SoW:BoB 64-bit/Multicore optimised?

[mazex]

Originally Posted by Les

Whatever the case, in relation to this coding for multi-core thing, it's interesting for me personally to realize I probably have been sucked in by the Intel marketing/hype/spin. I actually believed them when they said games could be coded to make use of multi-cores. When in reality, that's probably just not practical for the most part, if possible at all.

Well. It's not all spin But it's a hell of a lot harder than making an Oracle database use all the cores/sockets for all those parallel queries. Falcon 4 is a good (and old) example where the multithreaded code works rather well with the ground war running on a separate thread. FSX also implemented a usable multithreaded code in SP1 where the texture loader was placed on a separate thread so that the loading of ground textures did not pause (stutter) the main render loop (much more fluid gameplay after that). Most modern block buster FPS games are multithreaded to some extent, but using it with mixed results... The bottom line is that it's not the salvation that Intel tries to make it (at least for gaming). Games using 4 cores in a way that really improves performance significantly does not exist as far as I know...

So sure, I guess with a lot of work the overall strategic AI in SoW could be placed on a separate thread handling the stuff outside of "the bubble" around the player, and stuff like object loading and textures. Maybe that won't be that important in a game that does not use unique satellite textures for the ground. I guess most of it will be loaded at mission load (especially if it uses the extra memory that the process may use on a 64-bit system ).