Matrix Games Forums

Okay i havent been around for quite some time now...ooops...
Anyway this is my problem. I dunno wether its a bug or not or anything...I m puzzled
The amount of infantries that i killed was rising more than 30,000 then after a certain limit there is a minus sign infront of the number like for eg: -25,000 and this amount slowly reduce to
-1000++ then something odd happened...the following game i onwards i found that the AI only pitch a small amount of soldiers at me...roughly about 250 men and also a few APCs but there is not one tank besides the SPA that numbered only two peices...

Is this supposed to be like that or is it something really odd ???

Originally posted by Sturmbannfuhrer
Okay i havent been around for quite some time now...ooops...
Anyway this is my problem. I dunno wether its a bug or not or anything...I m puzzled
The amount of infantries that i killed was rising more than 30,000 then after a certain limit there is a minus sign infront of the number like for eg: -25,000 and this amount slowly reduce to
-1000++ then something odd happened...the following game i onwards i found that the AI only pitch a small amount of soldiers at me...roughly about 250 men and also a few APCs but there is not one tank besides the SPA that numbered only two peices...

Is this supposed to be like that or is it something really odd ???

If it went negative around 32767, then the kills are stored as a 16 bit signed integer, when you get over 65535 kills it should start back over at 0, assuming it doesn't just crash out with an overflow error.

The same sort of thing happens sort of with leader ratings, they can go up to 255, but then they drop back to 0 since they are stored as an 8 bit unsigned integer.

Its just a quirk in how the game is written. Don't even get into the discussion on how many units you can have on the map before you start not getting crews when a vehicle is destroyed.
thanks, John.

Yep. All a matter of memory. Basically someone figured "they'll never get that high a skill rating/kill amount/number of units..." and, to save the RAM footprint, used a variable smaller than they should have. Ever remember "flipping the score" on your old video games? Like Defender on the Atari or Mario on the NES? Same deal. Except I find it a bit less tolerable on computer games: either use a large enough variable, or handle the "flipping" effect (ie, put a cap on it so it won't go beyond what the variable can handle).