| New Bug - Pop Overflow |
Mon, 23 May 2016 04:57  |
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 magic9mushroom |
 | Commander |
Messages: 1361
Registered: May 2008 | |
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When testing the limits of AR planetary scanning in an attempt to find or debunk the fabled Scanner Overflow bug, I ran across some very odd results of a different sort.
I'd dropped about 1.14 billion pop (over 2^30, for those paying attention) on the planet to supercharge its scanner, and was expecting to come back the next turn to about 120 million deaths and just over a billion pop left on the world to get the scan.
I didn't. Instead, I found that it had grown to 1.16 billion. The next turn, it grew to just over 3 billion (as reported on the Load/Unload dialog and the tip that comes up when you click on the population number in the lower right) but this displayed on the top-left and bottom-right planet panes as -1 billion (and yes, it was out by the amount you'd expect were those displays four-byte signed integers). When I loaded a billion back into the freighters, there were still 2 billion on the surface (now displaying correctly). Very weird things started happening with the scanner, as well, but those may have been a symptom of this bug rather than the Scanner Overflow I was looking for.
I've only got Stars! on my old laptop (which is falling apart at the seams; the battery's dead, two of three USB ports are dead, and the OS has some very serious but not yet fatal errors), but I can provide the files if anyone wants them. As XAPBob pointed out to me at the time, though, it's probably faster to just cook up an IS testbed with 4,000 Super Freighters and wait a few hundred turns, assuming the bug applies to all races that hit 1 billion as we suspect it does.
Obviously, this isn't the sort of bug you'd see every day, but I can see exploitation of the 1 billion -> 3 billion jump (assuming it can be understood and reproduced) being a plausible tactic for IS orgies in the extreme lategame. What we all decide to do about it is of course a matter for the community.
-m9m
[Updated on: Mon, 23 May 2016 05:22] Report message to a moderator
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