| Re: Stars! MOD proposal |
Sat, 30 July 2005 10:39   |
|
 crr65536 |
 | Chief Warrant Officer 3 |
Messages: 180
Registered: June 2005 | |
|
Many things in Stars have powers-of-two limits. What happens is that the programmers, who tried to make things as efficient as possible, used bit-packing to try to minimize the amount of resources used up. For example, there is a maximum of 512 (2^9) fleets per player. The maximum number of minefields per player is also 512. The maximum number of ships of one type in a fleet, IIRC, is 32767 (2^15 - 1). The maximum initiative a ship can have is 63 (2^6 - 1)
Now, the armor and shields fleets have are stored, typically in 16-bit or 32-bit numbers. 16-bit numbers can have a maximum of 32767 (2^15 - 1) or 65535 (2^16 - 1), depending on whether the numbers used are signed or unsigned (unsigned numbers can't be negative - instead the bit that would control the sign is used to allow 2* as many positive values). If you exceed a limit, the value will either be reported as negative (if it's signed) or zero or very small (if it's unsigned).
Indeed, this is the basis of a bug that was found a little while back: a space dock's armor is stored as a 16-bit signed value, and so when exceeding 32767 armor (by using Superlatanium) strange things were found to happen.
Anyways, a 32-bit number can go up to 2147483647 (signed) or 4294967295 (unsigned). While these are out of reach for Death Stars or Nubians, depending on how cool these "very very powerful" starbases are you may run into these sorts of limits.
Also, one more thing: in Stars nowadays people generally see starbases as a vehicle for making ships, not as strong defensive installations themselves. Empty starbases are common, and full starbases typically find themselves firing on chaff only before being destroyed. I'm not sure if you realize it, but your suggestions would change the game probably much more than you think. Not that it's a bad thing  , but there are quite a few things to like about this game too  .
Report message to a moderator
|
|
|
|
Members
Search
Help
Register
Login
Home
