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...

[Suicide Junkie]

"show only latest"

It'll be better or equal in every way to the lower tech Versions, so no worries there.

[mottlee]

GO for it, I would go the 10X10X10 to see how it goes, I like the Idea of more weapons

[spoon]

Suicide Junkie said:
"show only latest"

It'll be better or equal in every way to the lower tech Versions, so no worries there.

Ah, for some reason I was assuming that the resource cost on a component would be going up as the tech went up.

Just be sure to but all the things you might want to take "lesser" Versions of before the stuff that only gets better as the tech level rises -- if anything falls into that Category at all!

[Spoo]

Isn't there a maximum number of components that SE4 can support? (Or is it millons?)