they've answered the 1st question.   Yes, Both versions will be on 1 disc.   So no worries about having to buy them apart.

I'm curious to know in which beta stage they expect to provide both versions.

Personally I thought it was pretty clear that Python will be the programming language to create their own scripts.

in theory (I think anyway) the 64-bit version would be without havok physics until that part is fixed.  I mean, I can't imagine the benifit of having havok in a map-only version of the game, for example. 

Of course, I don't know all the complications.  To me it seems like you should be able to create some sort of emulated environment to hold the 32-bit havok (perhaps a 32-bit *video processes that only renders the game on the screen and handles havok related physics and such) and have another program actually handling the back-end map and AI features that would need 64-bit memory access.  

I'm sure I'm over simplifying it, since I'm not sure the complications in creating a x86 graphics program that pulls from a 64-bit "backend program"

Boogie- I know the Epic Generator was something you worked long and hard on for GalCiv2 and ended up scrapping a lot of it.  But, don't feel bad, as it was probably a good learning experience.  And here's my take away- if you can create a rather detailed, filterable logging feature, the community can attempt to create a story-ized version of those logs.  Without the logs, though, it can't happen.  Plus, the advanced logging will help SD and the community with trouble-shooting bugs, I'd imagine.

I would suggest some easy method to capture points in time to an HTML file that can include screenshots, though.  All you'd have to do is choose to perform a screen capture with a caption of text and/or highlight a particular log event and send it to the HTML.  Heck, you could integrate this into your blogging features in Impulse as an easy way to post game progress.  That would be amazing!

Have you considered doing something like a web generating log file?  It would make sharing tales of games really easy, fun, and educational as people share strategies, bugs, and tales of success/failure.

Faugh. It was and is a fine idea, even if it does demand some long and horrible romance between a DBA and a novelist.

32-bit systems can use up to 3.25 GB of ram, right? What enourmous maps would you use to even scratch that limit... Even if ram would be a limiting factor, I am sure they could make it so that huge maps are not needed for a full experience. CivIV works perfectly fine with standard sized maps, and the game does not scale very well to the arger map types.

In Civ IV, playing on a map much larger than Huge would probably strain any 32 bit system for memory. And yes, gameplay in Civ IV wouldn't scale well beyond that anyways, but Elemental is not going to be Civ IV (if it were, why would anyone buy it?). We've already been told that the standard huge map size in Elemental will be ~4x the size of Civ IV's. Elemental's gameplay will hopefully scale much better with map size than Civ IV's (and GC2's).

ROFLMAO