Multi-Cloaking and supply

[Fyron]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
cloaking component with negative supply and 0 cloak. call it a reacter.

But, it only works when the cloaking is on, which makes no sense. Your sweepers won't be able to sweep mines. Any other cloaking abilities you have will be activated. You will not be able to generate supplies while decloaked. None of these are good side effects of doing that.

[geoschmo]

Actually, whether or not you agree with Fyron's points I don't think it works. I tried giving a cloaking device a negative supply usage and it didn't add or subtract supplies fomr the ship.

Geoschmo

[geoschmo]

I tried negative supply use on cloaks and they do nothgin. I tried them on engines and I get an overflow error. Also, in both cases they show up screwy in the component readout. Instead of -x, they show like 49543723 as the supply usage. Obviously negative supply use isn't going to do it.

But it was a good idea I think.

Geoschmo

[Fyron]

The negative supplies for the engines seem to get subtracted from the maximum value of the integer variable used, just like what happens with standard move points.

MM apparantly took the lazy way out and made a lot of variables unsigned integers instead of signed integers, so negative values can not possibly work. I hope he doesn't make this same mistake with SE5.

[ May 09, 2003, 20:09: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Krsqk]

To be fair, unsigned integers allow ~double the max value--0 to 255, for instance, instead of -128 to 127. Still, I would have liked to see longs, or even floats or doubles, used. RAM's cheap these days.

[StarBaseSweeper]

OK, so no negative value.

Thanks for the detailed information about activating cloaking, Imperator Fyron.

So no non-solar supply generator, better be lots of stars then

Do you know if a solar panel (generate supply from star) uses supply if a "Amount of supply used" is given ?

(to do like generate 1,000 supply /star, and spend 900 supply, so that only 100 is generated for 1 star, making system with no star very difficult to travel, and the one with 2 or 3 stars very effective)

[Fyron]

Krsqk, integers are more than one byte. And even if they were only 1 byte, 128 points is way more than enough for most abilities. Why do you need more than 128 bonus to happiness? Or reproduction rate? That's kinda absurd.

64 byte doubles... ooohh....