What's the situation regarding the 64bit executable?

I remember very well that Oleg stated in an interview that CLOD would benefit form large amounts of ram, so I was somewhat surprised to find that it only had a 32bit exe.

[Stefem]

Originally Posted by Igo kyu

This is very probably mistaken.

If the devs used the sizes of variables in any of a thousand ways that they could, then changing from 32 bit to 64 bit could cause problems. It doesn't have to, if the devs were scrupulous about not using the sizes of the variables it all might just work, but if they used any of the possible optimisations that depend on the sizes of variables, then it will probably be a very long job to make a 64 bit version of the game.

Obviously, I don't know how the devs made the game, but if there were almost any optimisations at all, then simply recompiling it for 64 bit would probably break the code. You'd get error reports from the compiler about what broke where, but sorting that out is typically tricky, because what seems to be broken there is often connected to something that doesn't seem broken here, and that's connected to something else somewhere else, and so on and so on. Eventually you sort out all the connections, but that might be months later. Feeding random code to the compiler and chasing the errors it gives you is probably not the most efficient way of working.

This is generally true, probably the most common problem in porting from 32bit to 64bit is that the size of long and pointer change in the 64bit data-type model, but since CoD (accordingly to devs) was designed to be compiled for both 32bit and 64bit target platform I believe that, excluding QA wich is a very important part, it wouldn't require much more work than recompile the game.