EA StaffRe: the sims 3 (64-bit & metal) release
Since I promised I'd try to address questions that come up (with two exceptions), here's a quick hit of what I picked up over the last few pages. Thank you to all the AHQ heroes and Guides for also answering these questions before I have!
Q: What is "Apple ARM CPU?"
tl;dr: This is the chip that makes your computer be a computer. Apple announced a fundamental change to it earlier this year, but hasn't begun shipping new hardware based on the change yet.
A: Forgive me if this gets too basic (OR too far in the weeds), but I want to make sure there's no confusion here. The "CPU" is the main powerhouse of what makes your computer a computer. The acronym stands for "Central Processing Unit" and it's the thing that, as the name implies, does the bulk of the processing on your computer. The "architecture" and/or "instruction set" (the terms are often used pretty interchangeably, though they're actually different things) of the CPU will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and intended use to intended use (though it's also possible for one architecture to be licensed to other manufacturers, and then all of them will adhere to that standard as a common standard). There's a WHOLE lot more to this topic, so I'll just leave that part alone. Search the Internet for "CPU architecture" if you want to know more.
Today there are several pretty mainstream CPU architectures that are used by manufacturers, and they all have advantages and disadvantages. PowerPC used to be used by Apple for Macintosh hardware until they moved to Intel chips (PowerPC is a RISC chipset that is still widely used in industrial applications but not often seen in places where the end user would notice them. Lot of automation/robotic controller, lot of automotive "compute unit" to control how your engine runs). Intel's x86/x86-64 instruction set is a venerable standard that's been around for many decades and is probably what's in use in your Macintosh or Windows PC (or Linux server, etc). x86/x86-64 is a CISC based architecture that is widely used nearly everywhere and is manufactured by several companies (Intel, AMD, etc). Apple adopted this CPU family over PowerPC in 2005 and, for about three years, provided an emulation layer so that software optimized to run on PowerPC would still be able to run on x86 CPUs (and as with all emulation software, this had mixed levels of success). This emulation layer was called "Rosetta."
During their developer's conference in summer of 2020 Apple announced that they would be transitioning to an internally developed CPU based on the ARM CPU architecture (a RISC based CPU that is widely used in low-electrical-power applications like phones, tablets, system-on-a-chip computers like the RaspberryPi, etc). They will be attempting to ease migration for application developers from the x86 CPUs to the ARM CPUs via an emulation layer called "Rosetta 2." Apple have not yet announced when the first consumer-facing Macintoshes based on this new CPU will ship, but they have continued to launch new Macintosh models designed around the Intel x86 CPU. It is very likely that the Macintosh hardware ecosystem will be a mix of x86 and ARM CPUs for several years (not least of which because there are millions of Macs in the wild today that are built around x86).
Q: What about error 12?
A: From what I can gather Error 12 is due to the world held in the game's memory being too complex to write to disk. The mitigations I see described are various tactics to reduce the amount of memory needed to construct the save files (note - I have learned this through 3 minutes of Internet searching so I may be 100% wrong about it). If the root cause really is not having enough memory available to the game to be able to construct the save files in memory before flushing to disk then yes, this update should help with that. The move to 64-bit architecture means that the game will no longer be constrained to 4 Gigs of RAM total, so if it needs to burst to 6 or 8 gigs while it constructs these files then it should not have a problem (though if your Mac doesn't actually have more than 4 or 8 gigs of RAM you might notice things get really slow while this work happens due to the use of a technique called "swap" or "virtual memory" that involves using your hard drive as extra, very slow, RAM). But never say never. I'm positive someone will find a way to stress this system again.
Q: Will custom content work?
A: I don't see why not.
Q: MaxisJoe mentioned Christmas
A: Nope. I mentioned Festivus.
Did I miss any questions/statements?
