Question About Number of Planets

[COOL3077]

Hi

Can some one explain to me why we can only use upto 255 planets per quadrant. I love this game to bits its just so good, but i like Gigantic maps to play with and was just wondering two things. How many can u have? And if only 255 Y????

Drew

PS modder wanabes plus seasoned modders should check this out.
http://www.cdmag.com/articles/032/119/spaceempir-04.html

[Q]

It's not 255 planets but 255 sytems per quadrant as maximum.
This is hard coded by MM probably because otherwise the game would need higher hardware requirements as it does now.

[jc173]

It's probably got something to do with the way the data is stored is my guess since 256 is a power of 2. Although if this were some sort of 256 slot array, I'd actually expect there to be 256 not 255 systems, I don't know maybe the first slot is some kinda of header.

[nerfman]

2^8 = 256

[Taqwus]

It's probably just an unsigned char -- 8 bits, with the possible range of 0-255. I suppose Aaron *could* have written it so that 0 was interpreted as 1, 255 as 256 (casting to a larger type), and so forth... but pretending that 0 means 1 is a very good way to lose sanity tracking down subtle bugs...

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[dmm]

Yeah, array indices in C drive me nuts. That's why I love Fortran. Arrays start at 1 by default, like they ought to. But if you want, you can change the index to anything you want -- even have it go backwards. Beats the pants off C and C++. (Fortran95 also has pointers and structures and overloading, if you want them. Plus many commands will work on entire arrays at once. It's a beautiful language.)

[rdouglass]

It probably is 255 'cause you can't have Zero systems, can you? It's like using a 0 based array instead of a 1 based array (for any programmer types). Just a guess but a possibility......