[X3TC][List+questions]Game Engine Limits...

[Mav/]

I think it would be beneficial for modders to have a central list of the limits of the game-engine, but I so far couldn't find one...

So, I'll start with listing what I know and/or remember so far (the "unknown" points are actually questions from me, and the single dots are just for structuring the post by separating paragraphs a bit more) :

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* direct-fire weapons (or rather, the ai targeting-code for those) seem to be limited to about 30km, judging from my experiments (result: CTDs) with "planet destroyer" stuff ... I'd guess it's the usual Integer-limit of about 32700something (32767 ? *update* likely the same 32768 that Litcube mentions below */update*) in meters - if this should be in a script-file instead of hardcode, though, it might be increased.
Can anyone confirm if this is a hardcode- or script-issue (and, if the latter, which script file(s) are involved) ?

* the number of HQs in hq.xml is limited to something between 7 and 15 (result if with 15: buildtimes and ressource-requirements vanish, and shipbuilding doesn't work)
WRONG. I had a hard-to-spot typo in my hq.xml - By now I'm at above 20 HQ-types and counting... - Sorry for that misinformation

* the number of weapongroups in TLaser seems to be fixed, as far as I can tell (so far found no way to add new ones)
[update - JonfersonSDD] 32 weapongroups, fixed.

* sector sizes are fixed to about +-4000km in each direction (though it seems to me that planets and such can be placed further outward?)
[update - JonfersonSDD] 0,002 metres * 2.147.483.648 ~= +-4.294 km

* [JonfersonSDD] player account is limited to 2 billion (= approximately 2^31)
[AP-related question: I know it was raised for the player account in AP - but does this lead to an increase in max. ship/station/item-price ]

* turrets are NOT limited to 12 guns - as far as I can tell, only the weaponsscreens' mounting function is; and I already have scripted a small replacement-weaponsscreen recently - Release-Thread.
I somewhere read there are 2 different types of gunpoints - of which one scales up quite well while the other doesn't. It had something to do with visible gun models and such, but I don't remember exactly what the point was...

* ships are said to be limited to 6 turrets plus the main bank - but since I only recently got to learn .bod syntax, I couldn't yet test myself if the sideeffects of breaking this limit are more than the abovementioned weaponsscreen-complicatiions...

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* max. number of TLaser-/TBullet-entries (didn't count, but I added quite a few - maybe 15 or 20 in addition to what MGM 4.8 has)
[update - Litcube] 32768 max. - for all TFiles each

* max. number of ship entries in TShips so far (~1100 shiptypes and counting...)
[update - Litcube] 32768 max. - for all TFiles each

* unknown: max. number of starts (I currently have about 20-30)

* unknown: max. size of ship-/station-models (both in meters and polycount)

[update]
* unknown: but PRESENT - max. number of jobs running (or maybe it's just because they produce too many running scripts?? Then, my total running script count actually went DOWNward from 20k to 18k) ... I lately bumped into that so often, it really gets annoying


Please post all limits you know of which are missing in this list, thanks .
I'll now and then update the first post by quoting what others have found, to keep it a comprehensive list, as intended (though intervals might differ...) .

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[Guest]

* the number of weapongroups in TLaser seems to be fixed, as far as I can tell (so far found no way to add new ones)

* unknown: max. number of TLaser-/TBullet-entries (didn't count, but I added quite a few - maybe 15 or 20 in addition to what MGM 4.8 has)

... there are 32 global subtypes for laser "groups" => this number is not changable
... the number of entries in TLasers/TBullets is afaik not limited (at least not in practice), any global subtype can contain multiple laser types
--> making one global subtype available to a certain ship means making all laser types in this global subtype available for that ship

* sector sizes are fixed to about +-4000km in each direction (though it seems to me that planets and such can be placed further outward?)

... the smallest length the game engine works with is 0,002 metres (aka 1 "game unit")
... afaik the game engine uses only integer values
... 32-bit-integer has space to store numbers up to +/- 2^31 = 2.147.483.648 game units = 4.294.967 metres = 4.294 km
(1 bit remains for storing the sign, 0 = positive, 1 = negative)

ps: ... player account = limited to 2 billion (= approximately 2^31)

pps: ... mir erschließt sich iwie der sinn hinter deiner signatur nicht wtf hat newton mit wirtschaft zu tun ?? **häähh**

[Litcube]

Tfiles are limited to 32768 entries

[Tom5Cat]

Boron iq's are limited to 50-ish

(sorry, couldn't resist )

[MilesRS]

* turrets are NOT limited to 12 guns - as far as I can tell, only the weaponsscreens' mounting function is; and I already have scripted a small replacement-weaponsscreen recently - release should be in the next weeks, if I get the time.

Are you sure?? Ive always been of a mind that 12 is the limit haha. Can you confirm this to be 100% true?. As in that you can have more they just wont show up on the weaponsscreen.. (unless you have that script)

Extra turret groups would be nice as well, but i was sure both are hardcoded!!

[DrBullwinkle]

Just a Rumor Department: I have heard that the turret "limits" are actually the limits of what the AI can fire. You can add more on the ship, and maybe the player can fire them, but AI will not. I have never tested this.

[MilesRS]

@mav

this weaponsscreen script/mod you have created, does it solve the max 12 configurable laser issue? In other words if i have 24 lasers on my turret (camera) can i manually change each one?

The issue is of course that you can change 12 of them manually but the only way to add the full 24 is by spawning them (cheatscript)

If so i would be very interested in using it for the bsg mod, if you would be willing!

Miles

[Mav/]

@mav

this weaponsscreen script/mod you have created, does it solve the max 12 configurable laser issue? In other words if i have 24 lasers on my turret (camera) can i manually change each one?

Exactly that , though it's still a bit rough around the edges...

The issue is of course that you can change 12 of them manually but the only way to add the full 24 is by spawning them (cheatscript)

Well, that was the first possibility I found when experimenting. But you can also directly assign them via script.
And then you can add a little interface for that, which is exactly what I did...

If so i would be very interested in using it for the bsg mod, if you would be willing!

As stated in the readme, no problem as long as you give credit, and don't close your version to me:
Turretscript-Thread

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@DrBullwinkle:
Well, I haven't tested it for the AI - but as I wrote in the thread, there recently was a strange event when on of the turrets didn't let me fire most of it's guns; so maybe there's a hiccup or two... :-/
[edit]Though usually, the turrets on my own ship seem to use them quite well, even if automated - or so I think...[/edit]

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@Litcube:
Thanks .
This applies to all TFiles? Well, atleast I can add some more stuff to my installation then .

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@Tom5Cat:

Then it's good that I'm both the Boron AND the Paranid head of AEC, isn't it?
(And watch out - we might have some deals with other parties in UFJD-sectors... )

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@JonfersonSDD:

Thanks. The subtype/lasertype correlation is something I already knew - have at least 8 lasertypes in one of the subtype...

Oh, and sometimes the X3Editor2 (my version might be a bit outdated, I'm not sure...) seemed to remove the Kha'ak-subtype from some turrets when I edited the TCockpits - any idea?

Also, to my experience - while it IS possible to 'jump' from one side of a sector to the other, the 2 or 3 times I tried to 'jump' back immediately, I got a CTD . So it seems that turning around after such a 'jump' isn't a good idea...

Bzgl. Signatur: Naja, wenn man quasi die Einschätzungen der Kunden als lokale Ableitungen ansieht, dann passt das sinngemäß meiner Ansicht nach ganz gut - wobei in dem Fall ja nicht gerade alle Ableitungen gleich gewichtet, und oft noch manipuliert werden (Werbung, Firmengeheimnisse, etc. - und ja, ich weiß, dass bis zu einem gewissen Grad Firmengeheimnisse notwendig sind) ...
Aber auch ohne sowas kann man bei Newton so seine Problemchen kriegen, wie ich aus Erfahrung sagen kann... :-/
[edit]Und das Problem mit der Ungleichgewichtung hat GoD ja meineswissens gar nicht... (alle AIs, die ich überprüft hatte, hatten einen vollen 2e9-Account)[/edit]

[SovereignReaper]

Also confirming that you can get more than 12 guns in a turret that fires just fine, but you need a script to load them (used MARS to load a 16 gun front turret on a modded Atlas - gods damn, those PPC salvos were beautiful to behold, even if the AI was the one firing it).

I've never seen an AI firing at ranges over ~9.8km, even with weapons that go further than that and have 0 Firing Delay. However, I've managed to use a gun that went ~75km without any issues.

[Mav/]

Also confirming that you can get more than 12 guns in a turret that fires just fine, but you need a script to load them (used MARS to load a 16 gun front turret on a modded Atlas - gods damn, those PPC salvos were beautiful to behold, even if the AI was the one firing it).

I've never seen an AI firing at ranges over ~9.8km, even with weapons that go further than that and have 0 Firing Delay. However, I've managed to use a gun that went ~75km without any issues.

Oh, right - I'm not really using MARS or such because I don't like automatic loadout-changes; so I didn't think about if they might do the job already...

As for the range:
* I wasn't testing the weapon myself, but I got a crash with a debug-Log which seemed to suggest the AI was trying to fire from over 30km and it's targetting routinesomehow couldn't handle that. (usually happened when I entered a sector with a Kha'ak-queen or shortly after entering such sector)

* Also, I was using a beam weapon (d-Kyon), so maybe it was just that the model of the beam was longer than allowed ?



Other Limits I found:

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* There seems to be a limit for number of entries in a .map-file . While this can be circumvented for the galaxy-map by splitting it up into smaller files (like done in MGM), it seems to be quite a problem when free space in the WareTemplates runs out while you still want to add something to it.
Scripting can sort of help here, but it's not quite the same since you then also need an extra script to handle respawning.
If splitting over several .map-files works for the WareTemplates, I don't know... any info on that, please?
Also, is there just a general entries-limit (i.e. for "objects" including wares and such), or is there also a separate limit for number of staions ?

* by now I have the Impression that many of my earlier crashes are simply caused by the script-stack getting too large - when it has more than about 21000-24000 entries ( MBRR[with pointlimits between 800 and 5300]+ik2+Tortuga+ki1.4 together with shiploot+NPCbail usually get it there - while not activating the first three usually keeps it at ~11000 ) , CTD's usually 'round the corner for me...

* Question: I know the player-accounts' limit has been raised in AP - does that also raise the possible maximum price?

* there seems to be a buildtime-limit at ~24days - when I tested HQs with different buildspeeds, that was about the wrap-mark (i.e. trying to build something which took about 23d at one HQ at another with slower buildspeed would usually result in a very low buildtime)

* HQ-limit is actually between 10 and 13 ... didn't test further, but common sense then suggests 10 to be the likely value WRONG. Had a hard-to-spot typo in my hq.xml - by now more than 20 HQ-types work quite well. Sorry for the Misinformation

* Question: What is the limit of waretypes per station, and is it a general limit or split up into separate limits for products/primaryRessources/secondaryRessources ?
* I read something about RAM-limits... - once about a 1.7GB-limit which caused crashes prior to some patch, and once something about 2.7GB (don't remember much about that one) - but then, I already saw my .exe take up 32xxxxx kB (~=3.05GB) without crashing (used Alt-Tab for Taskmanager)...
So - what is the current RAM-limit of the .exe

* sectors are limited to use galaxy-coordinates from 1/1 to 23/20 (or was it 20/23 ?) , that leaves you with 23*20=460 sectors max, which I'm actually currently using without problems... X3Editor1 which I'm currently using for galaxy-edits doesn't allow you to place more, and I haven't used the ingame GalaxyEditor yet, so I can't comment on that[Correction]

* Question: Is there a ingame-limit to objects per sector? Because ik2 tends to cause a lot of wrecks when I let it loose... not to mention MBRR near Asteroid Belt where Terran support grows quicker than combined community fleets can shrink it...


[edit]
* also, I found out that it IS possible to put marines on TS, M3, etc.
How? Well, looking into TShips with X3Editor2, there are 2 different values for shipclass - one (the upper one, if I recall correctly) controlling what class is shown in the ship ID and the Encyclopedia, as well as the ship-icon AND the size of dockport it needs
; while the other one controls the amount of marines and where in the sectormaps' listing a ship appears.
So, e.g. setting the first to TS and the second to TL will give you a TS which can transport 20 marines (and will show up in the sectorlisting near other TLs, but still with a TS-icon and TS-dockingclass) ; the same works for M3/M6... and in the extreme should work for M5/M1 (or M5/TL) , too, though I didn't test it that extremely...
[/edit]


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