Ummmm, I am on Admiral Kiernyc's team!

*splits up his smaller fleet into a zillion, takes all of Kiernyc's planets at once*

red lights go off in my head when I see this.

Even if it is limited by a 32-bit int, do you think you'll need more than 2,147,483,647 ships?

or more importantly, in what ungodly universe can your computer handle that many? and can you show me how to get there?

lol, thank you thank you *bows*

As opposed to..a double? Float? A linked list? A binary tree? "I'm making all game constants have up to seven significant digits!"

I laughed

bigger, more important question: is there someway to streamline ram for this game? I think I've had a crash where I had more ships than the OS would handle.

Do you mean you broke the 2GB limit? If so, its probably only possible to go with a 3GB switch or a 64 bit OS.

yes, but I'm talking just streamlining, making the units take less than the 2gig spot than as of currently

keep in mind I'm using vista which practically doubles a program's ram usage. also having that 3gig switch would be nice

Excuse me? How does vista "double a program's Ram usage"? I know that it increases the RAM requirements (because Vista hogs down memory on its own...) but this is the first I've heard of that!

Anyway, the 3GB switch is an OS level thing, which merely requires that SINS be tagged as large address aware -- hopefully the Devs have done that, or all their jawing about "infinite planets through modding!" has been really silly.

Ron you've never heard of vista's parade of Ram eating programs? it even doubles up the picture of an application so that it can go in and out (alt tabing) faster! that can easily suck up a good deal of ram for games like supcom.
that increased ram req falls under the 2 gig switch, so basically you just confirmed what I said.

they didnt do it for supcom!

I know.

I know that Vista eats RAM, but this is the first I've heard of programs actually taking up more RAM (in and of themselves) to run, as opposed to the OS eating it up for them.

the OS eats it up for them, but as relative to that limit its indistinguishable. the OS attatches those changes to the actual program, not doubling those programs on its own

the result, as obvious, is that page limit is drastically "lower".

Granted my computer engineering background didn't take me too extensively into programming, but isn't that impossible? I mean, unless you code the game differently for each OS, the game code itself should take the same amount of memory regardless or where you run it. If the OS decides to allocate more memory for it, that's independent of the game programming, no?

no, what happens is the OS supplements the original program, except that all of those supplements fall under the 2gig data packet umbrella, so as far as anyone else is concerned it doubles the RAM the thing utilizes.

Right, I just meant that the program itself is designed to use the same amount of memory regardless on what OS it is run, it's just the OS itself that adds onto it. So we mean the same thing

yes.

The user's OS has to be enabled to address more than 2GB of RAM to a process.  This can be problematic and we're not using it.

Vista actually does a pretty good job with RAM usage - outside all the stuff it loads on its own. It fills your RAM with stuff it think you may want to access again, so that you can get to it more quickly. In XP, that free RAM just sits there doing nothing until you tell it to do something.

the problem with that is it consumes the package limit of 2gigs, games fold much faster.


then at least provide a quick and easy tool to let it happen if you've already made the adjustments, like me.

"Here's a 250kb tool to remap every memory allocation in the source code to account for 64-bit systems, then compile it in less than 30 seconds. If you believed that, I've got some prime beachfront property to sell you."

If they programmed it to be large address capable (which is just plain old fashioned good programming technique) then adding a large address aware "flag" to the exe file is actually quite doable -- go look at Supreme Commander, where an end-user created a "patch" file to make it flagged so!

someone made a fix for this, because for some that have more then 2GB memory the game would crash. Im using it and the game works as normal again. Tho this problem only happend in vista 64bit not 32bit



thats not true, its when a given program reaches the 2GB limit and vista doesnt make it worse by using more memory. you can have more programs running near the 2GB limit without problems

Specifically, any time the game exceeded the use of 2GB of memory it would crash -- its a limitation of a 32 bit OS. The OS can only allocate 4GBs of memory "addresses", either to a given program or to the various hardware memory. As a result, you get the 4 GB "cap" on addressable memory, split between system RAM, video RAM, and any other hardware devices on the machine. Additionally, programs have a limit of 4 GBs of "memory spaces", and by default 2GBs of those go to OS stuff and the other 2 GBs go to the game. At the time this "standard" was devised, it made perfect sense -- no [i]way to use that much memory!. These days, its a problem, as we really could use the extra memory from moving the "partition" over a half-gig to a full gig, but bad programming on many kernel level things (aka drivers and the like) means that even on programs flagged large address aware (a flag created because if the programmers didn't program the software right, moving that "partition" over can cause it to break down) you run some risks with system stability.

With a 64 bit OS, the allocation limits were done away with entirely. (Edit: I used to have a link to a page or three on the subject, but I don't anymore, alas).