The road to 64bit part I - Interstellar Rift development update 167

It’s been some time since the last Interstellar Rift update, and in the meantime we’ve been working on updating underlying systems to retool the game for 64bit.

Why is this important?

Interstellar Rift servers need to simulate the galaxy and solar systems need to be loaded into memory to do so. Being a 32bit application limits the amount of data we can load into memory, and puts a limit on how many things the game can handle at the same time. This means that we had to put a lot of effort into optimizing servers so they could efficiently swap resources around to make sure that we had plenty of memory available as players would venture all over the galaxy.

Why was Interstellar Rift built on a 32bit platform, as games have been targeting 64bit for years now?

Interstellar Rift has been locked to 32bit for over 8 years, as we used the Havok physics engine during early development while it was still available for small developers. And the version that was freely available to everyone was 32bit only, with the option to expand to a more professional license later on. Unfortunately over the long development cycle of Interstellar Rift the Havok brand was moved around between different companies, which would not license it to us anymore. Which left us with the 32bit version, and at the time we thought we could optimize well enough that it would not be an issue, but it has imposed some limits on the game.

What are we changing?

We have completed most of the work on swapping out Havok for a different physics engine. To go into a little more detail; Interstellar Rift has always used two physics engines. One for the client side interactions with ships, such as walking around and interacting with objects and devices, and one for the space ships, which has to be a deterministic physics engine. Deterministic meaning; every simulation the spaceships do has to be exactly the same when run on the pc’s of each player in the same solar system. This has to do with how we simulate the game for each player.

The physics engine that we use to simulate the space ships has not been changed, the physics engine that we use for player movement has been swapped out with a new one.

So the game is 64bit now?

Not yet. Our first step was swapping out the physics engine. Which is now almost done. Once we are happy with the performance and stability of this change we can then move on to opening the game up to use more memory. The move to 64bit will be fairly quick once the physics engine work has been completed.

What changes am I going to notice?

Hopefully not many. But you will find that your player character might control slightly differently, or that jumping/running is slightly different. We are trying to keep these differences to a minimum.

We are releasing this version on the experimental branch first. Where hopefully players can test it out and we can track down any remaining bugs.

A couple of things to take into account:

• First person guns don’t work yet in this version.
• Animations for other players are glitchy in this version.
• Players can play on the normal servers and player with people not on the experimental version.
• Animations can glitch even more when playing with people who are not on the experimental version

We will update the experimental version in the coming weeks to address these problems.

Hopefully some of you can find the time to play on the experimental version. Any crashes will be send to us automatically if you have this option enabled, for any other issues you encounter please list them on our bug tracker: Split Polygon Bug Tracker

As always, we’ll see you star-side!

- The Split Polygon team.

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Enabling the experimental branch

To enable the experimental branch, right click on Interstellar Rift in Steam, > properties > beta, and select the "experimental IR beta patches" option