FM 13 still not 64 Bit?

[Blanchflower1]

If my understanding is correct, I fear that FM 2013 will still be a 32-bit application as SI has not said anything about this yet.

[spankie]

I think that it's not yet 64 bit because there are so many people still using 32 bit PCs and OS.

To bring out a 64 bit version will kind of double the work as there would need to be 2 executables and some code would have to be re-written to actually take advantage of the 64 bit capabilities. I'm no expert but I doubt that there is a piece of software ot there that you can run through some 32 bit code and get 64 bit code out the other side.

As there are 2 executables that will effectively double the amount of testing needed, every fix and change in the 32 bit executable would have to be made in the 64 bit system and both tested identically.

64 bit is the way to go eventually, but it would take a fair bit out of the rest of the development of FM to achieve and I think a lot of people would slam SI for spending a lot of development time on a 64 bit application at the expense of new features, improvements and bug fixes.

A lot of people are looking at the number of new features and the 900 in FM13 sounds impressive, it's a lot more impressive then 400 new features including 64 bit FM. So until 64 bit machines become the majority it doesn't make commercial sense to invest in it at the current time.

[asdpoo]

More than 65% of Steam users use 64 bit OS. And FM players are Steam users, not aliens from outer space.

But I think you should care more about FM utilizing multi-processing when calculating days. It does so only for matches.

[_Nikon_]

More than 65% of Steam users use 64 bit OS. And FM players are Steam users, not aliens from outer space.

But I think you should care more about FM utilizing multi-processing when calculating days. It does so only for matches.

Definitely this!

[jakobx]

I think that it's not yet 64 bit because there are so many people still using 32 bit PCs and OS.

To bring out a 64 bit version will kind of double the work as there would need to be 2 executables and some code would have to be re-written to actually take advantage of the 64 bit capabilities. I'm no expert but I doubt that there is a piece of software ot there that you can run through some 32 bit code and get 64 bit code out the other side.

As there are 2 executables that will effectively double the amount of testing needed, every fix and change in the 32 bit executable would have to be made in the 64 bit system and both tested identically.

To create a 64 bit executable you tell your compiler to create one. Thats pretty much it.

They could create an unofficial unsupported 64 bit version of FM. No testing required. If something goes wrong you are on your own.

[Smurf]

Just because 65% of all Steam users use 64 bit doesn't mean that 65% of all Football Manager users use 64 bit.

[spankie]

If SI release something they have to support it by law.

[asdpoo]

Just because 65% of all Steam users use 64 bit doesn't mean that 65% of all Football Manager users use 64 bit.

Chief SI apologist in the house. You are right, it may be 63%, which is an entirely different story.

[Smurf]

No you're missing the point.

There's 650,000 Steam users at it's peak today.

But only 5% of them were Football Manager users.

It doesn't matter that 65% of the people on Steam use 64 Bit. It's no reflection on whether the other 5% of the Steam community using Football Manager use as their OS.

You'd have to get the actual stats for what the c.38,000 of Football Manager users on Steam were using as their OS.

Otherwise all you have is a blanket stat for all Steam users, which is no reflection of the FM users.

[spankie]

Only SI would know how many 64 bit FM players are out there because of the feedback through Steam. I seem to recall when this cropped up last year that someone from SI revealed that, at that time, the 64 bit systems were by far in the minority.

When the feedback from Steam indicates that the majority of FM players are using 64 bit systems then I would expect SI to consider adding 64 bit to FM.

[asdpoo]

Why do you so wholeheartedly believe that FM players are so different than players in general?

Not to mention that 32 bit CPUs died 4 years ago. Only 6% of people sport a single core CPU and extremely tiny portion of dual core CPUs are 32bit

[Smurf]

I don't "wholeheartedly" - I'm just saying that the stat of 65% of Steam users using 64 bit doesn't reflect the stat of FM users and what OS they use.

The 65% of Steam users using 64 bit is irrelevant to the amount of FM users using 64 bit.

[Smurf]

Why do you so wholeheartedly believe that FM players are so different than players in general?

Not to mention that 32 bit CPUs died 4 years ago. Only 6% of people sport a single core CPU and extremely tiny portion of dual core CPUs are 32bit

Where did you get 6% from? What's your source?

[asdpoo]

Where did you get 6% from? What's your source?

Steam and I believe that are people's other devices, not their gaming machine. Plus nobody who thought of something other than browsing the web would end up with a single core CPU for some years now.

[Smurf]

Well I'm not really talking about single/dual core systems.

I'm just saying - you can't use the blanket of 65% of people on Steam are using 64 Bit Systems - it's not a reflection of how many of those playing FM are using as an OS.

According to steam there's nearly 30% still using 32 bit systems.

Of how many of them are FM players is still unknown.

[asdpoo]

According to steam there's nearly 30% still using 32 bit systems.

Of how many of them are FM players is still unknown.

You know that even if FM goes 64bit there still would be a 32bit exe, right?

And to use the popular FMC rhetoric - it won't affect you, we don't care about you, go away. j/k

[N^G]

For SI to encourage new customers to their product they need to start going down the route of things like 64 bit (and properly optimising for it, using multi-threading to its fullest is also something that needs to happen) otherwise their market will be difficult to increase.

If the userbase for FM's hardware stats are wildly out of sync with the median then surely SI should be asking themselves why that is and attempting to address it, as it means that their product is at risk of being stuck in a niche at the bottom end of the market.

Making better use of the technology available is, to me at least, more of a selling point than having an extra dropdown to click during the never ending tedium of press conferences, or cheats that I can have the priveledge of paying extra for. This game is, after all, a game about number crunching over graphics, so why waste the opportunity to make use of faster machine's resources and massively improve the game experience for those users?

The concept around it doubling workload, which even if it were somehow the case as an issue, is nonsense when you consider that they just did pretty much that by adding a second game mode to support.

[Smurf]

You know that even if FM goes 64bit there still would be a 32bit exe, right?

Of course I know that.

That's not the question though is it? It's how many people are currently using 64 Bit and 32 Bit.

If a majority are still using 32 bit then it's not really a great use of resources to start making the game 64 bit... is it?

Why change something that a majority isn't using (perhaps they are, I don't know -it's a hypothetical question)?

I'm all for a 64 bit version. And I'm sure SI have considered it long before this thread manifested. Who knows they might be working on it for FM14 and it just wasn't ready this year.

But, none of this is the point.

The point is you can't use a blanket stat to say that just because 65% of people using steam are using 64 bit it doesn't mean 65% of FM users are using 64 bit.

[asdpoo]

Yes, I actually can, that's what statistics are for. The CPU argument was again in favour of 64bit systems. Please stop.

[Smurf]

But the stats don't show you the percentage of FM users. They're useless to tell you who playing FM is using 64 bit.

[milnerpoint]

Its also worth pointing out that those stats mean nothing, as a large portion of FMers are not gamers, so they dont have gaming spec PC's.

64 bit will come, when its worthwhile, clearly right now its not worth the hassle.

[asdpoo]

FM players are Steam users, not aliens from outer space.

I'll stop replying to your repeated statement now, as you seem to fail to grasp the concept of statistics.

And here comes the other famous SI apologist, milnerpoint just pulled a fact out of his ass.

[Smurf]

asdpoo - I fully understand statistics.

It's like saying that 65% of people who go to football games have iphones.

But you have no way of knowing if 65% of people going to Man Utd games have iphones.

Same way as 65% of people who use Steam to play games have 64 bit operating systems.

There is no way to know if 65% of those playing football manager have 64 bit systems.

I've explained it the best I can.

The fact that milnerpoint understands it and you don't doesn't give you the right to be insulting either.

[milnerpoint]

The fact you have argued that shows you have no real clue at all about what your speaking about, your just trolling Eugene without making any real points.

He has clearly explained it, i've expanded with a piece of information that most sensible people accept as being the situation regarding FMers, no one is making up excuses or apologising for anything.

Quite frankly this, if you dont insult SI, your a fanboi is getting boring, i'm asking the mods to delete this crap, its nothing but trolling and surely against the rules of the forum.

[asdpoo]

I haven't insulted anyone. You've been defending SI at any hint of criticism in the last month and I'm not the only one noticing it.

a piece of information that most sensible people accept as being the situation regarding FMers

milnerpoint, that is a bull made up fact. I am the one making a point based on something real. I don't agree with Eugene's spin of the stats and I went out of my way to show him that CPU stats show 64bit systems proliferation in even greater numbers, where it is an absurd to put majority of FM players in the remaining 5%. While he just keeps repeating the same, like it is a shouting contest.

[milnerpoint]

Your not, your trolling with nothing to back you up.

Out of the all the people i know, including other communities i am a part of, that play FM, none would ever install another game on their PC, its well accepted by sensible people that quite a lot of FMers are not PC gamers, they are FMers only.

Im done rising to your bait.

[Bjaart]

The "everybody knows it, therefore it is a fact"-argument that is being used here is useless. If you want a discussion, you have to back up your facts, not just use a stereotypical assumption about FM-players and use it as a be all and end all argument. Atleast asdpoo is backing up his claims with numbers, he might be wrong but atleast he has some empirical backing behind him

[Crispypaul]

I like the phrase "SI apologist" - like they're some kind of dictatorship rather than a moderately sized software company.

[spankie]

Atleast asdpoo is backing up his claims with numbers, he might be wrong but atleast he has some empirical backing behind him

Not really he's taken a fact and used it to make an assumption.

Just because 65% people using Steam have 64 bit PCs it doesn't mean that 65% of people playing FM on Steam have 64 bit. The only way that would work is each and every single person using Steam also plays FM. We can safely say for a fact that not every Steam user plays FM and that is where his statistic fails.

This does not mean that the figure is wrong, for all I know he might be bang on. But you can't claim something like that as a fact when it clearly isn't.

The only people who will know are SI due to the reports from Steam and when it shows that 80-90% of FM players are using 64 bit then they'll probably look into it.

[tom_numbers]

Whenever this issue comes up, someone (probably Brocky) from SI says that the data on Steam puts the average FM user on a lower quality PC than the average Steam user.

I've never known an exact figure, and there is probably a good reason it's never been released.

[Smurf]

I don't agree with Eugene's spin of the stats and I went out of my way to show him that CPU stats show 64bit systems proliferation in even greater numbers, where it is an absurd to put majority of FM players in the remaining 5%. While he just keeps repeating the same, like it is a shouting contest.

You're the one spinning the facts lol

I've to keep repeating it because you keep coming back with the same argument but worded slightly differently

Not really he's taken a fact and used it to make an assumption.

Just because 65% people using Steam have 64 bit PCs it doesn't mean that 65% of people playing FM on Steam have 64 bit. The only way that would work is each and every single person using Steam also plays FM. We can safely say for a fact that not every Steam user plays FM and that is where his statistic fails.

This does not mean that the figure is wrong, for all I know he might be bang on. But you can't claim something like that as a fact when it clearly isn't.

The only people who will know are SI due to the reports from Steam and when it shows that 80-90% of FM players are using 64 bit then they'll probably look into it.

Am I still wrong asdpoo?

Spankie understands it exactly.

[asdpoo]

I understand that there can be an error, but I don't think it is a must or highly likely.

Yes, spankie, I take a fact and use it to make an assumption. While you just make an assumption based on nothing, that the FM playerbase is fundamentally different than the whole average playerbase.

Do you now understand where I'm coming from?

Eugene Tyson, can we at least agree that single-core CPUs are quite uncommon and better multi-processing in FM is unquestionably relevant? Because that is what I actually wanted to underline in the morning.

[Smurf]

I've never made an argument about single-core CPUs, you brought that up, not me.

I'm not saying you're incorrect that a majority of FM users are on 64 bit systems, there's just no way to know by looking at Steam stats.

You might be right, you might be wrong, there's just no stats on steam to prove otherwise - other than making the assumption.

[x42bn6]

Alternatively, we can take asdpoo's statement with a pinch of salt because we don't have any other information. asdpoo's statistics are the best statistic we have, besides "everyone knows".

Having said that, the last mainstream 32-bit processor released was the Pentium 4 or Athlon XP, which is basically 2002-2003 (and Atom, I suppose, but you don't really play games on the Atom). So it's entirely possible a lot of people simply have the wrong OS for their processor.

spankie is also wrong with this: "The only way that would work is each and every single person using Steam also plays FM. We can safely say for a fact that not every Steam user plays FM and that is where his statistic fails." What needs to be the case is that the distribution of OSes for all Steam players needs to be effectively statistically equivalent to the distribution of OSes for FM players.

FM players are regularly stated to have lesser computers than the average gamer. However, not every game exists on Steam. Historic titles that aren't sold any more might not be on Steam, but exist out there in disc form. It is entirely possible that Steam's library attracts gamers with superior PCs than the average gamer, too.

All smoke and mirrors, of course - until someone comes up with better statistics, there's no need to be vehemently angry at them. They're just numbers...

[FrazT]

Getting really tired of this- cut out the personal comments or infractions will follow.

[asdpoo]

However, not every game exists on Steam. Historic titles that aren't sold any more might not be on Steam, but exist out there in disc form. It is entirely possible that Steam's library attracts gamers with superior PCs than the average gamer, too.

Steam just as well may attract a lot more people with less powerful PCs, because it has an incredibly large number of indie games, which traditionally don't need much. Those games aren't sold on CDs or Origin. Smoke and mirrors. Or with a large enough base, statistics level and tend to be pretty accurate

[spankie]

I understand that there can be an error, but I don't think it is a must or highly likely.

Yes, spankie, I take a fact and use it to make an assumption. While you just make an assumption based on nothing, that the FM playerbase is fundamentally different than the whole average playerbase.

Do you now understand where I'm coming from?

Eugene Tyson, can we at least agree that single-core CPUs are quite uncommon and better multi-processing in FM is unquestionably relevant?

The only assumption I've made is that not every Steam use plays FM and I think that I might be correct in that assumption. And because of that I can say that your 65% figure of FM players with 64 bit machines may be incorrect.

I think milnerpoint may have been right about his assumption in post 176

[jakobx]

Whenever this issue comes up, someone (probably Brocky) from SI says that the data on Steam puts the average FM user on a lower quality PC than the average Steam user.

Which is weird considering FM is the most CPU intensive game. But then again a quick look at all those" buying a new PC" topics reveals that everyone is buying cheap crappy notebooks.

[Wanson]

More than 65% of Steam users use 64 bit OS. And FM players are Steam users, not aliens from outer space.

But I think you should care more about FM utilizing multi-processing when calculating days. It does so only for matches.

This doesn't make any sense.

Most Steam users are gamers and have high spec PCs, most of which are 64-bit (65% according to you). However FM players are not your average Steam user. Most FM players don't really play any other game than FM (I know I don't at least) and therefore likely don't have such good systems.

Then again, I use a Mac, which is 64-bit, as all recent Intel Macs are. By your logic, I can look at the Steam stats and see that 65% of Steam users use a 64-bit computer therefore 65% of Steam users are Mac users.

That would just be silly.

[Ackter]

There is no way to know if 65% of those playing football manager have 64 bit systems.

SI know (well, excepting those people who elected not to send information from FM).

[Smurf]

Ah yes they would know - but I meant by looking at the Steam stats, of course.

[x42bn6]

Then again, I use a Mac, which is 64-bit, as all recent Intel Macs are. By your logic, I can look at the Steam stats and see that 65% of Steam users use a 64-bit computer therefore 65% of Steam users are Mac users.

That would just be silly.

That one can easily be disproven by adding up the percentages in the Steam Hardware Survey.

By contrast, no such (public) data exists to prove or disprove the distribution being equal for FM12 users.

Also, this bit is the reason why the logic is wrong:

Then again, I use a Mac, which is 64-bit, as all recent Intel Macs are.

You are basically saying that around 100% of recent Macs are 64-bit, but 65% of Steam users are on 64-bit. So you know you cannot make the assumption that the 64-bit distribution on Steam is the same as the 64-bit distribution on a Mac (as asdpoo uses to justify 65% of Steam users are 64-bit, therefore so are 65% of FM users).

[Smurf]

That one can easily be disproven by adding up the percentages in the Steam Hardware Survey.

By contrast, no such (public) data exists to prove or disprove the distribution being equal for FM12 users.

Also, this bit is the reason why the logic is wrong:

You are basically saying that around 100% of recent Macs are 64-bit, but 65% of Steam users are on 64-bit. So you know you cannot make the assumption that the 64-bit distribution on Steam is the same as the 64-bit distribution on a Mac (as asdpoo uses to justify 65% of Steam users are 64-bit, therefore so are 65% of FM users).

I believe they said it would be silly

That would just be silly.

[milnerpoint]

That one can easily be disproven by adding up the percentages in the Steam Hardware Survey.

By contrast, no such (public) data exists to prove or disprove the distribution being equal for FM12 users.

Also, this bit is the reason why the logic is wrong:

You are basically saying that around 100% of recent Macs are 64-bit, but 65% of Steam users are on 64-bit. So you know you cannot make the assumption that the 64-bit distribution on Steam is the same as the 64-bit distribution on a Mac (as asdpoo uses to justify 65% of Steam users are 64-bit, therefore so are 65% of FM users).

I think his post was in jest to show how silly asdpoo's statement was.....

[Neil Brock]

If you have a 64-bit OS, the game will run more leagues faster on your machine (dependent on RAM of course), but I just don't think with our current resources we have we could develop a separate 32 and 64 bit version. Something we're certainly aware people want, but it's not a particularly easy thing to implement I'm afraid.

[Ryan S]

If you have a 64-bit OS, the game will run more leagues faster on your machine (dependent on RAM of course), but I just don't think with our current resources we have we could develop a separate 32 and 64 bit version. Something we're certainly aware people want, but it's not a particularly easy thing to implement I'm afraid.

Until Microsoft kills off 32 bit versions of Windows there will always be a sizable population of 32 bit users. Sadly we are going to need to wait until at least Windows 9 before they kill off the 32 bit OS.

[x42bn6]

I believe they said it would be silly

I think his post was in jest to show how silly asdpoo's statement was.....

The logic in his post is different to asdpoo's post. asdpoo asserts that the 64-bit distribution is the same for Steam and FM. Wanson asserts that they are different ("which is 64-bit, as all recent Intel Macs are"), then tries to apply asdpoo's logic ("they are the same"), contradicting his assertion right off the bat.

[thomit]

Bottom line here is: A lot of people who play FM - most probably a majority or a huge minority - has a 64 bit capable processor/system, and a 64 bit OS, and the percentage is getting bigger every day. It will improve their FM gaming if SI made FM 64 bit. I think many will view such an improvement as more important than many of the other things SI allocate manpower to do - so just do it, SI. Don't lag behind. And make the game that allready exists as good as it can be, before introducing tons of "new stuff".

[Smurf]

The logic in his post is different to asdpoo's post. asdpoo asserts that the 64-bit distribution is the same for Steam and FM. Wanson asserts that they are different ("which is 64-bit, as all recent Intel Macs are"), then tries to apply asdpoo's logic ("they are the same"), contradicting his assertion right off the bat.

Yes - the contradiction is on purpose to show how illogical and argument that:

"If 65% of all steam users use 64 bit then that means 65% of FM users use 64 bit".

[Spart]

Maybe a simple user questionnaire would give some indication of 64-bit awareness within the FM player base if not stats on actual take up.