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> There was never a reason for anything published in the steam store to be 32bit only. Except of course for the ease of porting 32bit games from other platform
by ben-schaaf 3y ago
> There was never a reason for anything published in the steam store to be 32bit only.
Except of course for the ease of porting 32bit games from other platforms. Games that continue to work on those other platforms. Really it's the only sane decision to not port to 64bit just for ~2% of your audience.
- lxgr 3y agoDoes it really make porting noticeably easier to target macOS 32 bit when coming from, say, Windows? I’d expect most of the complexity to have revolved around not having DirectX available. There was no game porting kit back then. Although, come to think of it: Maybe the actual problem was not being able to (easily) generate universal binaries? 64-bit only would have still been a non-starter in the early macOS Intel days.
- ben-schaaf 3y agoWhen your codebase hasn't been built with 64 bit in mind there can be a fair bit of work involved. An important thing to remember is that valve games are multiplayer, so you'll need to go over everything with a fine comb even if it compiles.
- gpderetta 3y agoMany porting houses (aspyr, feral) have had their own equivalent of the porting kit for ages.
- Apocryphon 3y agoAnd yet, Aspyr's port of Civ IV is 32-bit only.
- olliej 3y agoGenerating universal binaries is extremely easy, they really are just a convenience: you literally build for every architecture you want, and then use lipo to package them into a single "binary". e.g. if you can build for 32bit and 64bit making a universal binary is a single operation (essentially it's something along the lines of `lipo -arch arch1 arch1binary -arch arch2 arch2binary ... -arch archN archNbinary -output myawesomebinary` in principle you could think of them as being a tarball)