64 bit executable to eliminate slow loading screens

[CheekySparrow]

I really wish the devs would add that. Come on, it's 2017, who on Earth makes 32-bit only games? My wish is very easily explained — waiting for the loading screens REALLY kills the immersion. Kills  it a lot. Some might say "oh, these loading times are not long at all", but it adds up, you know. I'm sick of seeing the walking wolf animation twice if I forgot something in Trapper's Hut and just need to run in and out. I've got 18 Gigs of RAM,  I'm sure many of other players have even more, and I believe it's enough memory to load the whole game with all assets, so 'loading' screens would be effectively eliminated — come on! Since the game does already employ irreversible design choice of using separate world cells for interior and exterior locations, at least, it could be great to be able to eliminiate the loading times! 

You'll immediately get a whole bunch of very happy gamers, myself included, I assure you. 

[JAFO]

5 hours ago, CheekySparrow said:

I really wish the devs would add that. Come on, it's 2017, who on Earth makes 32-bit only games?

On this I agree with you..

Welcome to the forums, btw!

[stratvox]

Is this really a thing? On linux I have a 64 bit executable, and according to readelf it's a true 64 bit program.

[AZHockeyNut]

On Linux you run thru steam yes? Steam for PC is 32 still I think so that could be where the limitation is ? 

[AZHockeyNut]

On Linux you run thru steam yes? Steam for PC is 32 still I think so that could be where the limitation is ? 

[stratvox]

Steam is 32 bit, but all it does is call whatever is registered as your shell (in my case that's bash) to call the program, and when I run it it calls the 64 bit executable that's distributed: tld.x86_64. There's also a 32 bit executable, but steam is smart enough to recognise that I'm on a 64 bit machine and call the right executable for my architecture.

Also, since there doesn't appear to be any kind of copy protection on the game I can always just run it from the command line, or create a program object to run it from with or without steam.

[Carbon]

On 9/9/2017 at 11:19 AM, CheekySparrow said:

I really wish the devs would add that. Come on, it's 2017, who on Earth makes 32-bit only games? My wish is very easily explained — waiting for the loading screens REALLY kills the immersion. Kills  it a lot. Some might say "oh, these loading times are not long at all", but it adds up, you know. I'm sick of seeing the walking wolf animation twice if I forgot something in Trapper's Hut and just need to run in and out. I've got 18 Gigs of RAM,  I'm sure many of other players have even more, and I believe it's enough memory to load the whole game with all assets, so 'loading' screens would be effectively eliminated — come on! Since the game does already employ irreversible design choice of using separate world cells for interior and exterior locations, at least, it could be great to be able to eliminiate the loading times! 

You'll immediately get a whole bunch of very happy gamers, myself included, I assure you. 

 They have a bunch of happy gamers already. 64-bit would be fine but it won't have the degree of effect you claim.

[JAFO]

7 hours ago, stratvox said:

Is this really a thing?

Yes, on Windows, it really is the case. Unlike with Linux, you only get one executable, and it's definitely 32 bit.

 

6 hours ago, stratvox said:

Steam is 32 bit, but all it does is call whatever is registered as your shell (in my case that's bash) to call the program, and when I run it it calls the 64 bit executable that's distributed: tld.x86_64. There's also a 32 bit executable, but steam is smart enough to recognise that I'm on a 64 bit machine and call the right executable for my architecture.

Damn.. I wish the Windoze version did that..

Hey @Patrick Carlson, could you ask the devs how come if Linux has both 32 & 64 bit versions of TLD, the same isn't the case for Windows, please?

[JAFO]

2 hours ago, Carbon said:

64-bit would be fine but it won't have the degree of effect you claim.

Agreed..

[kurja]

Could be a Unity thing? There are other games (KSP at least that I know of) that have struggled to deliver 64b for Win while Linux version has had both 32 and 64 executables since forever.

Edit - there is a pause going through the "loading screen" on 64 bit too.

[JAFO]

3 minutes ago, kurja said:

Could be a Unity thing? There are other games (KSP at least that I know of) that have struggled to deliver 64b for Win while Linux version has had both 32 and 64 executables since forever.

Possibly.. but so far as I know, the Unity/Win64 issues have been pretty much sorted for a while now. Of course, that all depends what version of Unity TLD is currently developed on.

[stratvox]

13 hours ago, JAFO said:

Possibly.. but so far as I know, the Unity/Win64 issues have been pretty much sorted for a while now. Of course, that all depends what version of Unity TLD is currently developed on.

I can definitely say that the 64 bit issues with KSP and Windows have been sorted for a while now. I can also say that the amount of dev pain involved in getting it going once Unity updated and fixed their 64 bit Windows issues was substantial.

I've spent a LOT of time in KSP. And yeah, the 64 bit version was working flawlessly in linux for literally years before it finally got sorted on the Windows side. You may very well be right in that Hinterland may need to update their version of Unity to get that fixed up... but I remember very well the substantial issues that got raised in KSP when they did that and the extensive patching that went on (for literally months, was pushing a year) before it all got stabilized properly.

[JAFO]

3 hours ago, stratvox said:

I've spent a LOT of time in KSP. And yeah, the 64 bit version was working flawlessly in linux for literally years before it finally got sorted on the Windows side. You may very well be right in that Hinterland may need to update their version of Unity to get that fixed up... but I remember very well the substantial issues that got raised in KSP when they did that and the extensive patching that went on (for literally months, was pushing a year) before it all got stabilized properly.

Likewise.. I have far more hours on KSP (not tracked, as I bought direct from their store) than I care to think about.. and yes, I well remember the Win64 dramas it had.

[s7mar7in]

On ‎9‎/‎14‎/‎2017 at 8:55 PM, stratvox said:

I can always just run it from the command line

This is clearly an intelligent group; could anyone help me to "Add" the game, (TLD on Steam using Windows 10), to the list of games optimized by 'NVidia GeForce Experience'.

[stratvox]

On 4/29/2018 at 9:44 PM, s7mar7in said:

This is clearly an intelligent group; could anyone help me to "Add" the game, (TLD on Steam using Windows 10), to the list of games optimized by 'NVidia GeForce Experience'.

That's going to be a hard one for me. The last version of windows I used with any regularity at all was 7. I'm full time on linux now; I've been "one of those bearded unix guys" in my professional life for a decade now (Solaris, and CentOS and Ubuntu linux). I'm not sure what 'NVidia GeForce Experience' on Windows 10 even is....

[s7mar7in]

11 minutes ago, stratvox said:

That's going to be a hard one for me

NVidia GeForce Experience is part of the updated driver and GPU management application; it scans your computer and finds installed games, then creates an optimized profile for the games "found". NVidia finds many of the games installed using Steam, but does not automatically find TLD. Could you help me find the location of TLD.exe on my Windows 10 PC so that I may add it to the list of games in the NVidia Experience application.

[stratvox]

Open a prompt. A command line window... you know, like the old DOS days style computer interface.

cd c:\

dir TLD.exe /s

It'll go through your entire drive looking for the file, so it may take a while, but it'll find it.

Note that if you installed TLD to your D drive you should change the drive letter in the first command to match... but it's probably on the C drive.

ETA: it may be that the NVidia app is not finding the TLD executable because TLD is not supported by the app. If that's the case you can perhaps lobby NVidia to include it....

[s7mar7in]

39 minutes ago, stratvox said:

ETA: it may be that the NVidia app is not finding the TLD executable because TLD is not supported by the app

This is the case, the game is not supported by the NVidia application. I appreciate your help locating the TLD.exe file, but providing the path to the GeForce Experience application was of no benefit.

GeForce Experience can’t optimize some of my games. Why?

Some games install the configuration file along with the game under Program Files. These files cannot be modified by external programs like GeForce Experience.

Many thanks for your response and help my friend.

[stratvox]

On 5/3/2018 at 10:46 AM, s7mar7in said:

This is the case, the game is not supported by the NVidia application. I appreciate your help locating the TLD.exe file, but providing the path to the GeForce Experience application was of no benefit.

GeForce Experience can’t optimize some of my games. Why?

Some games install the configuration file along with the game under Program Files. These files cannot be modified by external programs like GeForce Experience.

Many thanks for your response and help my friend.

I know I'm necroing this thread, but it occurs to me that perhaps you could move the install location to somewhere under your user profile so that the nvidia geforce experience app could have write permissions to the config files. This is a strong case of "back it the fsck up" before doing any of this, because I've little doubt that this process would be fraught with peril, but it may work.