A request to the developers: raise the unit limit!

[DrPraetorious]

It's possible that by replacing existing *units*, you can preserve space under the graphics cap.

I'll run tests later today.

[Sombre]

Yeah that /might/ work, but since descriptions added to vanilla units still count towards the description limit, I wouldn't put money on it.

[NTJedi]

The unit limit, sprite limit, and in game commander limit should all be increased. Unfortunately we're more likely to see a real UFO land in the street and start dumping bricks of gold.

[Foodstamp]

That is sad to hear. I may devote some time to modding out the later era nations to see if that works, but I have a feeling it won't. I am not sure what causes the issue, if it is an array size issue for images stored, descriptions stored etcetera or if it is an issue with how much memory the game allocates to the storage of each, but either way, it has dashed my hopes and dreams of creating several dozen unique nations

[Zylithan]

Maybe just showing my ignorance.. but why wold this be hard to do? Is it like a Y2K thing? It seems like it should be easy to add more empty memory banks. But I really know nothing.

[paradoxharbinger]

i imagine that it is an overall memory issue. just think about all of the information that has to be held in memory aside from the sprites. memory may be cheap these days, but i think the devs are trying to keep people who may still have dilapidated systems in the fold.

[DrPraetorious]

Given that I know very little about how this game is put together - I'd guess from crawling around in the binary that it was written in good old ansi C, and I believe this was confirmed - it could, depending on how it was done, be a *major* pain in the *** to change the memory management. If this is legacy stuff from Dominions 1, the easiest way to fix this would be to rewrite the entire module, and obviously, we can forget that.

One issue is that the in-game sprites are stored in JK's efficient format, *not* as tgas. Does it compress the sprites and then uncompress them again? I have no idea - problem could be at any stage along the line.

Anyway, I'd love to see it expanded, but we can only speculate on whether or not that is even feasible.

[llamabeast]

Has anyone tested the remove-earlier-units idea yet? Otherwise I might give it a go. You could simply have a remove-early-age mod, a remove-mid-age mod and a remove-late-age mod, and you could use the appropriate one(s) to make particular uber-mods feasible.

[Foodstamp]

llamabeast said:
Has anyone tested the remove-earlier-units idea yet? Otherwise I might give it a go. You could simply have a remove-early-age mod, a remove-mid-age mod and a remove-late-age mod, and you could use the appropriate one(s) to make particular uber-mods feasible.

I created a mod to test what you suggest. I used '#era 0' to take all the late era nations out of the game. So far, I am in late winter of my first game with no crashes due to "Unit Spr" bugs. One incomplete test is not conclusive, so I will try several more games and I encourage other people to test it as well

[lch]

Foodstamp said:
I used '#era 0' to take all the late era nations out of the game.

Please elaborate how that is removing an entire era of units from the game. Usually it's era 1,2,3 and this ditches era 3?