Multi-Cloaking and supply

[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....

[Dingocat85]

Originally posted by StarBaseSweeper:
So no non-solar supply generator, better be lots of stars then

There's actually one way I can think of that will give you a non-solar supply generator - but it's rather odd, tedious, and enables ships to repair themselves:

1) Give all bridges the ability 'Repairs 1 component per turn'.
2) Mod the rules, to allow Repair Bays to repair Emergency Resupply Pods (see where I'm going?)
3) Get rid of the 'Resupply' Research Path, effectively ridding the game of ERPs.
4) Mod the Stats, Size, etc. of Emergency Resupply Pods, into whatever you want Generators to be; the amount of Supplies 'Generated' per turn, should be how many supplies the ERP (now called a Generator) gives a ship when it is used.

Having done that, every turn a ship uses a Generator, it'll gain supplies, and the Generator will be destroyed - and the next turn, it'll be repaired, thanks to the Bridge. Having the bridge repair one component per turn shouldn't be all that bad, and could add some strategy to the game. For example: If your ship gets damaged, you'll have to stop using the Generator while everything else gets repaired. If your bridge gets destroyed, not only is your movement reduced to 1 - but your Generator won't 'recharge' anymore!
So, as long as you don't mind having to manually use the Generator every turn, the above solution should work well

[ May 13, 2003, 07:20: Message edited by: Dingocat85 ]

[Fyron]

That solution quickly becomes impractical as you start getting 100s of starships.