Hi ISI,
I am a very loyal fan of your sims, since F1 2002. I feel like you lost your way with RF2 until recently. When I purchased RF2 (lifetime) license last year it was with trepidation since all the screenshots and videos until then had shown the visual to be bland and flat, looking appropriate for a game circa 2003 but not 2013. Now however you have stepped up the game significantly, with recent cars and tracks being stellar, and the graphics component of the RF2 engine also much improved.
However there is a HUGE bottleneck right now, and that is the RF2 executable being 32-bit. This means that the game can't allocate more than 3.7 GB memory. If this game were being launched 5 years ago that would have been (almost) ok. But now RF2 will be launched in 2014 at the earliest, and will be alive for several years. Already we are hitting the memory limit, as you may be aware from the many crash reports on the forums due to "unable to allocate memory" error message people get. The very nature of your work - highly detailed tracks and cars with very high-resolution textures - means that loading even a reasonable number of cars onto a track is impossible. When I select more than a couple of car mods and try to load a track I consistently get the "unable to allocate memory" message. Given the long planned lifespan of RF2 and that modders will doubtless release even higher detail cars and tracks at some point, it is going to be impossible to run RF2 for anything other than single-spec races.
The solution obviously is to compile the executable as 64-bit. I know it might not be a trivial task, involving changing the way memory management is done within the engine, but I feel that the ability to allocate a large memory space is going to be crucial for RF2's success. Frankly it is not very good that a cutting-edge sim to be released in 2014 has such a small memory limit, and is still in 32-bit, considering that a serious sim should allow more technical freedom and capability.
I am a very loyal fan of your sims, since F1 2002. I feel like you lost your way with RF2 until recently. When I purchased RF2 (lifetime) license last year it was with trepidation since all the screenshots and videos until then had shown the visual to be bland and flat, looking appropriate for a game circa 2003 but not 2013. Now however you have stepped up the game significantly, with recent cars and tracks being stellar, and the graphics component of the RF2 engine also much improved.
However there is a HUGE bottleneck right now, and that is the RF2 executable being 32-bit. This means that the game can't allocate more than 3.7 GB memory. If this game were being launched 5 years ago that would have been (almost) ok. But now RF2 will be launched in 2014 at the earliest, and will be alive for several years. Already we are hitting the memory limit, as you may be aware from the many crash reports on the forums due to "unable to allocate memory" error message people get. The very nature of your work - highly detailed tracks and cars with very high-resolution textures - means that loading even a reasonable number of cars onto a track is impossible. When I select more than a couple of car mods and try to load a track I consistently get the "unable to allocate memory" message. Given the long planned lifespan of RF2 and that modders will doubtless release even higher detail cars and tracks at some point, it is going to be impossible to run RF2 for anything other than single-spec races.
The solution obviously is to compile the executable as 64-bit. I know it might not be a trivial task, involving changing the way memory management is done within the engine, but I feel that the ability to allocate a large memory space is going to be crucial for RF2's success. Frankly it is not very good that a cutting-edge sim to be released in 2014 has such a small memory limit, and is still in 32-bit, considering that a serious sim should allow more technical freedom and capability.
