Faction and Unit Limitations

[plumjuice]

Hi everyone, longtime lurker, first-time poster.
First, loving 6.4. Really. I haven't played medII for ages, but a friend made me try out SS and I've lost many hours already.
Anyway, after scouting a couple of the threads on unit/faction limits, references abound to the EDB, and it being full, and also to a maximum number of factions.
What I would like to understand is why such limitations would be hardcoded into a game. I'm not saying it's stupid, as I'm no programmer and for all I know it's necessary, but if it isn't required to prevent alternate realities exploding from your hard disk, it seems illogical for CA to have done it.

P.S. Not quite sure if this should be here or in the general medII forums, so I apologize if it's not meant to be here.
P.P.S. There may already be a thread on this, if so, a link would be greatly appreciated.

[David93]

Im pretty sure the faction limit is 31 (29 are used and theres a constant debate about what other factions should be added) and the unit limit is 500 (which is currently full but SP and others are working on it)
I could be wrong though. i dont know why ca did it.

[Ferdiad]

Hi everyone, longtime lurker, first-time poster.
First, loving 6.4. Really. I haven't played medII for ages, but a friend made me try out SS and I've lost many hours already.
Anyway, after scouting a couple of the threads on unit/faction limits, references abound to the EDB, and it being full, and also to a maximum number of factions.
What I would like to understand is why such limitations would be hardcoded into a game. I'm not saying it's stupid, as I'm no programmer and for all I know it's necessary, but if it isn't required to prevent alternate realities exploding from your hard disk, it seems illogical for CA to have done it.

P.S. Not quite sure if this should be here or in the general medII forums, so I apologize if it's not meant to be here.
P.P.S. There may already be a thread on this, if so, a link would be greatly appreciated.

If they needed more slots they would have made more but seeing as they used way less than the limits they were actually quite generous in a way.

[plumjuice]

If they needed more slots they would have made more but seeing as they used way less than the limits they were actually quite generous in a way.

Fair enough, but I'm still hazy as to why there are limits in the first place. Why exactly are they necessary?
At first I thought it had something to do with the usage of ram/processing power, but from what I understand, the slowdown on the ss turn times vs vanilla is due to the new scripts rather than the extra factions. (Although they probably do add time, it seems to me that is mostly do to the scripts running for each faction, unsure) But the more I tinker with my own sad and stunted mod project, the more it seems that having any number of hardcoded limitations (no matter how large an amount of free room) is odd(Especially for the number of unit types). Is it really necessary to have those limits? If so, why, and if not what are some reasons for their use?

[PerXX]

The prime reason is probably that it's far far easier to program within a set parameter. By a huge margin, especially in such complex code as a game like this is.
A secondary reason is as mentioned load time. The code for reading a select number in a specific range like 1-30 is much smaller than an undefined range.
The extra time it would have required to code without the limitation probably remains the largest factor. The game designer have a plan, and the programmers code to fit that plan, not make things easy for modders - unfortunately, one could say

[plumjuice]

The prime reason is probably that it's far far easier to program within a set parameter. By a huge margin, especially in such complex code as a game like this is.
A secondary reason is as mentioned load time. The code for reading a select number in a specific range like 1-30 is much smaller than an undefined range.
The extra time it would have required to code without the limitation probably remains the largest factor. The game designer have a plan, and the programmers code to fit that plan, not make things easy for modders - unfortunately, one could say

Bummer
Oh well. Thanks for the responses people.

[danielrech]

Technically there is no need for them to hard-code these limits, since PC hardware is scalable. But they must guarantee that the game runs flawless with the given minimum and recommended system requirements.

What happens usually is that the game designers and graphical artists will keep pushing content into the game. So that is the programmer's hard way of controlling the content creators from going overboard.