Beating the 255 barrier

Atrocities · #1 April 7th, 2002, 12:22 AM

As we all know now, the 255-system barrier can not be exceeded do to coding issues. However, what about multiple quadrants each were containing 255 systems?

Let me explain:

Right now, we have one quadrant that can have no more than 255 systems.

What about having 5 quadrants with having a connection to the remaining 4. When a player leaves a quadrant and goes to into the Central quadrant, the game loads a whole new quadrant with 255 new systems.

Break down:

A B

C

D E

The game starts in one quadrant, A, B, D, or E, with C being the connecting quadrant. This would give a player something on the order of 1275 systems to explore, and 12750 planets or asteroids to claim. I don�t know if this can work, but if it could, it would open up a whole knew era for Space Empires. It would be the first game of its kind to have multi-quadrant game play. Hell, you could even have wormholes that would move one player from one quadrant to another. These wormholes would then become as prized a possession as anything could become.

I know that my vision has programming flaws, but hey, if I can imagine it, then it can be done. Or at least I would hope so. Perhaps this would be a great feature for SE V.

Gaming has stagnated with the 255 barrier, not just SEIV, but all 4x-space sim games including MOO 3. The only way to circumnavigate this limitation is to allow the player to have multiple levels of game play. Hell with the newer PC�s and CPU�s, something like this should have already been produced.

It would just be very nice if Aaron was the first too do it.

What do you think, good idea, or bad?

[ 06 April 2002: Message edited by: Atrocities ]

[ 06 April 2002: Message edited by: Atrocities ]

QuarianRex · #2 April 7th, 2002, 01:02 AM

Very good idea, though you would have to do some modifications to the tech tree so that it didn't max out before you even left your home quadrant.

I am not sure but I think I heard about something similar already having been done. I remember seeing a post about someone making a "hyperspace" map that was layered under the regular one some how. Everytime you would go through a warp point you would go to the hyperspace map and have to travel to the other end of the warp point (or something like that). I never saw the map itself but if it was possible then you might be able to use a similar method to layer a quadrant under/over another, connected by a limited number of warp points. Maybe.

Tnarg · #3 April 7th, 2002, 01:29 AM

I have also thought of this, kind of a continually expanding game. My original impression with race age had something to do with this. Complete one game, graduate to a higher race age, perhaps gain a few racial and/or advanced racial points maintain the existing quadurant, and find the gateway to the next quadurant. Incorporate the old and explore into the new. The Galaxy is pretty big, makes sense. In a sense you have complete control of one spiral arm and have found the warp point to the next spiral arm, and onto complete galactic control, with the densly populated center as the main goal, full of ancient and incrediblally "cautious" races that have won't hesitate once to put a stop to wolfling races intruding on their sacred territory.

Finally you have the Galaxy conquored, time to move on to the next. Wow, this would probably take years in terms of actually playing such a game. Cool.

As far as a tech tree goes, hell either slow it down to snails pace, or just add large numbers of intermediate levels as in the Proportions mod. Or just compile a collective of all of those ingeneous ideas that are floating around on this forum and create the ultimate SEV game. Of course everyone will need a super computer, but hell aren't those just around the corner any how

Keeping in mind that the game progress in levels not just all finished in one sweep of a quadurant. It continually advances, as far as mainting the old, isn't that what ministers are for.

Suicide Junkie · #4 April 7th, 2002, 01:31 AM

If the entire game was rewritten to use 256*256 = 65,538 systems, what would happen?

A 300 KB savegame becomes a 90 Megabyte savegame.
Just writing the savegame to disk each turn would take a significant amount of time. Heaven forbid you from trying to download that from PBW each day, even on a high speed connection!

Tnarg · #5 April 7th, 2002, 01:40 AM

Considering technology as of now, perhaps this would just be a good AI type game. Which I am pretty fond of. "Hopefully one day they will get smarter and learn to adapt."

As an addition, having an ultra advanced race, very ancient, god-like, perhaps two that are warring poke their heads in every once in a while. Perhaps to guide that wolfling race that is struggling to make it in the interstellar realm "helping out when those backdoor bullies just don't let up"(Progenerator Type). Or maybe to pop in and put a dent in extreme progression type wolfling races that in the future may interupt their experiments in the core. (Cleanser Types)

Atrocities · #6 April 7th, 2002, 02:16 AM

quote:
A 300 KB savegame becomes a 90 Megabyte savegame.
Just writing the savegame to disk each turn would take a significant amount of time. Heaven forbid you from trying to download that from PBW each day, even on a high speed connection!

I thought about this too. I guess one of the way to work around this would be to only store the statistics of the game for the player to see in all quadrants, but each quadrant would only store THAT quadrants data. Same as it is now, except the information, ie planet count, ship count, location of said item, would be visible in all quadrants. Information only.

If a battle took place in B quadrant, and you are in A quadrant, at the beginning of the turn, the information window would notify you. You could then Click GOTO, and the new quadrant would load.

If battle happened during your turn, and you are in A quadrant, the battle takes place in D quadrant, then you would have the choice of going to D quadrant, or letting your forces fight it out automatically. Hell theres an idea, much the same as PBW, the battles that take place out side of your active quadrant happen automatically, you just read about the aftermath in the Turn News Report. Kind of a bummer, but hey, if it works better this way, then so be it.

Atrocities · #7 April 7th, 2002, 02:20 AM

An idea for PBW would be that each player hosts his own quadrant, and when a new player enters that quadrant, then that players PC gains the information about that quadrant.

IE, if player 1 enters X wormhole and ends up in Player 6's quadrant, then Player 1 now has two maps on his PC for this game, Map for Player 1 and Map for player 6. As Player 1 explores Player 6's quadrant, Player 1's computer gathers data and stores if for just as it would for his home quadrant except the data is for Player 6's quadrant. This way the information and data Player 1 gathers stays localized to each individual quadrant.

geoschmo · #8 April 7th, 2002, 04:18 AM

This idea sounds a lot like Aaron's vauge descriptions of his vision for Space Empires in the future. I doubt you will see it in SEIV though.

Geo

Dracus · #9 April 7th, 2002, 05:04 AM

This is the same path that me and a couple of artists I have employed are now working on for a game we hope to release as we are also stuck with the 255 limit due to the programing limits.

Nebraskan · #10 April 7th, 2002, 07:13 AM

Atrocities:

I had something like this happen when I first started playing SE4Gold. I was using the SE4G Mapmaker to make maps that I would then edit. I had modified the Quadrent.txt file for the Grid type quadrent, I was trying to get more than 117 systems by spacing the systems closer and using 255 as the number of systems. What happened was that SE4Gold Mapmaker using grid type quadrent still looked like it had 117 systems but somehow many of the systems were actually underneath the topmost systems. I turned on the system names switch and you could not read the names because they were printed on top of each other. I actually started playing a game with one of these systems and it was AWESOME and somewhat confusing. I could see where my home system was but could not always move to the next system by clicking on it because it was in a different layer.

I know this is not exactly what you were getting at, but it has some of the same qualities that you were explaining about connecting systems and different layers of quadrents.