Beating the 255 barrier

[Atrocities]

quote:

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A 300 KB savegame becomes a 90 Megabyte savegame.
Just writing the savegame to disk each turn would take a significant amount of time. Heaven forbid you from trying to download that from PBW each day, even on a high speed connection!

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I thought about this too. I guess one of the way to work around this would be to only store the statistics of the game for the player to see in all quadrants, but each quadrant would only store THAT quadrants data. Same as it is now, except the information, ie planet count, ship count, location of said item, would be visible in all quadrants. Information only.

If a battle took place in B quadrant, and you are in A quadrant, at the beginning of the turn, the information window would notify you. You could then Click GOTO, and the new quadrant would load.

If battle happened during your turn, and you are in A quadrant, the battle takes place in D quadrant, then you would have the choice of going to D quadrant, or letting your forces fight it out automatically. Hell theres an idea, much the same as PBW, the battles that take place out side of your active quadrant happen automatically, you just read about the aftermath in the Turn News Report. Kind of a bummer, but hey, if it works better this way, then so be it.

[Atrocities]

An idea for PBW would be that each player hosts his own quadrant, and when a new player enters that quadrant, then that players PC gains the information about that quadrant.

IE, if player 1 enters X wormhole and ends up in Player 6's quadrant, then Player 1 now has two maps on his PC for this game, Map for Player 1 and Map for player 6. As Player 1 explores Player 6's quadrant, Player 1's computer gathers data and stores if for just as it would for his home quadrant except the data is for Player 6's quadrant. This way the information and data Player 1 gathers stays localized to each individual quadrant.

[geoschmo]

This idea sounds a lot like Aaron's vauge descriptions of his vision for Space Empires in the future. I doubt you will see it in SEIV though.

Geo

[Dracus]

This is the same path that me and a couple of artists I have employed are now working on for a game we hope to release as we are also stuck with the 255 limit due to the programing limits.

[Nebraskan]

Atrocities:

I had something like this happen when I first started playing SE4Gold. I was using the SE4G Mapmaker to make maps that I would then edit. I had modified the Quadrent.txt file for the Grid type quadrent, I was trying to get more than 117 systems by spacing the systems closer and using 255 as the number of systems. What happened was that SE4Gold Mapmaker using grid type quadrent still looked like it had 117 systems but somehow many of the systems were actually underneath the topmost systems. I turned on the system names switch and you could not read the names because they were printed on top of each other. I actually started playing a game with one of these systems and it was AWESOME and somewhat confusing. I could see where my home system was but could not always move to the next system by clicking on it because it was in a different layer.

I know this is not exactly what you were getting at, but it has some of the same qualities that you were explaining about connecting systems and different layers of quadrents.

[Kling]

I don't know it is a stupid question or not, but what is so special about the 255 system limit? There can't be very much data to store on a single system and with todays computers...

[Atrocities]

King, the 255 limit is a hard coded issue that has to do with the programing abilities and such of Languages that ware bing used to program these type of games. Currently 255 is the TOP of the programing limitations.

If you break a game down;

20 players = rougly 10 systems or about 75 planets to each player factoring out black hole systems, asteroids, and simple single - bi - tri star systems.

In a game with 20 players, the neighbor hood gets croweded awful quick with a limitation of 255 systems.