Moderator: Shannon V. OKeets
Yes. Thanks.ORIGINAL: Froonp
Maybe it was said below, but an idea to save time in calculating supply, would be to have units stacked with another non hq unit from the same country to use the same supply path as that unit.
Nice in theory, but for the US, all of the US & Canada would be in one bag. And for the USSR it would include all of Siberia. One problem is that supply is different not only for each major power, but also for each minor country. That's a lot of bags to keep up-to-date.[:(]ORIGINAL: Incy
I have a proposal for the unlimited supply determination algorithm.
Instead of trying to trace paths, you could tray to trace a 'bag' and check if something is inside or outside the bag.
The bag could be centered either on the unit being tested, or on a primary supply source. I suspect the latter is better and will assume this.
To construct the bag you would start on a random primary supply source and trace a straight line in a random direction (disregarding supply cost, rail, etc) until you can't trace supply any further, this is an edge hex/Seazone. Then you recursively find all adjacent hexes that are also on the edge of your supply capability. Continue until the edge forms a full circle.
You'll also have to check for the two special cases that there is a separate bag inside of or outside of the current bag. This is easily done by checking if you can trace to all other primary sources from your starting source. You might also want to construct 'sub-bags' for parts of paths that are overseas, to solve some difficulties calculating edges when seazones are involved.
Once you have the bag in place (or several bags), determining unlimited supply becomes a matter of detecting if a unit is inside a bag or not. All units outside of a bag are unlimited OOS. Hopefully you have a good way of determining this.
Also, you could store the path of the edge around the bag just as you do with unit supply paths. This will allow you to detect potential changes in the shape of bag, and make a delta calculation everytime a bag changes.
Also, if you calculate bags, you can safely tag all units outside a bag as OOS, and you'll never have to recalculate them (until the a bag expands to put them back in unlimited supply).
I think there are too many intricacies in the supply rules for this to work. Here are a couple of the anomalies that supply has to deal with:ORIGINAL: Incy
I think large bag size is not a problem, I think it's an advantage. The larger the bag, the more you earn by only computing the edge (and not every possible path within the bag).
The america, siberia and africa bags would normally not change much during a game, most of the edge would remain static. The west and east edges of siberia, and the north edge of africa would see some adjustments, but for the main part they'd simply hug coast/boarder along the same path the entire game. Delta calculation of edges would not be very difficult to implement either.
The biggest gain would be that you never have to recalculate supply for anything outside of a bag.
You'd also never have to recalculate unlimited OOS status for any unit (which is probably an expensive calculation, that might have to be repeated very often, depending on your algorithm). All that is needed if you implement bags is to toggle a units 'unlimted OOS status' whenever it passes over the edge, or the egde passes over it.
I agree that it wil be somewhat complex to code (probably many days), so if you are able to solve well both
-unlimited OOS calculations
-calculating when units are brough back in supply
then you definately shouldn't consider this idea.
PS: You can eliminate the need for bags 'per minor' by calculating one bag that everyone on a side can use, and then add sub-bags for those parts only acsessible by some countries on a side. If/when the need arises I'll be happy to write out a more detailed algoritm for this.
I am a little off topic here.ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
... all the odd bits take a lot of checking.
Weather - changes the number of basic path hexes in a supply line (so the bags would have to be recalculated every time the weather changes); it also affects whether a port is iced in or not
Supply is redetermined whenever the weather changes - obviously. Supply is not assumed to be the same as previously. It is just that the previous path is tested to see if it is still valid. Any units that were out-of-supply previously are always checked.ORIGINAL: brian brian
I noticed an obscure thing for the soon to be new supply routines do properly. Will they trace supply across frozen lake hexsides? They become river hexsides in winter. Then there are those extra tricky lakes that lay on weather boundaries.... just a thought to check the code with.
