[newman]

Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind fs2 which can use my 12 gigs of ram..

[The E]

Err. ****. That's what I get for posting without sleep

What I meant was, there's no "need" for us to compile 64-bit exes. It's nice that it works on Linux (and, presumably, MacOS), but it's not a priority for Windows. Personally, I've never seen RAM usage go beyond a gig with FSO; I highly doubt that the ability to use more than 2 Gigs will be needed anytime soon (looks expectingly in Diaspora's direction....)

[Admiral LSD]

Yeah, there's next to no need to go out of your way to support 64-bit on Windows if the program doesn't specifically require it (which is the vast bulk of consumer software) because 32- and 64-bit interoperability is virtually transparent and handled almost completely without user interaction. Mac OS X is better in some ways since you don't have to worry about drivers (on genuine Apple hardware anyway), 16-bit software or 32/64-bit separation of certain system directories.

Linux, on the other hand, is a completely different animal. multilib is OK, better than having to maintain a 32-bit chroot, but it lacks the transparency offered by Windows or Mac OS X. It's next to useless for pre-packaged software since package managers will reject (quite correctly, though for the wrong reasons) anything not in the same binary format as the system. More annoyingly, if you have a 32-bit app that requires a library not offered in your distros pre-packaged collection of 32-bit libs (such as FSO and libogg on amd64 Ubuntu), then acquiring and adding it to multilib requires more effort and skills than should be required for a desktop OS.

[S-99]

I used a program called getlib for ubuntu and debian that grabs 32 bit libraries for 64 bit systems. For fso, there was only one library i needed. It went very smoothly which was really cool. I most likely got lucky since i'm using a distro that already includes a lot of 32 bit libs already. If it had been another pre-setup distro, this could be very different.

EDIT: Necro'd a little. It's pretty unnecessary to make a 64 bit build of the fso engine. I wouldn't do it for memory requirements; i wasn't theorizing that this game would take more than a 4gb of ram. I would be doing for adoption of a processor instruction set as more people move over to it.