[Mr_Maniac]

Hi there!

Can you tell me how many ships and of what shiptypes fs2_open should support in one mission without acting "strange"?
And what are the limits of an Inferno-Build?

Secondly: When I have Fighter-Wings in game with multiple Waves, how gets this counted?

I'm mainly asking because I'm editing an old mission that a good friend made a few years ago.
He made it with vanilla FS2 (we didn't know about the SCP and we didn't have internet) and it never really ran
To many ships... But now I decided to edit this mission, because FS2_Open should handle it.
Okay... So far, so good...

After only "debugging" the mission, it looks like this:
Ships in game:
- Friendly:
* Five wings of terran Maras (six Maras per Wing)
* Four Aeolus Cruisers
* Five Sobek Corvettes
* One Hecate Destroyer

- Enemy:
* Six wings - Bombers and Fighters (six ships per Wing, ten waves per wing)

- Waypoints:
* Five Waypoint Paths with five Waypoints per Path...

- Jump Nodes:
* One Jump node - unnamed - at the end of the Waypoint Paths

- Who arrives when:
* The terran Wings are there from the beginning
* 0:30 - The four Aeolus cruisers arrive
* 1:00 - The five Sobek corvettes are jumping in behind the Aeolus cruisers
* 1:30 - The Hecate is jumping in behind the Sobeks
* 2:00 - First (Bomber) wing arrives
* 2:10 - Second (Fighter) wing arrives
* 3:00 - Third (Fighter) wing arrives
* 4:00 - Fourth (Bomber) wing arrives
* 5:00 - Fifth (Fighter) wing arrives
* 5:30 - Sixth(?) (Bomber) wing arrives

- Primary Objective:
* Protect the GTD FORTRESS (the Hecate)

- Secondaty Objective:
* Destroy all enemys

This should work, and it does... But only in a few of many builds...
In many builds, the mission crashes when the first enemy wing is warping in (It crashes exactly at this moment, where you can target...)

But now lets forget this... Moving on:

After debugging I added and modified a few things.
The latest stable state has the following things in it:
* I added two Lilith Cruisers
* I added a Sathanas and a waypoint for it
* I added three Bomber-Wings (six ships per wing) of Bombers that attack the main beam cannons of the Sathanas
* I changed the speed of some ships

Okay.. So far, so good...
The Problem with this is, that I fail protecting the Hecate because exploding Parts of the Sathanas are flying into the Hecate...
And WHAM, it's dead... Mission failed...

So I tried to slow down my ships at one of the waypoints...
So I made an event that sets the cap-waypoint-speed to 5 for all my capships.
This event should be triggered, when any friendly ship reaches the 4th Waypoint of the first Waypoint-Path (distance: ship - Waypoint < 750)...
But nothing happened...
So I placed a GTNB Pharos at this Waypoint... But it didn't appear!
Instead two terran Maras of the Gamma-Wing changed to GTNB Pharos... Very strange...
But in the Mission-file, everything's okay... Everything's right...

Well... So I thought I maybe just should add another Bomber-Wing, so that the Sathanas would go down sooner...
But then, when loading the mission, FS2_Open crashed with the message, that one of the enemy Fighters are in my new created wing?!?!? And FRED2 told me something similar... Only with another enemy Fighter... So I had to remove the new Bomber-Wing with an Text-Editor...

Now I know, I only would have to create a new Waypoint to do the distance-thing, but when I really want to edit this mission any further, I maybe would need to add a few ships...

So it would be good to know how far I can go...

Hehe... Such a long Text only to ask for the Limits

[karajorma]

Basically you're allowed 100 ships or enough ships to equal the subsystems limit (No idea what that is).

AFAIK waves don't count towards either limit. Only what you've actually placed in FRED. Furthermore AFAIK inferno builds do not change either limit (they bump other limits like the number of ships in the table etc).

[WMCoolmon]

Maximum ships limit (for FS2 and FRED2) is 400.

Maximum subsystems was made dynamic by taylor awhile back.

Edit: However, the maximum amount of submodels are 2100.

[karajorma]

Maximum ships limit (for FS2 and FRED2) is 400.

Maximum subsystems was made dynamic by taylor awhile back.

Really? When were those raised?

Still 400 ships is probably going to be way more than FS2 can actually handle.  You'll start running out of collision pairs well before that number are present (Unless the number of those has also been raised at some point).

[taylor]

You'll start running out of collision pairs well before that number are present (Unless the number of those has also been raised at some point).

Collision pairs are dynamic too now.  In testing I had it at over 120,000 pairs, at it could still take more.  The previous limit was 10,000 and retail had it at around 6,000-7,000 I think.  With the current code you'll run out of memory before running out of collision pairs.

[WMCoolmon]

Bleh, when I said the subsystems max is 2100, I meant submodels. Which effectively limits subsystems, anyway.

[Mr_Maniac]

Thanks for the Answers...
Do you have a clue, why almost all new builds crash when the first enemy wing is warping in?
And why two fighters of Gamma wing become GTNB Pharos?

Hmm... Maybe I should upload the Mission(s)...

Okay.. I think I'll do this

JOHNNY.fs2 is the "normal - debugged" version without my changes and
JTest.fs2 is my modified version...

Uhm.. Is file-Uploading deactivated? It doesn't show up in the Additional Options...
Oh, well... I'll upload them to my WebSpace, then...

[taylor]

Do you have a clue, why almost all new builds crash when the first enemy wing is warping in?

Worked fine for me, though I did have fix a few Assert()'s, an Int3(), and a NULL pointer reference before even getting that far.

And why two fighters of Gamma wing become GTNB Pharos?

Is that what that is?  I've been getting an Assert() on a message sending since those messages aren't supposed to come from non-flyable ships.  I didn't realize until I came back to this post that it would appear to be this same problem.  I'll try and debug it further later tonight.

[WMCoolmon]

Do you have a clue, why almost all new builds crash when the first enemy wing is warping in?

Worked fine for me, though I did have fix a few Assert()'s, an Int3(), and a NULL pointer reference before even getting that far.

[Mr_Maniac]

Okay... The current CVS-Build isn't crashing...
Just wanted to say that... But yesterdays build, for example, did...

[taylor]

And why two fighters of Gamma wing become GTNB Pharos?

Loadout screen problem.  MAX_WSS_SLOTS is 12 (4 ships, 3 wings) but you have 6 ships in each of the first 3 wings.  The loadout screen can only handle 4 of each properly so you end up missing 2 ships from Alpha and 2 from Gamma (but these are only missing from the interface), and 4 ships from Gamma wing since there is no more room to store them.  Ships 3 and 4 of Gamma should be listed (if each wing was 4 ships) and so the loadout screens get a bit imaginative about what should go there.

Unfortunately MAX_WSS_SLOTS can't be bumped to handle this since it breaks both pilots files and networking.  For this to be fixed we'll have to get a bit creative in how the loadout screens handle 6 ships per wing (in single player mode) so this can be dealt with without having to break anything.  It can be done but I can't say this will be high priority.  Mantis it and assign to me if you want, I'll take a shot at it when I get more time.

Of course, that's assuming I'm getting this right.  It may be unrelated to MAX_WSS_SLOTS and instead be something that has broken elsewhere.  Based on the little bit of testing that I did with though I'm probably not far off.

[Goober5000]

I thought phreak had taken care of that?

[taylor]

I thought phreak had taken care of that?

I did too.  That's why I'm aproaching with the possibility that I'm wrong about what I observed.  It's obviously not working properly though.  I removed two ships from Alpha (5 & 6) as a test and slots 3 & 4 of Gamma were empty and couldn't be filled.  It's just not behaving like it should.  I'm hoping it's just something simple but I want a little more info on the problem before going to phreak about it, so I don't send him chasing after wild geese.

But then I also seem to remember something about the 6-ship-per-wing code never getting into CVS so...

[WMCoolmon]

It's not in CVS and the code for it was lost...

[Mr_Maniac]

Okay.. Here's an little Info:
All fighters were Maras - like expected, before I added the GTNB Pharos (named "Trigger") that should mark the Waypoint.
When I added it, two fighters of Gamma wing became GTNB Pharos and the "Trigger" Pharos didn't show up...
It only showed up one time...

I don't know anymore if I added the third Bomber-Wing AFTER oder BEFORE placing the GTNB Pharos there...
Or maybe it could be my change in the events?
After I noticed, that this "Trigger" didn't work (distance: Waypoint4:4 - any friendly < 750) I changed it to (distance: Trigger [GTNB Pharos] - any friendly < 750)...