GridTechs, compression and HD space.

[Suicide Junkie]

As you may or may not know, Grid Techs are where one component has multiple tech areas that improve it.

For example, you might make an armor component where research into 'industry' makes it 5% cheaper to build per level, and 'armor design' which gives it 10% more hitpoints per level.

With my tech gridder program, it is easy to make really big tech grids, and the multiplicative nature of them starts to show.

For my GritEcon mod, I was thinking of doing 3 dimensional tech grids. 10 levels in one area, and 20 in two others.

10x20x20 = 4000 levels of a component (turn on 'show only latest' )
4000 levels of DUC, for example equates to 4.7 megabytes of text file.

If I did this for all of my planned weapons, the components.txt file would end up at approximately 160 megabytes in size.

However, due to the magic of compression algorithms, the download ZIP of the entire mod would be only 2.5 megs in size, enough to fit on just 2 floppies.

[se5a]

Who worrys about a measly 160 mb THESE days????

[Phoenix-D]

I'd take it down to 10x10x10 myself. Or maybe 20x10x10.

[Alneyan]

I see no problem either; compressing the file back would be enough if you did need the space (unless you are playing SEIV every single hour of your life, and only SJ's mod).

Oh, and it looks like I misunderstood your plan quite a lot. Are you saying there will be an insane number variations of *each* component? I thought it would be only for weapons; so does it affect the other, non-weapon components as well?

[Suicide Junkie]

There would only be 4000 Versions of each weapon, since they're 3-dimensional gridtechs.

I do plan on making a few more levels of the other components, but they'll be insignificant next to the weapons.

Knocking it down to 10x10x10 for 1/4 the space would be feasible too.

[spoon]

What impact does this have on the ship design in-game? I wouldn't want to have to sort through 4000 variations of a weapon to get to the one I want...

[Kamog]

Sounds like a great idea! It will make research and ship design more interesting, allowing for more variations in ship designs and creating more choices and trade-off decisions to be made in what area to research.

[Aiken]

The HDD space is not an issue, but RAM... 160 mb components.txt will load terribly long time on slower machines and swap in and out constantly.

Also, it's not always good to have Show latest only ON, ie, sometimes I want to fit price of my new design to SY build rates and turn "Latest only" off to pick obsolete but cheaper/smaller component. Scrolling through 4000 DUC/ECMs/whatever will be somewhat painfull in this case.

[Alneyan]

I believe SJ wrote that the latest components will be equal or better to their previous Versions, so that will likely include price as well (the hull size will be the most important factor when determining the final cost of your vessel, unless you are toying with Stellar Manipulation).

Ram may be quite a problem though, or perhaps even processor speed when launching the game. I recall I had some trouble with Adamant with my old computer, so 160 mo would be a *ahem* slight problem in this case. Perhaps make the full 4,000 Version, and a "low weight" with a much smaller tech-grid SJ?

[Suicide Junkie]

One decreases cost, one decreases size, and the third increases damage.

None of them have side effects, so the only reason you'd ever want to use an old component is during retrofits. In those cases, you just copy the old design and replace only the parts you want to replace.