Population Resets to Zero

[Loren]

The situation stated in the OP can't happen.

I just reproduced the problem, the reset occurred in the vicinity of 320000 people. I wasn't watching closely as I thought I was a long way from the reset point so I don't have the exact number. I strongly suspect 327670 is the largest possible population. It's year 36.

Note that the gems reset if you go over 32767 gems. They wrap into negative numbers, though--you can't use the gem type until you've collected another 32768 of them.

[MaxWilson]

Thanks for checking that out, Loren. The gems is also good to know about, although it's hard to conceive of hitting that limit in one of my games (doubt I've ever banked even 1000 gems).

-Max

[Loren]

It occurs to me that I ought to mention one other thing I learned in that test: Three Red Seconds can be cast on an enemy province.

The game goes very fast if you have a sufficiently powerful siege force in every enemy province. I couldn't simply take the provinces because that would have reduced his dominion and risked an unwanted dominion kill.

[Mordici]

I'am sorry but I didn't imagine my population resetting at around 500k three times. The situation stated by myself in the OP can and did happen to me on three occasions.

[Endoperez]

How sure are you about that 500 000 value? There is an overflow bug, but if it doesn't always happen at same point there's something weird going on. I doubt the pop cap would be terrain dependent, but I can't think of anything else ATM.

[sector24]

There's a really tiny chance that the variable used to keep track of the population is two unsigned chars. "Unsigned" meaning it goes from 0-512 instead of -256 to 256, then the value multiply by some constant to get the actual value displayed in the game. If that was the case then the population would overflow to 0 at 512, but a char is not the optimal data type to store this kind of value so it's not likely.

[Loren]

sector24 said:
There's a really tiny chance that the variable used to keep track of the population is two unsigned chars. "Unsigned" meaning it goes from 0-512 instead of -256 to 256, then the value multiply by some constant to get the actual value displayed in the game. If that was the case then the population would overflow to 0 at 512, but a char is not the optimal data type to store this kind of value so it's not likely.

What?!?!?!

An unsigned byte goes from 0 to 255. A signed byte goes from -127 to 127.

An unsigned word goes from 0 to 65535. A signed word goes from -32767 to 32767.

This latter is what I think they used and they are adding an extra zero for display purposes.

[sector24]

Right, but what mordici is saying is that his population is rolling over at 500k. The closest variable being 2 unsigned chars (512 x 1000), even though that would be inefficient. Hence its unlikeliness.

[Loren]

sector24 said:
Right, but what mordici is saying is that his population is rolling over at 500k. The closest variable being 2 unsigned chars (512 x 1000), even though that would be inefficient. Hence its unlikeliness.

Where are you getting this 512 from, though? Modern machines use 8-bit bytes!

[Mordici]

I just want to clarify what I said again cause sector24 said that my population was rolling over at 500k.

My population rolled over at around 500k, which means that somewhere between 400 and 500k a rollover did occur. In all three cases I didn't notice it on the turn it happened, so I have no idea exactly what amount my population was at before it happened.

Also, I don't know if this has any bearing on this, but I'll provide this anyway. I run this game on a Macintosh computer running Mac OS X 10.4.11 and it is version 3.17 of Dominions. I don't know exactly what mods were running at the time, but there are a few I know for sure where running. They were the following:

Better Independents

Better Independents Resource

Deadly Seas


I hope this information helps.