Oolite Bulletins

Following my discussion with A_C here:

https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?t=8151

... I was hoping to find someone who could build / has built / would build an Oolite 1.76.X installer for Win7.

I'd really like to use my shiny new RAMs to their full extent.

Anyone who does this can be sure of my - and presumably quite some further gamers' - eternal gratitude etc.

Cheers

L

Anyone who does this, I would like to assign them the role of the Oolite Windows 64-bit maintainer in the dev team. Any takers?

Judging from the following page:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/mingw- ... ODO%20List

this bit:

# Enable the use of shared Obj-C and Std-C++ libraries (at the moment they aren't build, because libtool checks for 64-bit mingw for wrong patterns).

is the main show-stopper as far as Oolite is concerned...

does oolite not work on 64bit, or am i misreading summat?

I'm playing it on Windows 7 Enterprise so it seems to work on a 64bit OS - I guess it's just running inefficiently as a 32bit app.

Killer Wolf wrote:

does oolite not work on 64bit, or am i misreading summat?

It certainly does work, but in 32-bit compatibility mode. Lestradae is asking about native 64-bit binaries, which are not available at the moment.

The main difference between the current 32-bit windows Oolite and a future 64-bit one would the ability to use much more memory for the game - the current game is 'limited' to 3.something Gb of data in ram, which can slow Oolite down when it's saving/loading game data to the disk cache.

The difference in speed between 32 & 64 bit versions in a 4 Gb machine wouldn't be that great, but I'd expect to see a noticeable difference with 8Gb and above...

It's all relative, of course. I don't seem to have major speed problems with my 2Gb XP computer, but I'm sure I don't have as big an AddOns folder as Lestradae!

@ Forum Admins:

Could we perhaps make this topic a sticky?

I assume this will be of more and more interest to more players as technology progresses into the 64bit region and the horde of oxps closes in on 400, and not only in my singularly special interest.

I have slightly altered/updated the original posting to accomodate a possible sticky function.

Cheers

L

I have an x64 machine that I'm willing to 'donate' to the cause. My problem is I don't know enough of MinGW and stuff to figure out building it the 64-bit environment. If someone can help me with that, I'll happily set up a machine.

It'd be nice if someone did, but somewhat optimistic.

While you can happily compile 32 bit wide windows applications (so not able to access more than 3Gb of memory), we've got the minor problem that - as yet - no-one has been able to build a single 64 bit windows application with minGW...

(Mutters strange incantations in Latin)
Ahhh... Glad to see Necromancy still works. Least Thread Necromancy.

Anyways. I'm still willing to take a swipe at this if someone with a more firm knowledge of setting up the regular Win32 environment can collaborate. My knowledge on Windows is fairly top (having worked for them), but I am by no means a developer. Anyone want to lend a hand and see if we can make this happen?

As it happens, these guys have actually released a version of mingw that should make it possible... I'd suggest having a look over there!

Kaks wrote:

As it happens, these guys have actually released a version of mingw that should make it possible... I'd suggest having a look over there!

Getting the compiler that can build 64-bit binaries would be only half of the trip. In order to fully utilize the capabilities of a 64-bit environment, apart from the actual game executable, the entire support dll set that gets distributed with Oolite should also be built using mingw-w64. That is not exactly as easy as it sounds. In any case, good luck to whomever wants to try it and we will do our best to help and support the effort from here.

Or someone may want to donate a 64-bit system and OS and speed the process up Well, at least I tried...

Prompted by a combination of my laziness wearing off, my work demands lessening slightly, and the post by Mangamuscle - I checked on MinGW-W64 today.

It's hit v1.0!

Hey a_c, want to help me take a crack at things again? I have the MinGW files downloaded already...

All hail Cmd. Cheyd, the potential hero of future 64bit Oolite goodness!