[TheLeadSled]

Hey guys

With the engine being modified does this mean that you will be able to have more fighters and capships at each navpoint as well as increased performance?

[Drakon]

Maybe this isn't a good answer to the question, but I know from messing with FRED and Prologue that I can run the following 77-ship force in combat at one waypoint without so much as a hiccup: 1 Ranger, 3 Tallahassees, 3 Sheffields, 5 Ventures, 4 Thunderbolt VIIs, 4 Hellcat Vs, 8 Arrows, 3 Fralthi IIs, 6 Frawqirgs, 4 Gothri, 12 Dralthi IVs, and 24 Darkets. I'm quite impressed by this engine... maybe it's just because I haven't played enough titles, but I've never seen this many ships together in-game without either massive lag or a CTD altogether. I'm sure the team does a lot better though... I just gave it a shot to get a couple of screens.

http://www.snapdrive.net/files/340020/Fleet-Skirmish%20A.JPG
http://www.snapdrive.net/files/340020/Fleet-Skirmish%20B.JPG

[Tolwyn]

Hey guys

With the engine being modified does this mean that you will be able to have more fighters and capships at each navpoint as well as increased performance?

More or less. There is an annoying bug in FREd though that sometimes prevents to add more ships. Currently I am stuck at 100 at one navpoint (the mission consists of one navpoint, but well ... ).

Also, in the game you won't have to keep all ships in memory, each nav point is more or less a separate entity. Ships come and go, they are usually "not there" upon mission startup.

EDIT: please post pictures in JPG format. BMP is... well...

[Drakon]

Sry, will co. *replaces bmps* Lol, the shaded look after JPEG conversion makes it look more WC3'ish anyhow.

[TheLeadSled]

More or less. There is an annoying bug in FREd though that sometimes prevents to add more ships. Currently I am stuck at 100 at one navpoint (the mission consists of one navpoint, but well ... ).

Also, in the game you won't have to keep all ships in memory, each nav point is more or less a separate entity. Ships come and go, they are usually "not there" upon mission startup.

So has that always been the case where you can only have 100 ships at a navpoint or does it only happen sometimes?
But if you can fit more in that good I always like the huge battles.

[Drakon]

Seeing that one can have a hundred ships at a waypoint at a time, and hundreds of others waiting to spawn or waiting at other points goes to show that the engine can handle every possible WC mission imaginable. The only troubling limitation I could see would be if the project aims to include the final battle with TCS Hermes and the rest of the diversionary fleet in Hyperion. If you count Kilrathi forces alongside their Confed. counterparts there are well over a hundred capships (at one waypoint too, right?), and that doesn't take into account that every one of them which is a destroyer or heavier would have their fighters up. I suppose if ships were set to respawn a certain amount of time after their destruction and under certain perameters though it wouldn't be a problem, right?

If this is true LeadSled I don't think there's going to be any risk of us being cheated of the massive, grandiose battles we crave. Even if a lot of them don't occur in the campaigns there's no reason why they couldn't be set up by a skilled mission-maker to be a single mission in the simulator. Hehehe, I'm sure someone could come up with a mission that has so many enemy contacts that by the time even the most skilled, cat-hating, wingnut finishes he'd be begging for a break from all the dogfighting.  

[Tolwyn]

So has that always been the case where you can only have 100 ships at a navpoint or does it only happen sometimes?
But if you can fit more in that good I always like the huge battles.

No, the thing is that the engine supports up to 400 ships in a mission (not counting waves of fighters. For instance you could set up a wing of four fighters and then have it reappear upon destruction for, let's say, 4 times. They will still count as 4 ships). The thing is that sometimes FRED will not let you add a ship after you've reached 99 ships in a mission. Sometimes deleting waypoints in that mission (and adding them later) helps, sometimes it does not.

[karajorma]

You shouldn't be able to place more than 100 ships in the mission period IIRC. You can get around the 100 ship limit legally with waves of fighters and by spawning ships using the ship-create SEXP.

The game engine will accept up to 400 ships at any one time. However you should be very careful about going beyond 800 ships in total. After that the engine starts recycling slots in the Ships_exited array. Which means that any SEXPs dependant on that information will start to give strange or erroneous responses (I forget which SEXPs do depend on that info but I do remember that there was at least one).

[Tolwyn]

You shouldn't be able to place more than 100 ships in the mission period IIRC. You can get around the 100 ship limit legally with waves of fighters and by spawning ships using the ship-create SEXP.

According to taylor I can. 

[karajorma]

Doesn't work for me. I just placed 100 Vipers in a BtRL map and saved. Worked fine. I place the 100th and FRED ignores it completely.

Which version of FRED/FS2_Open are you using?

EDIT: Double checked the code

Code: [Select]

required_string("#Objects");

// parse in objects
Num_parse_objects = 0;
while (required_string_either("#Wings", "$Name:"))
{
// make sure we're not overflowing
if (Num_parse_objects >= MAX_PARSE_OBJECTS)
{
skip_to_start_of_string("#Wings");
break;
}
MAX_PARSE_OBJECTS is set to 100 in HEAD builds so once you have more than 100 ships it should skip straight to the #Wings section ignoring anything else you've added.

[Tolwyn]

That's not a FRED limit though, for FRED that same thing would be 400 (currently).  That MAX_PARSE_OBJECTS thing is only used for reading missions in the normal game.  It goes back to retail when FRED builds had MAX_SHIPS at 100, which probably hid the problem from , and MAX_PARSE_OBJECTS (or what it was originally called anyway) was just never bumped like it should have been when MAX_SHIPS was increased.  There is also no reason that limit should even exist any longer since it should have gone dynamic a long time ago.  And waypoints aren't included in that number either, for either the normal game or FRED, so that doesn't actually explain the problem.

I'm pretty sure that it's just some freakish retail bug, and as soon as I get time to track it all of the way down I'll fix it (and make MAX_PARSE_OBJECTS dynamic while I'm at it).

[karajorma]

That's actually wrong. MAX_PARSE_OBJECTS is used by FRED as well as the game.

You can have more than 400 ships in one mission by spawning, use of wings, etc and you can place up to 400 ships in the mission in FRED but as soon as you save 300 of them would be ignored. Unless you've got a build in which the limit has been raised I can't see how you could be getting past that.

Admittedly it's very trivial to raise that number but if it has been done as a stopgap before making things dynamic it should be in CVS.

[Goober5000]

Now that the memory corruption bug in FRED has been fixed, the parse objects have been made dynamic as well.

[Tolwyn]

Now that the memory corruption bug in FRED has been fixed, the parse objects have been made dynamic as well.

It has? Is the fix in the stable branche?

[Goober5000]

No.  It hasn't even been committed to CVS yet. But it will be by tonight.