Author Topic: Building Limit (Read 6434 times)

siqueule · « **on:** January 24, 2006, 05:56:46 AM »

Leviathan, you who know the programmation, you think the building's limit can be push back?
180 structures, it's not very much

Leviathan · « **Reply #1 on:** January 24, 2006, 06:05:57 AM »

I dont think it can be changed.

BlackBox · « **Reply #2 on:** January 24, 2006, 07:42:32 AM »

That might be able to be changed. (I've never heard of such building limits, only vehicle limits)

The limit itself is just a fairness thing. Like max pop in AOE and other games.

Internally, I think the game can handle something on the order of 4096 units total (not sure if that's for all players, or per player).

Note that all objects on the map are considered 'units' by the game. A mining beacon, a disaster, a wall, and even those circles in the wreckage collection missions are all units.

I don't think there'd be a problem with pushing the limit to 500 per player though. That's 3000 for all 6 players, so that gives you 1096 for other map objects.

However, I'm not saying that I KNOW how to do it. I'm not sure where the code that controls the limit is.

siqueule · « **Reply #3 on:** January 24, 2006, 07:54:42 AM »

I remember, I had builed a lot and a lot of structures, probably 180, and the button "build" in the structure factory has disappeared <_<
I think the limit is 255, because I was in eden starship with plymouth

dm-horus · « **Reply #4 on:** January 24, 2006, 11:53:00 AM »

It would be really nice to have a higher build limit. could someone look into this? adding an additional 30 buildings isnt much of an improvement (but its a good start), so finding a way to get each person a few hundred buildings would be great.

HaXtOr · « **Reply #5 on:** January 24, 2006, 01:41:37 PM »

Ive never had any problems with building limits. Could it be based on the stats of your computer? I once had a code glitch and it built agridomes everywhere on the entite map

siqueule · « **Reply #6 on:** January 24, 2006, 01:45:45 PM »

notice: I have reached this limit only once: usually, when I play a game in a colony game, I give up after one hour or two because I am bored :blink:

siqueule · « **Reply #7 on:** January 24, 2006, 01:46:52 PM »

lol Haxtor, your map, what was his dimentions?

Arklon · « **Reply #8 on:** January 24, 2006, 03:29:14 PM »

The amount of structures you can have in single player is higher than the amount you can have in multiplayer. This probably also applies to vehicles.

Leviathan · « **Reply #9 on:** January 24, 2006, 03:42:36 PM »

You can go over the vehicle limit in multiplayer by tradeing units to other players once they have hit the limit.

Hooman · « **Reply #10 on:** January 25, 2006, 04:29:44 AM »

Each tile has an 11 bit unit index pointing to the unit that occupies that tile. That means there are 2048 possible index values. The index 0 seems to be reserved and is never used to represent a valid unit, so that leaves 2047 possible unique values. This is a limitation of both the in game memory structure and the saved game (and map) files.

Side note:
This unit index field is fairly useless for the map files though, since they don't contain unit records, but it can screw things up since it doesn't initialize this memory other than loading it from the file. This data is packed into the same DWORD as the tile index and cell type. Consequently, I believe this field was related to Eddy-B's invincible mine. If two buildings are placed on top of each other, there's only one index to point to one of the buildings. Once that one is destroyed, it probably reset this index to 0, and so the weapons fire didn't detect another buildings to damage after that. The drawing code seems to be independent of this though.

Anyways, I believe I've come across some sort of artificial limit on building units, probably for fairness. I also remember finding the limit a bit odd. I think it might have only allowed up to 1024 units to be build before it started failing. I don't remember for sure anymore, but I think there were off by a bit in their check.

dm-horus · « **Reply #11 on:** January 25, 2006, 05:51:17 AM »

hooman: does this mean its possible to increase build limit but possibly by lowering game stability? or is it that the build limit was aribtrarily set?

haxtor: i reach structure limit in single player on a weekly basis. if you havent reached build limit yet it means yur not playing to high mark. i usually reach build limit when i have enough structures to support <1200 colonists (about 10-15 advanced residences).

siqueule · « **Reply #12 on:** January 25, 2006, 11:54:45 AM »

and the hospitals and the food factory too

and the leisure centers and the others structures to avoir unemployement, to have happy colonists who will do a lot of kids! Mmmm... that represent much buildings, that <_<

dm-horus · « **Reply #13 on:** January 25, 2006, 12:25:56 PM »

im always amazed at how many support structures it takes to maintain just 10 residences at full capacity. you need at least as many agridomes as residences when at <100%. then theres medical centers, meteor deflection, recreation, etc... not to mention backup structures.

siqueule · « **Reply #14 on:** January 25, 2006, 01:30:37 PM »

it's the great difference with age of empire, where the guys have a food bag, they sleep when we don't see them, they aren't ill even in the snow the naked chest, and the ressources are stocked in a mysterious place :lol:

BlackBox · « **Reply #15 on:** January 25, 2006, 02:54:30 PM »

Quote

Each tile has an 11 bit unit index pointing to the unit that occupies that tile. That means there are 2048 possible index values. The index 0 seems to be reserved and is never used to represent a valid unit, so that leaves 2047 possible unique values. This is a limitation of both the in game memory structure and the saved game (and map) files.

Ah yes. Good point, I had forgotten about that.

Hooman · « **Reply #16 on:** January 26, 2006, 01:10:52 PM »

Horus: You could increase the per player limit, but there is a hard limit set for the game engine. I doubt it would work if you tried to go beyond it. It might depend on the unit as to whether it would crash the game or not though. I never looked into it that much. There are also fairness issues here. It could kinda suck if one person had 2000 units, and the other person only got a handful before the game hit it's hard limit. I'd also like to mention that every disaster, and every resource (Beacons, Fumaroles, Magma Vents) each take one of those unit records.

HaXtOr · « **Reply #17 on:** January 26, 2006, 03:50:00 PM »

I know if you create too many units at once the game lags horibly, I remember onetime I filled a 128X128 blank map with all cargotrucks of different players each while debugging my cargotruck disater, and one thors hammer linx in my controll...

the cargo trucks took fovever to move and when i fired on them it took several minutes for the bolt to show and the sound to play, If i remember correct the game became more resonsive after i destroyed 1/2 the cargotrucks

Hooman · « **Reply #18 on:** January 27, 2006, 03:33:45 PM »

Well, I came across that code I'd found earlier. It looks like unit creation should fail once you hit 1023 units.

Mind you, due to the way units are created, this depends on how that particular unit is created. But from what I've seen, they all seem to call the common function which has the 1023 limit. The function is called from quite a few points (although, it didn't look like there were quite enough calls for every possible unit). I checked out a few such as CommandCenters, Beacons, and Vortexes. They all used the same function.

Mind you, that doesn't deal with the buttons getting disabled in the UI. That's just failure when you actually try to create the unit. That shouldn't happen until after the factory has finished building the unit, and the button gets disabled so you can't even start building it.

As for editing the above code, it doesn't look like it'd be too hard to increase that internal limit to 2047 units. It'd need a few slight changes to a few locations, but they all seem to be contained in that one function. The only problem is, this wouldn't appear to address the UI issue, so it'd probably be a useless edit until that is figured out.

Malik Carr · « **Reply #19 on:** July 16, 2006, 06:22:47 PM »

Ah, fabulous. So, even if the unit limit is increased, we still haven't figured out how to make the buttons appear in the factory menus. Awesome.

For a game made in 1997, Outpost 2 sure manages to continue confounding people to this day.

CK9 · « **Reply #20 on:** July 16, 2006, 09:52:59 PM »

I just thought of something:

If you transfer units to someone, will that count towards their individual limit? If so, then what's to stop a player (on a largr map of course) from producing, hiding, and transfering a large number of scouts to their opponent, and thereby making it so no more attack units may be produced by them?

Hooman · « **Reply #21 on:** July 16, 2006, 10:01:26 PM »

How about self destruct?

That's a lot of money and time for you to waste for the few seconds it would take them to solve the problem. Plus, they might try to solve the problem in your base.

Besides, I don't remember seeing anything to suggest there is a per player limit. Only a game total limit.

CK9 · « **Reply #22 on:** July 16, 2006, 10:08:48 PM »

There is a per-player limit, I found that out on WON. And on larger maps (especially Axen's home and Around the world), it's very easy to hide units in groups of up to 5 without them being noticable on the mini map (especially if you are yellow or cyan)

BlackBox · « **Reply #23 on:** July 17, 2006, 07:15:22 AM »

Well, if they happened to build enough scouts, they could overrun the limits of the game unit array. (Although, that would be detrimental to all players, not just the one). Self destruct wouldn't help too much since the unit record will continue to exist (the 'dead' flag will just be set).

Also, isn't 2048 a real game limit anyway because of the 11 bit field in the map for the unit index? (at least in the case of saving units).

Sl0vi · « **Reply #24 on:** July 17, 2006, 11:21:42 AM »

You can use the transfer option to force the other player to reach his vehicle limit, happened to me once, the other player just made a nice walled area, filled it with scouts, transferred them to me, and continuesly emp'ed them. Meaning, I had to waste alot of time on self destructing them, which is also a waste of time.

Transferring units can also be abused to go above the players individual vehicle limit.

News:

Author Topic: Building Limit (Read 6434 times)