94 replies to this topic

[Cougar]

I did something scary today. I went into System Information, viewed Applications, and sorted my games by 64-bit. I was a bit astonished about how many non-64-bit games I have. Blizzard's games, and even some newer indies, like Undertale, Baldur's Gate: EE, and Day of the Tentacle, are 32-bit. (Yes, even Steam itself, but that will get updated.) Blizzard's games I have no doubt will get updated, but for smaller indies like Incredipede, I have low hopes.

I know we have until at least October 2019 before the apocalypse arrives, but I'm starting to think about prioritizing playing some of these older games on my backlog, especially for a few Mac-only games that I never got around to finishing, like Prey, Call of Duty, and Tropico 3. Thank goodness for SteamPlay or I'd really be screwed.

It would be nice to hear from Aspyr and Feral about what their plans are for updating their apps. Even Civ V is 32 bit. Will they bother when they have to maintain VI?

[DirtyHarry50]

The biggest issue I have found over time is time itself.

Consider this: do you really want to be playing Incredipede vs. some new, amazing AAA game you also own? What should the priority really be when we remember that every single day is a gift and no tomorrows are assured for any of us? How do you want to spend today with that in mind? Incredipede never mattered because if it did, you would have played it by now. Something else mattered more and rightly so, whatever it was. It still does.

What I am trying to say is, prioritize by greatness, by fun, by the very best stuff you have to enjoy and the hell with what is going to become obsolete or whatever. That is not a good way to prioritize compared to prioritizing by maximum quality of experience. You don't have time to waste on less than the best. None of us have that.

[Frost]

Stuff like this is one of many, many reasons why I finally threw in the towel and started gaming on Windows even though I still work on my Macs. All my games would constantly break and never get updated. Keeping old hardware and OSes around to use my favorite stuff really started getting old (and consuming a lot of space).

[the Battle Cat]

DirtyHarry50, on 28 July 2017 - 04:26 PM, said:

The biggest issue I have found over time is time itself. [...etc]

Your post was profound and awesome, like you.  Thanks for the reality check.

[DirtyHarry50]

the Battle Cat, on 29 July 2017 - 09:24 AM, said:

Your post was profound and awesome, like you.  Thanks for the reality check.

Aw, you're too kind but thank you! You know what is funny is that I almost mentioned you buying Borderlands the other day, installing it and playing it right away and then the next time I was on (to play Planescape Torment) there you were having fun with Borderlands. I was tempted to say hi but didn't want to interrupt you playing. That to me represents being smart and jumping right into something fun rather than buying it cheap for the mythical later on that too often never happens. I really did think about that and how it was very cool to see someone do what I think I should myself much more often.

[the Battle Cat]

Beans to you good sir.  I indeed recently bought Borderlands 1 for Windows and proceeded to have 3 day long play fests that were richly rewarding despite being played 6 times previously on the Mac.  My excuse is that this was where the fun and interest was and by damn that was where I was going to be despite having newer Steam sale items to play.  I discovered a totally new (to me) build for the Siren that is kickass and awesome.

[DirtyHarry50]

I had a feeling you'd already played it plenty on Mac and gotten it for your fancy new gaming rig to enjoy some more.

Although I mentioned shiny new AAA vs an indie game above, I really should have clarified the notion in that context, of beauty being in the eye of the beholder and therefore, anything could subjectively be the thing to enjoy right now. I love a lot of older titles and I am really enjoying a mix of old and new presently playing the Planescape Torment Enhanced Edition which they did a really great job with on my cheapo laptop PC, Destiny on my PS4 and Oblivion on my XBox One. I could be playing the Elder Scrolls Online or the Skyrim remaster instead of Oblivion but I want to play that one more and before the others so that is what I am doing. These choices however, have nothing to do with bits and operating systems and obsolescence looming on the horizon.

Unless it gets an update before this fall, my iOS version of Enemy Within which is 32 bits will stop working when iOS 11 launches, perhaps permanently. Oh, well. I know it is a very fun game but I cannot play everything at once, I should not have bought it for the mythical later on and I probably threw my money away there because I made that mistake.  It is not as important to me as the games I am playing now or even the games I still plan to play before I'd ever get to it. So it is that kind of mistake making based on my own rich experience in making mistakes that made me want to share the thoughts and advice that I did. I like to hope that by being willing to share my own mistakes with others maybe some good will come of them beyond me hopefully learning something myself after repeated lessons at the school of hard knocks and bad choices.

[ehuelga]

Over at least three machines in the past 10+ years I've managed to keep functioning installs of Halo, UT2004, and Jedi Knight II. Sigh… I did prioritize by greatness & fun, IMHO. I guess those will go the way of all bytes.

[Camper-Hunter]

DirtyHarry50, on 30 July 2017 - 07:05 PM, said:

So it is that kind of mistake making based on my own rich experience in making mistakes that made me want to share the thoughts and advice that I did. I like to hope that by being willing to share my own mistakes with others maybe some good will come of them beyond me hopefully learning something myself after repeated lessons at the school of hard knocks and bad choices.

Someone once said something like: a smart person is a stupid person which doesn't repeat his mistakes.

[Matt Diamond]

Camper-Hunter, on 30 July 2017 - 11:58 PM, said:

Someone once said something like: a smart person is a stupid person which doesn't repeat his mistakes.

Advice like that is well worth repeating.

[Cougar]

DirtyHarry50, on 28 July 2017 - 04:26 PM, said:

The biggest issue I have found over time is time itself.

Consider this: do you really want to be playing Incredipede vs. some new, amazing AAA game you also own? What should the priority really be when we remember that every single day is a gift and no tomorrows are assured for any of us? How do you want to spend today with that in mind? Incredipede never mattered because if it did, you would have played it by now. Something else mattered more and rightly so, whatever it was. It still does.

What I am trying to say is, prioritize by greatness, by fun, by the very best stuff you have to enjoy and the hell with what is going to become obsolete or whatever. That is not a good way to prioritize compared to prioritizing by maximum quality of experience. You don't have time to waste on less than the best. None of us have that.

I get what you're saying, but this doesn't apply to games that I want to revisit or that you don't stop playing. (Like Civ V.) Or games that I haven't even bought yet that I might want to play in the future that are 32-bit.

And, thanks to bundles, there are games that I definitely want to play at some point but just haven't gotten around to it, despite having bought them years ago.

Of course, I'd never play a game *solely* because it was about to stop working, just for some futile attempt at completion or sunk cost fallacy rationalization.

[DirtyHarry50]

Cougar, on 01 August 2017 - 11:25 AM, said:

Of course, I'd never play a game *solely* because it was about to stop working, just for some futile attempt at completion or sunk cost fallacy rationalization.

I understood what you said, including the apocalypse title, to be about impending loss of access. You did say you were considering prioritizing games that may become inaccessible. That was what I was initially responding to although I admittedly wandered into related territory when I wrote about costs, money wasted, etc. all of which was based on my own personal experience and not meant to be critical of you or anybody else. I do feel that all of that was relevant though. You had mentioned an indie game for example that I would find difficult to believe you want to play again and again for years to come when you have yet to ever play it, until confronted with the possibility of not being able to. Suddenly, Incredipede appears on the radar for that reason and my whole point was that reason probably doesn't hold up too well against other games you've preferred to play instead ever since buying it. Otherwise, like I said, you wouldn't care about it becoming obsolete. You would have played it a long time ago. Clearly it was less important than other games. I maintain it still is considering the evidence I see. So why play it now? Is it subjectively better than everything else you have access to right now, so much so that you really want to drop everything and play this game today? How did that come to be? That was my point.

[DirtyHarry50]

Here is a fun little exercise for anyone who wants to try it. For many, it will be a real eye opener if you've never sat down and done this before.

Total the number of hours of game play for every game you own that you would like to fit in at some point. This of course has to be just a guesstimate but it is good enough for this purpose.

Now, for the sake of simplicity here let's just assume one has 20 hours every week for gaming on average. So divide the total you came up with by 20 or whatever number of hours on average per week applies to you in particular. Be real with yourself about this for best results. Now you know roughly how many weeks it will take you just to play what you already own assuming you stop buying games completely until you catch up.

For many of us, the next logical step is to take our weeks number which may be rather large and divide it by 52 so we arrive at how many years approximately it will take to play every single game we already own.

This is easy to do and enlightening too for anyone who's never done it before. What I quickly learned when I did this was exactly what I talked about above. My own list was not doable, not even close. For even more fun, if you keep a wishlist on Steam or elsewhere, total that up too and toss it on the pile of hours and do the relevant math for even more money flushed down the toilet. You just might hit critical mass there and encounter a real apocalypse of sorts.

So when it comes to setting priorities for me at least, what is going to become obsolete doesn't even enter into the equation at all anymore. It does not matter. I will never play even half of what I foolishly bought for later on. Later on is always a gamble to begin with and I basically made sure I stacked the odds against myself so well that I cannot possibly win this one. So all those Humble Bundle indies? Not happening. All the Spiderweb games? I wish but no. They aren't happening either. Nothing against Jeff but no way am I playing through the Geneforge series when I haven't played games much more important to me yet. All these games are great to varying degrees but again, it is just about the time. There just is not enough time to worry about old stuff becoming obsolete. Just let it go or if you want to play it badly enough, do it. Keep the gear it runs on.

Few people today enjoy spinning 78's on a Victrola but my brother does. It's a beauty too. So, keep the Victrola or get one if you want/need it. Problem solved. Apocalypse avoided for now anyway.

[DirtyHarry50]

One final thought on this stuff. If ever there was a platform where time is of the essence for any game you buy, it most certainly is anything Apple. More than any other platform by far, it makes good sense to play it right now if you are playing it on iOS or macOS because you can be certain it isn't going to work for long in far too many cases.

[mattw]

With iOS 11 leaving behind a surprising number of games and some other apps (thankfully mainly ones I got when they dropped to free or nearly free, and did not play much or at all - I still preferred to game on Mac) it is interesting how many 32bit ones are on my Mac.

We may get one or two more MacOS releases before they are gone, hopefully some do get 64bit patches or go open source but if not maybe WINE will come to the rescue as it did for many OS9 and later PowerPC titles. At least these days some of the better games get rereleased as remasters and/or improved sequels arrive.

It can still be annoying adding games to your backlog and finding them obsolete before getting round to them. I wonder how many games I’ve purchased multiple copies of now...

[Sneaky Snake]

What I find a kind of (sadly) hilarious is the fact that Microsoft Office is now a 64-bit application suite on iOS (it is surprisingly capable on the iPad Pro), while Office for Mac is still stuck on 32 bit.

edit: Office is 64 bit on mac now, as macdude22 pointed out.

[Camper-Hunter]

Well, it's about the Windows version, but 32-bit Office is still recommended for 64-bit Windows. Unless you deal with huge documents which need gobs of RAM, 32 bit is good enough. Same for any app, really, either on Mac or Windows.

[macdude22]

Sneaky Snake, on 26 September 2017 - 02:33 PM, said:

What I find a kind of (sadly) hilarious is the fact that Microsoft Office is now a 64-bit application suite on iOS (it is surprisingly capable on the iPad Pro), while Office for Mac is still stuck on 32 bit.

This is false, O2016 has been 64-bit for a year on macOS. Even then the lag was primarily in regard to supporting add-ins (I'm looking at you Thomson Reuters).


However the apps are still single threaded so Excel is not as fast with complex calculations. Multi-threaded support is on the roadmap. There is an effort to align the Win/Mac feature set more closely and there will be significant engineering effort on that after the migration from major version 15 to 16 in the next few months.

Attached Files

•  64bits.jpg   366.34K   6 downloads

[Sneaky Snake]

macdude22, on 27 September 2017 - 07:28 AM, said:

This is false, O2016 has been 64-bit for a year on macOS. Even then the lag was primarily in regard to supporting add-ins (I'm looking at you Thomson Reuters).


However the apps are still single threaded so Excel is not as fast with complex calculations. Multi-threaded support is on the roadmap. There is an effort to align the Win/Mac feature set more closely and there will be significant engineering effort on that after the migration from major version 15 to 16 in the next few months.

Right you are. All of the Office apps on my High Sierra MBP are 64 bit. I think I was thinking about the single-threaded performance.

[macdude22]

Sneaky Snake, on 27 September 2017 - 08:07 AM, said:

Right you are. All of the Office apps on my High Sierra MBP are 64 bit. I think I was thinking about the single-threaded performance.

I gotta back up the APEX folks when I can The APEX team at MS are good people. I'm not just saying that cuz Paul brought me delicious ale from washington >_>

The single thread issue is well known and understood and the code base migration for major version 16 is expected to be a welcome step in getting that that resolved. As well as faster development with increased feature parity.