.4GB HD Mod that overhauls all of its textures (dsogaming.com)

"This mod uses AI upscaling techniques in order to overhaul all of the game’s textures."

Whats funny is this is impossible in some cases without reprogramming the game. In other words its lazy journalism.

https://www.dsogaming.com/mods/laa-4gb-memory-patches-released-for-doom-3-half-life-2-resident-evil-5-and-more/

Release date: 2022

www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/large-address-aware.112556

Release date: 2010

Reputable is probably Gamers Nexus though. Steve is a tech Jesus we never asked for but deserve. Imagine getting excited for a modder offering the 4GB patch for modding literally no one but me actually uses it. Let alone the unquenchable bounty that is x64 conversions.

It comes across to me that YouTube is this oppressive force that makes people just pump endless mcdonnalds happy meals instead of Masterpiece after Masterpiece. Pump and dump and move on.

*From dark gutter*

Hey kid, you wanna use my machine learning 4x upscale? 

DSOGaming: Say no more, its a Masterpiece. Not a single texture has been left out in the cold from the single days work ethic. My favorite part was how it was honoring how close he stuck with the original game render style, while I was literally going on Amazon to download the higher quality album original in the bar music area. May the most mediocre trash show up in my Google feed. Its an arms race of simply doing something first, who actually cares about reporting on real world quality. Especially when its on the house marketing to use this free junk humans pile up all over the internet. All so future superhumans can marvel at the tolerance levels we have for lazy human proliferating technologies.
 

This guy cracked the YouTube Matrix like hes freakin Neo. Whats interesting is they fixed his monetization after he was staging a class action lawsuit invasion. So many even professional channels on the platform are playing with the numbers. And even YouTube is playing games. With advancements in human evolution using lab upgrade technology to sculpt new cultures that value quality and honest hard work, we can finally escape this star system and thrive in others.
 

After this project im going to hit up Outcast next to complete the Academy package. So if you are into hardcore retro substances, get your veins ready. 
 

 

[SansVarnic]

@TheLuciferPhenotype Why are you quoting me? Not really necessary if your just adding information. 

[TheLuciferPhenotype]

"you're missing some posting requirements."

Lists example where veracity is laughable.

Whats interesting is Alex from Digital Foundry actually speaks to this outfit. And they show up in my Google feed, but they distribute misinformation that offends Gabenized scientists.

Looking forward to advancements in Linus science so we can start seeing mods on LTTstore.com that implant Linus character models and traits into the game franchise that supports chad upgrades.

Im imagining what would happen if Linus went full retro modder, and surprised the industry with his super chad texture mods that were out of this world. He would make millions more selling it from a reliable venue. And then finally Linus labs could afford to invest in space missions to the moon to begin rare earth collection logistics so we can afford the RTX 5090 series as a civilization.
 

@ 04:10
 

@ 02:59

Lol our Leader is worried about 500$ like Elon Musk is worried about Aliens invading Earth. Pretty soon the Linus Empire will be manufacturing antimatter by encircling black holes to achieve the ultimate efficiency possible.