[Akalabeth Angel]

How many entries can be added to the standard FS2 ships.tbl before it complains? I was just wanting to know how much I can put in there before I have to start taking some stuff out.

[Sesquipedalian]

Right now it stands at 130 entries.  If the engine were to allow more than that, it would break multiplayer capability.

[Killfrenzy]

I thought it was actual file size that screwed everything over?

[karajorma]

That too. You can get problems with a ships table over 380k in size but by doing a search/repace and removing the extra spaces in the table you can reduce the filesize enough that this is unlikely to ever be a problem.

[TopAce]

130 entries are quite much. And the filesize of 380k is quite much, too. The largest ship table I have ever had was around 250 kBytes. It contained several versions for all FS ships.

[diamondgeezer]

People tend to hit the limits of 130 entries and 380k when adding stuff to the existing FS2 ship lists. If you're starting from scratch then yes, the limits are perfectly reasonable

[Woolie Wool]

Yeah, I've had to delete large portions of the original ships.tbl to fit the Starforce ships in. As it stands there will be 92 entries in the completed ships.tbl for Starforce, 91 new ships plus the GTD Orion (the Legion's ruins will appear in one mission, and I'm using the original Orion to represent it in the briefing).

T&T has 200 total ships and needs the Inferno exe to work. And I STILL don't have all the ships I need.:shaking:

[TopAce]

Couldn't the SCP guys remove the limits in the case of tables as they did with polycount?

Just Enquiring.

[Black Wolf]

Originally posted by TopAce
130 entries are quite much. And the filesize of 380k is quite much, too. The largest ship table I have ever had was around 250 kBytes. It contained several versions for all FS ships.

Unfortunately, 130 is nowhere near enough for more complex mods. The tables I have for TI currently have 126 ships, and that's without several mods that are already completed and just haven't been put in there yet. I'll admit that, given a bit of time, I could probably eliminate a few of the less useful ships (SJD Sathannas, Shivan Comm node etc.), but even so, attempting to splice a new species into the near capella FS2 universe without a doubt is going to break the 130 limit, especially if you want more, non new species mods (as we do).

I was actually under the impression that this limit could, and indeed already had been boosted up to 255 ships, and that FSO was abandoning multiplayer anyway... If the limit hasn't/can't been boosted, TI may need a serious rethink...

[TopAce]

Maybe you should keep only those ships you are using. That's what I do with my project, too. If you do not use the GTD Hades for example, you can erase it.

[Black Wolf]

Well, yeah, that was kind of included in the less useful ships.

I just did a quick run through - there are ten ships I can take out that haven't already been removed, and perhaps another ten or so more if I'm willing at make some sacrafices. At this point, TI has 33 more mods in varying stages of development that I have not already added to the table. Note that this does not include modifications to ships that may need to be done on a per mission basis, another special group of mods that at this time has no actual ballpark figure for final count, but could be anywhere from 5 to a dozen or so, nor have I included any kind of margin for error - any ships we may need and haven't thought of yet. Even assuming a best case scenario (Custom hitpoints and stuff being all we need to make per mission changes, a change pof sexp of some kind etc. etc.) the numbers simply will not tally for us with 130 ships.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by TopAce
Couldn't the SCP guys remove the limits in the case of tables as they did with polycount?

Just Enquiring.

Originally posted by Sesquipedalian
Right now it stands at 130 entries.  If the engine were to allow more than that, it would break multiplayer capability.

[Hellbender]

*shrug* This from DaveB's notes in the source code readme:

- The FS community has been clamoring for higher ship counts and object limits.
  It would be a pretty trivial matter to have a commandline option that lets
  you specify MAX_SHIPS and similar constants. The internal stuff could be
  changed from a static array to a dynamically allocated array at startup. A
  few #defines would be need to changed to ints, but beyond that it should be
  pretty trivial.

Would this possibly apply - and solve the multi-play issue?

[Goober5000]

It would break multiplayer capability.

More than 130 ships breaks the multiplayer packets.  Until someone (probably Kazan) fixes this, we'll be stuck with 130 for official builds.

If you don't need multiplayer, though, that doesn't matter.  Phreak has a few Inferno builds with upwards of 250 allowed ships.

[TopAce]

I really dont understand why would the multiplayer part be worse with more than 130 ships.

[Black Wolf]

Originally posted by TopAce
I really dont understand why would the multiplayer part be worse with more than 130 ships.

Because you're not a coder. I don't understand it eiter, but if these guys say it'll break multiplayer... it'll break multiplayer.

[Star Dragon]

i AM USING THE OLD DTP 3.1 OR 3.2 BUILD AND CURRENT HAVE ALMOST 200 SHIPS IN GAME, WILLi GET TO 255 MAX POSSIBLY?

[TopAce]

Originally posted by Black Wolf


Because you're not a coder. I don't understand it eiter, but if these guys say it'll break multiplayer... it'll break multiplayer.

But there must be an explanation for it. Not If it interested me, its been ages ago when I were playing on PXO. And if I decided to play PXO in the future, I would use the retail version for sure.

At most I won't put as many ships into my tables as possible.