Emissive Armor?

[Asmala]

It just occured to me that there might be some use to EA. Three facts make it useful in early game: easy to research, is destroyed Last and absorbs 30 damage which is quite a lot against DUC. I've never used it but perhaps I'd have to try some day, 30 off from 40 (no mount) or 80 (large mount) aren't bad deal.

[oleg]

I don't think MM can change anything here. He would have to allocate variables to store damage to individual components instead of just one per ship. Now, if you have 20+ components per each ship, memory requirement and processing time will go through the roof in the late game battles. I would rather leave it as it is than to have SEIV run on ultra fancy computers only !

[PvK]

Originally posted by oleg:
I don't think MM can change anything here. He would have to allocate variables to store damage to individual components instead of just one per ship. Now, if you have 20+ components per each ship, memory requirement and processing time will go through the roof in the late game battles. I would rather leave it as it is than to have SEIV run on ultra fancy computers only !

It wouldn't be a problem for the computer. The hard part would be convincing MM to program it.

For example, suppose you have a battle with 10,000 ships involved, and they each have 1000 components, each of which can take up to say 63000 points of damage each. That's two bytes per component, x 1000 x 10,000 = 20,000,000 bytes, or about two megabytes. Consider that the largest battle in actual SE4 is probably more like 1000 ships, which have more like 50 components each at most (total more like 100 KB RAM required), and you can see this is not a huge amount of memory you're talking about, also because you wouldn't have to store the damage value for every component - only the ones on partly-damaged ships, etc.

PvK

[ December 20, 2003, 01:21: Message edited by: PvK ]

[narf poit chez BOOM]

20 megabytes. and approximitally half of them would have to be searched each time damage needed to be adjusted.

[Fyron]

How do you arrive at 20 MBs? All you need is 1 bool for every component, which is at most 1 byte in size.

[ December 20, 2003, 18:50: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[narf poit chez BOOM]

he's the one who said 20,000,000 bytes. i just used that.

[Fyron]

That was an extreme case... only even feasible in mods with 1 kT armor chunks AND 0 kT "structural supports" or "bucky tube gel plating," such as B5 Mod, P&N or Adamant. And then, good luck getting 10000 ships in one place.

[ December 20, 2003, 19:46: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[PvK]

Ok 20 megs in my example (not 2 megs - my goof), but my example was also rather too big. 10,000 ships is off of what really happens in SE4 by a factor of 10 or 20, and 1000 components per ship is also off by another factor of 10 or 20. So, realistically, the most you would generally need would be say ~1000 ships x ~100 components/ship x 2 bytes = 200,000 bytes. A drop in the bucket even of a 32MB RAM computer (about the minimum needed to reasonably run Win95). And, as I mentioned before, damage might be more efficiently stored as a list of partly-damaged components, rather than the partial-damage state of all components.

Also, it would not have to search all of the components to find the right component, because they would be part of the ship data - if a ship is hit, you know which ship it is, and will never have to search the components on other ships to find the right one to damage.

PvK

[Ed Kolis]

You know, maybe we should be writing our own space empire games... I wonder how far we'd get... "SE4 by Committee" suddenly takes on a whole new meaning!