[haloboy100]

 

[karajorma]

In general I tend to feel that most of those ideas are already possible and simply lack FREDding creativity or in Nuke's example are the result of getting the engine to do something it can't do and then complaining about it being unable to do it.

[Woolie Wool]

"FREDing creativity" sounds to me like "unnecessary compromise". Doing these distances for real has a lot more impact than using red-alert, and there's no risk of running afoul of the red alert bug that cripples Inferno's Independence vs. Diablo mission.

[karajorma]

Compared with forcing everyone to have higher memory requirements for a feature that isn't needed in the first place, it's sounds like a compromise you're going to have to make or ditch the idea for the mission.

And I wasn't talking about red-alert anyway. How's this for an idea. Say you have mission set around a double planet system. You want the first part round the first planet and then you want to autopilot to the second one. Instead of vastly increased memory restrictions why don't you simply check if during the autopilot cutscene you can just move the planets?

[Nuke]

In general I tend to feel that most of those ideas are already possible and simply lack FREDding creativity or in Nuke's example are the result of getting the engine to do something it can't do and then complaining about it being unable to do it.

its not that the engione cant do it, i know for a fact that 2 ways to implement newtonian exist. the reason its unfeasible is 1, we dont have enough space, and 2, the ai is too stupid to fly newtoinian. the second one is maybe fixable with scripting. but the first reqiores the change stated in this thread.

however i totally agree with kara. the tedious process of converting all the games math functions, formats, physics and rendering code to work with doubles rather than floats would be too big of an undertaking for little or no real gain. also using bigger numbers would mean you could cram less into a processor cycle. this is not one of those things that can just be made dynamic. last i checked c/++ uses fixed data types, which cannot be made to grow as needed. making things dynamic only works with large arrays of data.

[NGTM-1R]

Compared with forcing everyone to have higher memory requirements for a feature that isn't needed in the first place, it's sounds like a compromise you're going to have to make or ditch the idea for the mission.

I hate to say it, but FSO is not that memory intensive an application, y'know? I can run it fine with multiple instances of EVE or a game of SupCom running in the background. This is not a high-end machine. (And totally ignoring winamp and the 5-6 MSWord instances that are almost always active on my computer, since those use nothing.) While I think you have a point, I also think you are inflating the problem here.

[Grizzly]

possible launcher flag?

-desertionradius [Variable]

[karajorma]

possible launcher flag?

-desertionradius [Variable]

****ing awful idea. What happens if someone decides to run with a lower radius than the mission requires?

Launcher options should not lead to unplayable missions. We've gone to the trouble of removing -jpgtga for precisely that reason.

[Woolie Wool]

Compared with forcing everyone to have higher memory requirements for a feature that isn't needed in the first place, it's sounds like a compromise you're going to have to make or ditch the idea for the mission.

I hate to say it, but FSO is not that memory intensive an application, y'know? I can run it fine with multiple instances of EVE or a game of SupCom running in the background. This is not a high-end machine. (And totally ignoring winamp and the 5-6 MSWord instances that are almost always active on my computer, since those use nothing.) While I think you have a point, I also think you are inflating the problem here.

This makes me wonder--is there anyone here who has less than 768 megs (512 + 256) of RAM and can't upgrade? Sometimes I think support for the absolute bottom end computers can be a liability rather than a bonus. Ever played any brand-new games that run on Windows 95 recently?

[Colonol Dekker]

Is the 600k from the nearest contact or from z0x0y0 ?

I've always wondered...

[karajorma]

From 0,0,0

[TrashMan]

In other words you can have a combat zone of 1200KM in diameter...That's more than enough for me

[NGTM-1R]

This makes me wonder--is there anyone here who has less than 768 megs (512 + 256) of RAM and can't upgrade? Sometimes I think support for the absolute bottom end computers can be a liability rather than a bonus. Ever played any brand-new games that run on Windows 95 recently?

Considering I'm using 512 currently, that's not even the issue.

[Woolie Wool]

This makes me wonder--is there anyone here who has less than 768 megs (512 + 256) of RAM and can't upgrade? Sometimes I think support for the absolute bottom end computers can be a liability rather than a bonus. Ever played any brand-new games that run on Windows 95 recently?

Considering I'm using 512 currently, that's not even the issue.

Even a $370 Dell budget computer has 1GB RAM, so if you've got half that and can run FSO with all that stuff running, then memory footprint is a complete nonissue. My new computer (well, October '06 is fairly new) has 1GB only because I skimped on RAM in favor of an expensive video card. Really, FSO could afford to eat a lot more memory than it does now.

In other words you can have a combat zone of 1200KM in diameter...That's more than enough for me

It's not just about the combat zone. What if you want to portray actually traveling from base to the combat zone (via autopilot, of course)? You're going to need a larger radius for something like deep recon.

[Shade]

Not really. FRED has all the tools you need to simulate travelling a long distance without leaving the mission area or transitioning to a new mission.

[Goober5000]

First of all, the red-alert bug will be fixed in 3.6.10, so that's a non-issue as far as this topic is concerned.

Second of all, I'm really fed up with these threads that seem to pop up every few months or so.  We get two or three members lobbying heavily for a feature that 1) is unnecessary for the vast majority of situations; 2) can be reasonably approximated already with existing features; and 3) is practically guaranteed to never be used by the person who requested it.

On one side, we have established projects who request challenging features that will add a cool new gameplay aspect and that will be prominently featured in an upcoming release.  On the other side, we have these drive-by trolls who occasionally unite to make coders' lives hell because the SCP doesn't have a certain obscure feature.  It royally ticks me off.

[jr2]

Well, SWC and WCS would be able to make use of this feature, correct?  IDK how hard it would be to implement a bump in the limits though... and here's what I really don't get...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this feature would use 0.0000 MB more memory, unless ships ventured outside of 120KM, correct?  I'd like that answered (I have no clue).

[karajorma]

From what I understood it would use double the memory that is currently used (simply from the float to double transition) even before you actually increase the radius. Once you start increasing that the memory requirements would go up proportional to the cube of the extra length of the radius.

I'm going on memory here but if I'm right then you can see how fast that will turn into a very large drain on memory.

And as Goober pointed out I've yet to see proof that anyone actually needs the way this works changed. None of the teams mentioned in this thread have actually asked for an increase AFAIK. And I can tell that the claims that this feature is needed are complete bollocks because no one has actually stated the correct value for the desertion radius, something you'd surely know if you were actually bumping up against it. 

[Colonol Dekker]

For the record, i don't think this feature would be all that innovative, i've never heard the desertion warnings or encountered the desertion debrief, In all honesty and as mentioned any desertion stuff could be emulated with distance operators.


I just wasn't sure of the origin of the radius, thats all 

[colecampbell666]

In Solar wars, one mission has a bug that the destroyer you are protecting keeps on going instead of stopping. If you follow it more than 20k away from the node, you self-destruct.