f13.net

The trailer can be found here (http://myeve.eve-online.com/download/videos/Default.asp?a=download&vid=146).

The screenies are here along with EVE Classic comparisons (http://www.evegathering.com/e3/).

Comment.

The movie is AWESOME. Black Sun Empire rocks. On the screenshots - GIFV MEGA.

I prefer the old for scorp and megathrone.

New Executioner is nice though

Sexy.  Any chance of directional thrusters?  :-)

The Megathron looks much more predatorial. Nice, very nice.

My take was that the new textures are more metallic and shiny. I just hope the client performance doesn't take a hit. I love playing 1900x1220 in an agp system with no worries.

The devs are saying that you're going to be able to play the game at the same settings you are using now without taking performance hit. All you need is Vista.

To Llyse - I can't see how you can like the old greenish Mega. This one is tight. It looks like a Federate Issue/Vindicator but shinyer and in higher res :)
I can only guess the AWESOME level on the Federate Issue is going to be off the scale. And here's me hoping the Vind gets its own model :)

My only gripe is that a lot of the textures are darker and it's tough to make out details on them. Otherwise.. man, those Amarr ships look awesome.

I think it look darker because the lights aren't coming from a light map any more, they're directional from a source (the sun).

http://www.asgeirjon.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=5&pos=0

A new battlecruiser for Minnies? Oh my heart it does leap.  If it's a replacement for the Cyclone, then No, no no!  I like my frilled dino of doom.

I am considering a Cyclone in the next week or so- will that help with Level IIIs?

It's a new battlecruiser, not a replacement. All races are getting a new BC and a new battleship.
Edit: The Abaddon in the 'before and after' pics is actully the new Amarr battleship, for example (and it's rumoured to be the Arbitor's bigger brother i.e. a drone boat).

I do L3s in it, so, yes!.

  I don't own a battleship, too time-consuming to farm for the cash in Empire. The BC cost me 30 mil vs the 100+mil for a BS. Plus the skills & ammo are highly compatable with my cruiser, since both use Medium guns.  Biggest change for you will probably be that Cyclones are much more efficient shield tanks than armor tanks... you lose some of your toys and have some other skills to train up to make them really efficient.

And yay for a new battlecruiser.   I collect ships, too.

Yay, finally our ships get the proper amount of windows.

Also, looks like the Gallente are shifting from "sleek and sexy" to "badass." Perhaps it will be tied to storylines?


But bleh, the new Caldari BS is just another flying brick.

Youtube-hosted copy of the trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jOJR5Xauf0&search=eve%20online)

Fucking sweet.

You know, I'd be happy with some freaking hotkeys... how about a hotkey to engage autopilot? that would be nice... and a hotkey for lock on current target, target nearest enemy, orbit, go-to, how about hotkeys for disabling and enabling, not just activation? I'm in click-hell.

Also, how do you people live without a widescreen? I'm going through the flash player guide and on the screenies I can't help but wince... so cluttered!

You can reassign the few things that do get hotkeys.  Autopilot toggle is default CTRL-A, I think.  All-stop is probably CTRL-Space.  I have those mapped to the D-pad of my Nostromo, though, so I really can't remember.

A target-nearest function, that wouldn't be abused.  If there is one thing that irritates me, though, is not having my custom distance in the context menu, meaning I have to select something and press the button in the overview instead of right-click and choose whatever I set as default.

I compensate for the clutter by running at a resolution/text size where I can hardly read anything, and hunching over the keyboard.

How about target storage/recall? ctrl-1 to store, 1 to reacll.. I can only imagine how fleet battles are... Oh well, I'll get more of an idea how to adapt once I really start the combat.. I've only destroyed an unarmed drone so far, tonight should be the first night I go out 'hunting'.

I'll do some Eve stuff once E3 clears up; we shot a bunch of photos of the devs showing us Vista. Yes, it's really pretty and really smooth.

From my notes:

* Kali in 2 months.

Big new stuff:
* Solar System view. 3-D view replacing the Scanner that lets you see stuff around the solar system you're currently in. Improved and more usable scanning. Blob size apparently influences how easily you can be detected. Also, there's a spore-like 'seamless' transition from ship view to solarsystem view to galaxy (map) view. Scanprobes will be changed and improved. They will now be 3-D aware and not a giant pain to use. No details on what that actually means.

* Along with the SS view will be more hidden complexes and hidden asteroid belts with goodies in them. This is to "enhance the exploration aspect".

* When ships explode, they no longer blow up into cargo cans. They will now leave a hulk that you must 'scavenge' for loot, parts and stuff. Scavenging will have skills associated with it. Hulks will last longer than current cargo cans, "a few hours".

* Booster system, where you take drugs to confer temporary bonuses at the expense of temporary drawbacks (e.g. +5% turret rate of fire, -2% velocity). Tolerance, so if you shoot up a lot, the bonuses won't last as long as the drawbacks, thus simulating addiction. This second bit is not finalized.

* Gas clouds and gas cloud mining, which are used in booster manufacturing. Gas clouds are all in 0.0.

* Reverse Engineering. Basically, using parts found in complexes or salvaged off of the hulks of your enemies, you use reverse engineering to fix them up and then 'assemble them'. The game mechanic way of describing it is that you 'put parts in a box' and seal it; this locks in a set of advantages and disadvantages. You can then drop the box into your ship ("like implants for ships"), conferring those bonuses and drawbacks to that one ship. The 'box' will be destroyed when your ship explodes. Skills associated with all of this, naturally.

The Vista graphical upgrade is slated for the fall.

Windows Vista support "some time in 2007".

Long term, they want to make planets controllable and colonizable, with planetary flight, sieging, bases. An RTS-like building game. When I asked about the old French MMORTS "Mankind", the guy I was talking to said "kind of".

So the Reverse Engineering is the 'ship customization' stuff that had been mentioned previously?   I certainly hope so, because there had been folks speculating you'd be able to switch-around slots and such.  Doing something like allowing folks to take a 6/4/2 ship and turning it into a 4/3/5 seemed like a bad decision.

It may be; reverse engineering definitely allows you to Customize your Ship, but it may not be Ship Customization.

Anyone have a hint about how the T2 lottery will look after Kali?

My nipples are hard. Gimme!!

Slobber!

Man.

This is one of the things that they've wanted to do since release, but it's also something that requires lots of players to actually be fun. Hopefully they'll be able to figure out ways to implement even a quarter of this stuff.

I can think of so many ways for this to be awesome. I'm sure everyone else can too so I'm not going to bore anyone any longer.

To sum it up - YES.

So what was that MIRV-like missile launching weapon we saw in the video, anyone know?

And when we say Vista, are we just saying Vista as in Windows, or Vista as in the next expansion for EVE (like Kali)?

The starburst thingy was a Minmatar Titan megaweapon...I think.

There's two different things. Eve Vista is a graphical upgrade due out this fall. Eve for Vista is basically Eve with its graphics engine upgraded and rebuilt to work with DirectX 10, which is only available on Windows Vista.

It's confusing, but, well.. I'm not CCP.

Is Vista the new windows os in the making?

and will eve for vista run for xp and such older systems

Gah, that's might make me upgrade to Vista...thought Vista is 64-bit Only, correct?

And damn, at least for the smaller ships, we finally get some flight behavior that doresn't make the ships look like they are on rails. Banks and Spins = Win.

And I lol'ed at the squadron of Ravens. They purposely made them look faster, hehe.

Yes.

No.

Just played around with QuickFit.  If I had Caldari Battleships IV, and equipped a Raven with 5 Overdrive Injector System II's and a Quad LiF Fueld I Booster Rocket I could get it's max Velocity up to 2036.62 m/s.  Wheeeeeeeeeeeee.

"Eve For Vista" is going to be DX10, which is Windows Vista-only according to Microsoft as of Feb '06. Windows Vista will be available both for 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

"Eve Vista", the graphical upgrade, will ship using DX9.

Woah, are you telling me they won't be upgrading past DirectX9 for anything but Vista?  That would pretty much well force every PC gamer to upgrade.  That is huge.

That is correct. Windows Vista is also going to have an "Extended DirectX 9" or DX9ex, which will incorporate some features from DX10 but remain compatible with DX9. I don't know if DX9ex will be back-ported to Windows XP.

Driving consumer adoption of WinV is Microsoft's #1 concern; setting gamers up on a forced early-adoption path allows them to have a wider 'power-user adopter' group, which I think they're hoping will evangelize WinV via word-of-mouth.

Somehow I just can't see the major PC gaming companies forcing their customers to upgrade any time soon. Why on earth would Blizzard even consider trying to force millions of WoW players to spend a couple hundred bucks on a new OS?

I doubt most of the game companies will go exclusively DX10 for a while, but there's still Microsoft to consider as a publisher, as well as a developer thanks to Microsoft Game Studios. We know how much weight a publisher has. They also might cut a deal with the other larger publishers. If EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft all won't fund a PC title without at least DX10 support, I'm guessing most developers would be up shit creek.

But that last bit would be a question for the rednames here - just how much pull does a publisher have for dictating technical specifications like 'thou shalt have a DX10 engine'?

That is correct.

True up to a point, but MS will be throwing money at developers.  Halo on PCs will be Vista only from now on, for instance.

That's not a particularly good example because Microsoft owns Bungie.

Like pretty much every gamer in the world, I know about MS and Bungie: hard to get past the loading screen for Halo without seeing it.  But them buying studios like Bungie or Lionhead is a great example of how they can solve the problem by throwing money at it, whether that's purchase, exclusive tie-ins, or the more indirect route of providing consultants (often free of charge) to provde rapid ramping up of new techs.

In Halo's case, MS is throwing opportunity cost money at the problem.

Depends on how much of the money the publisher is providing.  In the typical case, they are providing most of it, and they can (and do) place such requirements.  Even halfway (or more) through the development cycle.

--Dave

Erm, anyone know if MS Vista will be shipping with both the 32-bit and 64-bit installs on the discs?

I'd really like to NOT have to buy the OS twice.

Supposedly every edition except for Vista Starter (only available in "emerging markets") will have both 32-bit and 64-bit installs on the same DVD. Microsoft expects 64-bit computing to become the standard during the Vista's lifetime.

Hmm, I didn't see this thread before visiting the Eve booth, so didn't ask. I did get the impression though that the new models and textures were going to be a free upgrade not specifically requiring people run WinV. They have another overhaul that would compel WinV, but just swapping objects and textures doesn't seem like that much of a reason.

The changes look hot though. They haven't done the effects yet, but it already is night and day.

Just read Issue #3 of EON and they mention in their Editor's Letter that Vista will not be a requirement. Of course it'll be a benefit, but only for those psychos who buy a new Microsoft OS less than 18 months after it first launches  :evil:

Read more closely; the Eve Vista upgrade is what Wolf was referring to, not Windows Vista. They know they'd be nuts to assume every Eve player was going to run out and get Windows Vista the second it's out.

I highly doubt they will do that.

Prediction: 6 months after Vista comes out they will backport DX10 to XP, if not sooner.

You just called me a psycho...  :cry:

Since we're kinda talking about 64-bit and Vista....

How will all of our older 32-bit programs work in a 64-bit environment? Is it all kinds of "backwards compatible"?

64-bit Vista (and the already-available 64-bit XP) has a neat little thing called Windows-on-Windows64 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64) (or WOW64, if you want to get confusing). It essentially 'translates' 32-bit apps so that they can run with only a little extra overhead on 64-bit machines. What it precisely does and how heavy the overhead is depends on what you're running. Consumer-grade 64-bit P4s and AMD64 processors are much faster at 32-bit emulation than certain other IA-64 processors (mostly ones built for use in servers) since they have a 32-bit compatibility mode built in.

So, in theory, "all" of your 32-bit programs will be able to run on a 64-bit machine without modification. In practice, I find that most user-mode applications will run fine. Applications that deal with Windows or the system more directly (e.g. Perfmon) is much more likely to not work, and anything that uses a device driver (e.g. most consumer security apps, anything with Starforce, CD-drive emulators) almost certainly will not work.
Various flavors of Unix have been doing this for a few years now.

The WOW thing is the same thing they did for 16-bit apps when Windows went 32-bit.  Lots of older apps, or apps that require backwards compatibility with ancient machines, are still actually 16-bit executables that get run under WOW - you can spot them by bringing up the task manager and looking for "wowexec" running at the same time they do (I think that's the one).

So all my old games will still work? Cool.

In theory. It remains to be seen how well DirectX versions 1-8 will be translated.

True, although we normally don't have to worry about third-party libraries that aren't compiled correctly.  You'd think if IBM could make this work, MS could as well.  But then, IBM can't seem to get Linux working on a Power CPU last I bothered to look.

I was browsing dev posts and whatnot and found these links to feature lists:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/updates/plannedfeat.asp - ideas they like
http://myeve.eve-online.com/updates/indevelopment.asp - ideas they're working on

From the indevelopment page:

Triple woot. I am extremely glad that custom modifications, reverse engineering for limited run T2 BPCs, and salvaging are all independent game mechanics. I was worried they were all related or something.

I want an optimal range mod.

This here is also highly awesome. Objectives?

Sounds very cool to me. I want it now!!!

Hopefully it'll post on Test soon (if not already?) so we can check it out.

Wonder if you'll have to be in a command ship to use the full features of the new gang structure?

We used to have to write targeting Win32s when coding for mixed 16/32 bit systems, and it worked surprisingly well.  Not just that, but it was fast enough that we saw no discernable speed difference between native and emulated modes.  Of course, that was largely dependent on whether one was running 3.1, WfW3.11, win95 or whatever, rather than the underlying chipset.  Thunking was the official Microsoft term for the translation process, as I remember.

Happily, the compiler target matters less to me these days, but I'll bet that they have implemented this iteration even better than the last.

Microsoft has historically been fanatical about ensuring that applications run well on their OS.  The famous example is where they wrote custom code to ensure that Sim City worked on 95; there was a memory bug in Sim City that would have prevented it otherwise, but the game was so popular they couldn't ignore it.  No telling how far they will go with the 64 bit stuff, but I'm sure they are well aware of how many apps run in 32 bit, and the outcry that would result if suddenly a sizable percent no longer worked.  They have an effective monopoly on the PC market, and they DO NOT want to lose it as it is by far the most critical product that MS produces.  In almost every sense of the analogy, expect MS to protect the client-Windows relationship like a Godfather after his own mother. 

I've been running XP 64 bit for about a month now and just about every 32 bit game, from EQ2 to small titles all seem to work in the X86 emulated mode within xp 64. Its really rather awsome that they've pulled it off.

As far as performance goes, the 64 bit OS on my system seems crazy fast by comparison to the 32 bit. Its nearly as if I'd gone out and bought a chip thats twice as fast. I know, that's actually what's meant to happen, but I didn't think it really would be that big a difference considering all the other factors involved.

The x86 games themselves may not be running faster in emulated mode, but having the background OS chugging along at 64 bit in the background seems to lend additional speed and 'pluck' to the system overall.

Microsoft is many things, but one thing it is not is stupid.

Microsoft knows that desktops and computer gaming in particular is it's last most stable bastion and they'd be stupid to do anything but throw as much money at the problem as they can.

Microsoft has lost market share completely with IIS, it's losing market share on the receiving end to firefox; It's losing server share to linux; It's got the MS office market pretty well tied up, and it's got exchange, but the real thing that keeps it afloat is PC gaming. Locking in the entire computer gaming and desktop world and requiring windows to be installed on every computer sold is how you create a monopoly. You maintain it by an almost constant cycle of upgrade and end-of-lifeing older products. If vista doesn't work flawlessly with every game and program that you have installed right now than it will flop; no one will upgrade.

The gaming market is excited due to their saying something like "DirectX 10 will provide a 30% performance increase over DirectX 9.0c". I think this is a bunch of horseshit but we'll see when the benchmarks come out. From the few things I've read it looks like they haven't managed to pull it (the performance, stability, or security) off; vista is shaping up to be a buggy piece of trash becuase of all the security 'fixes' they've put in it. Currently it's so bad they've gone through several dev staffs and are throwing huge amounts of money at it. If there isn't sufficient reason to upgrade, no one will. People will gradually start looking to develop on other platforms and their lock on the gaming market will break.

They won't let that happen if it can be at all avoided.

Ok, got a bit confused I think.
First question: Is it just that to take advantage of the crazy upgrades coming to Eve we need Vista but that we can otherwise still play the game at it's still current-beauty without XP?

Second question: Is there a difference between Eve upgrades on a 64-bit system and Eve upgrades under Vista? Like, if I get smacked with a bag of money this summer and buy a 64bit system, I'll be getting WinXP 64 knowing I'll later need to upgrade to Vista. What it is specifically about Vista that is tied to Eve improvements?

Windows Vista = DirectX 10. Preported to give huge visual enchancements as well as an overall performance improvement (the 30% figure is being thrown around). Most games will likely play fine but you won't get the "extra effects". For instance, if you have an older card that only supports directx 7 or 8, you won't see heat shimmers or water effects in doom 3 or half-life 2; It just doesn't do the renders. I'm guessing eve has effects like that you just won't see unless you upgrade.

64 bit is a mixed bag. Some games work better, some games work the same, (very few) work worse. The game has to specifically take advantage of 64 bit, otherwise it just runs in 32 bit emulation mode.

Brief version of Half Of The Thread:

1. Eve Vista. Graphical improvement coming this fall. DirectX 9, does not require anything new from you except maybe better hardware if your old stuff sucks. Higher-resolution textures, more polys in models, maybe some new shading effects.

2. Later on (in 2007), Eve for Vista, which is a DirectX 10 engine upgrade for Eve, along with any necessary Vista compatibility updates. (Not sure how extensively Eve makes use of directories and registry keys that Vista restricts access to; these would be the primary things that need changing.) DirectX 10 is Windows Vista only (at least, that's what Microsoft is saying), so in order to take advantage of this upgrade, you'd need to upgrade to Windows Vista. I presume the older DirectX9 client would remain available.

3. 64-bit Eve. This wasn't mentioned to me. Maybe it'll be a part of #2. Mostly unrelated, some people report better performance when migrating from a 32-bit OS on 64-bit hardware to a 64-bit OS on 64-bit hardware even when running 32-bit applications.

No kidding? I've got two 64bit AMD processors now, but I've still not taken the plunge. It's really worth it?

If all your apps are 32 bit, there's no advantage to running a 64 bit OS.

Well, of course they're all 32 bit. It's not that I'm looking for a GAIN by switching to 64 bit, I'm just looking for "not a loss". Know what I mean?

edit: it's chicken or the egg type stuff.  I'm not using a 64 bit OS because there aren't really any 64 bit Apps that I'm missing out on. And there's no 64 bit Apps, because there aren't any 64 bit Users.

Let me put it this way:

I have my 32 bit OS on 2 sata drives at raid-0. You know, the fast configuration.
I have my 64 bit OS on 1 pata IDE drive. An old clunker.

The 64 bit OS boots faster. At least twice as fast. It is more responsive and in general runs all OS-based operations, including web browsing, file transfers, application switching, etc, far more smoothly than my 32 bit OS.

The only reason I had the balls to try it is because I had an old HD lying around and my work got a bunch of licenses for 64 bit that it isn't going to use, so I am unnoficially 'testing' it out. I keep my 32 bit os in case my boss decides the testing period is over <grin>.

Sooner or later I'm going to take those SATA drives and put the 64 bit on it.

WOW64 doesn't really translate or emulate anything on x64. When a WOW64 process gets scheduled, it'll drop the processor down into 32bit protected mode to execute the code. The WOW64 environment offers all common 32bit DLLs as 32bit Windows does, and apart from the way kernel calls are done, they're 1:1 the same versions as in Windows Server 2003 32bit. Kernel calls get thunked, the WOW64 supervisor notified, which then switches to 64bit mode and executes the call to the 64bit kernel on behalf of the 32bit code, results get thunked back for the 32bit code. What's happening is simply passing data structures between different protection and addressing modes.

Also, in regards to speed on 64bit systems, the only thing you gain is more general purpose registers with 64bit width, which will speed up nested loops and integer arithmetic, if the 64bit compiler did the job right. The only other thing you gain is a bigger address space, which can be used for memory mapping, which makes bulk processing large datasets easier, because your application can just pretend that all data is loaded in memory and let the paging subsystem do the rest. You'll however not gain nearly double the execution speed just because there's 32 more bits.

Engels: Can you eliminate all the systray and device driver clutter from XP 32? I bet you would achieve the same results.

I do not believe I have seen even AMD or Microsoft make claims of faster boot times or OS response, much less the independent benchmarking press.

The fast 64 bit integer operations don't help. The large page sizes are not used by default in XP 64, and the OS and user applications you are describing will not request them. At most the speedup from the extra registers is 15%, which is not noticeable in the type of operations you are describing. Also, web browsing, file transfers, and application switching aren't the types of workloads which will see a large (>5%) speedup anyway. If you're changing the OS only, then you gain no benefit from the larger address space. There's no feature in XP 64 which would account for the speedup you are describing.

When benchmarking, I do lots of clean installs of XP, both 64 bit and 32 bit. The boot time is always amazingly fast. I get mad at my IT-managed systems which maybe manage to boot in about a day and a half. I also get mad at my home graphics driver and DHCP access, as they take for freakin' forever on boot before I get a command prompt.

Nit: the larger address space does not change the OS disk paging as you describe, it improves the hit rate in the CPU's TLB. It is unfortunate that the disk guys, DRAM guys, and CPU microarchitecture guys all use the word 'page' to describe slightly different things.

Disk pages: the mechanism for providing virtual memory by the OS
DRAM page: largest block of data that can be activated at once
microarchitectural page: changing from virtual to physical addresses, to hide the memory configuration from software

Large page sizes are reflected in the OS disk paging, as that is the fundamental unit in which the OS moves stuff from disk to memory and back. However, it doesn't change the amount of data that can be loaded into memory, nor the rate at which it is loaded. Performance there is limited by the DRAM you have in the system and your disk bandwidth, not the page size. What the larger page size does is allow the CPU to access larger datasets without missing the TLB and having to do a pagewalk, increasing the memory latency. This can be a substantial benefit on applications with such large datasets. Like I said before, though, XP 64 does not hand out large pages by default, simply because that would mean every applications' memory footprint would grow in chunks of 2MB or 4MB. An application must explicitly request a large page when allocating memory.

You can also have a larger process size in a 64 bit OS which means an application can use more memory, but that's just a hard limit. The larger process size does not make existing code faster.

DH,

I've got nearly identical start up processes on both OSes. Perhaps the performance boost I've seen on the IDE drive 64 bit OS over the SATA raid 0 32 bit OS is a function of the 64 bit being a newer install, with somewhat lower file fragmentation, although I have defragged the 32 bit OS often enough to drive performance up.

Regardless, it seems rather odd that the entire industry is shifting to 64 bit architechture, yet according to your descriptions, there's no discernable performance boost in the OS doing 'mundane' tasks.

It's not quite true to say that there's no advantage to XP64 if you run 32-bit processes.  I very often have to run with Visual Studio, Eclipse (notorious memory hog), Toad and the dev license SQL server (and a big DB).  As well as, obviously, stuff like ultraedit, various IE windows, mail client and the rest.  The fact that I can use more than 4GB of ram (and more than 2GB per app) with XP64 is a real plus.  I admit it's a bit specialised, though.

Also, XP64 is actually based on a build of the windows server 2003 codebase, rather than straght from XP32 SP2, which means that there are a few things in terms of stability, security and multiprocessor support it does better.

In all, though, dwindlehop is right: unless you're doing some pretty esoteric stuff, XP64 for pure 32-bit work is shiny and does no real harm, but really isn't needed.

This is what I'm talking about, virtual memory paging. Having an address space bigger than 2 gigabytes of user space allows you to clutter it full with tons of memory mapped files.

Those performance improvements in the server space come from the larger address spaces. You can address vast amounts of memory without going through stupid hacks like PAE and address windowing. A database server feels happier with 64 gigabytes of linear addressed space instead of 3 gigabyte or maybe 8 gig with PAE/AWE hacking (which eats CPU cycles).

If you had no idea how many people raided and just based your estimate on threads like this you'd conclude 95% of players raid.

I gotcha now. That is an interesting use of a large address space. As a hardware guy, I am continually amazed by the things that people make software do.  :-D

So basically you are all telling me that AMD came out with scores of 64 bit AMD chips a year and a half ago, specifically marketed for the home user and put in every AMD box out there now yet it has no bearing whatsoever on end-user OS performance ( and I myself am hallucinating) ?

http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=330

Timeline!

September - contracts, gang improvements, reverse engineering, mods, salvage, boosters, new ships, new regions
December - factional warfare
April 2007 - Eve Classic (DX9) graphics upgrade, intro of Eve Vista (DX10) (this is what CCP is calling what was referred to as "Eve for Vista" earlier in the thread)

And on the subject of integrated voice chat:

Engels- you are not hallucinating. The speedup you describe is not due to the 64 bit nature of the OS, though.

Later than what they told me, but at least they cleaned up the terminology. And, ooh, new regions. More space to dicker over.

Is it to do with the fact that the 64 bit OS was built around aspects of an AMD 64 chip that were unused while using regular XP pro? Because I am being 100 percent honest that the builds are near identical as far as start up processes that the user configures (The native ones I have no notion about). It also mystifies me that an OS would be zippier on an pata w/o raid than on a sata w/ raid0. Why would that be the case if it weren't the OS itself being faster, all other parameters being equal?

The OS itself doesn't do nearly enough computation to notice a performance improvements. Any speed ups noticed are architecturally related and as such to be noticed on both OS variants.

You'll only notice speed ups on applications that do 64bit integer math, which can be executed completely on hardware in less cycles compared to a 32bit CPU, and on applications that do a lot of/complex integer calculations generally, because there's more general purpose registers available, which allows the compiler to reduce data movements between the CPU and memory when doing these calculations. On top of that I think there's also more FPU registers, which would speed up complex floating point math a lot, but I'm not really sure of that one.

However note that you can only access these wider and additional registers if you run in 64bit mode, which the 32bit Windows version definitely doesn't. And you need applications that were compiled with an optimizing 64bit compiler.