Today's stream was excellent. Thank you Stardock and Frogboy for highlighting what will be a very successful expansion to Galactic Civilizations III. I was watching todays stream while actively working at my desk and taking customer calls and calling out to purchase live goods (what I do all day). You would think it being spring I would be so busy to not even have time to watch but its Galactic Civilizations so you make time for a stream (more so with Frogboy and Paul both there)!
I followed as well as I could and got to thinking (a dangerous thing for an old guy to do)....
Regarding maps, can maps larger than insane be made and if so are they stable? My thoughts are as long as the engine is robust and your hardware is at the very high end it seems that even maps beyond Insane could technically be made and played on.
What are the dimensions of Insane? If you wanted a map say 20% larger what would you do and would it CTD?
Thanks for reading!
<HexSectorSize>380</HexSectorSize>
MapSizeDefs.xml
No idea what happens if you make it bigger. (Map sizes are hardcoded in the schema(dll) so no new ones via mods)
Thanks Horemvore. You gave me the answer I was looking for. In a nutshell we cannot create maps greater than insane at this time.
What i think he was saying is that you can increase the number of planets, and habital planets. I never could mod this above 3150 habital planets i think with patches they kept shrinking it down, so i gave up. I think this is in mapdefs in both directories. No its not stable.
Admiral, actually I wanted to make the map physically bigger. I think the insane map is like 930,000 hexes or so. I wanted to go up say 20% and see if it would work.
On the stream yesterday Brad had the most amazing spiral galaxy i have seen. It looked like 6 arms tightly spiraled and all well populated with stars from center to the edge. That is the galaxy I love playing on.
Change the value I posted above (for insane). It will make the map bigger, but, theres bound to be a limit in the engine. Once you hit or go over it, it will CTD.
I meant brad sorry.
I changed it to 50% bigger. It crashed during galaxy generation.I then tried 25% - another crash.10% also crashed.I then increased by 10, to 390. Crash.I then tried an increase of 1, to 381. Crash.
So, I went back to 380. It worked fine.
These were with scattered stars and everything on Normal, and I have 32GB of RAM.
I guess GalCiv3/Stardock doesn't want some of us to get more Insane than you we already are.
Old Spider, thank you for your information!
Hm, I just measured my insane map by placing a ship with enough range in the upper left corner of the map and ctrl-hover over the the hex in the upper left and middle right corner.
For the upper left corner it says Distance 380 moves, for the middle right corner Distance 381 moves what I don't understand since for a symmetrical hex map both distances must be the same ... ?
Anyway, that would mean despite the xml entry of 380 for HexSectorSize the real size must be 381 or 382 hexes, and it means the number of hex fields at the edge of the map from one end to the other or from the center hex to either edge of the map (including the center hex). That's 434,341 or 436,627 sectors altogether (the formula is 1 + (1 + (r - 1) / 2 * ( r - 1 ) * 6 with r = radius of the map in hexes, giving 1 sector for radius 1, 1 + 6 = 7 sectors for radius 2, 1 + 6 + 12 = 19 sectors for radius 3 etc.
With every new radius R the overall sector count increases by (R - 1)*6 hexes.
And now I hope I didn't miscalculate
I thought it was like 980K in hexes but again I could be waaaay off! Paul made the maps and there was a discussion on the total hexes and such. Old Spider confirmed they are in fact hard coded to an upper limit. This maybe do keep stability. I am curious if you have the memory in both the may computer say 64 gigs of ram and had a pair of Titans rocking 8 gigs each if the engine itself would support a larger map. I think that only Brad and Paul and the other developers know how far it can go.
Ok - but we still need larger maps!
I think <HexSectorSize>760</HexSectorSize> should be enough for the first time
Ok as far as turns being off they could also be affected by nebulas.
I have done of a lot of work (and math!) on the galaxy sizes since the Beta. I started using the number of hexes on side instead of the radius because I found it easier to count. The hexes on a side and the radius in hexes are the same. I began using HexSectorSize because I no longer had to count. The actual size of a side or radius of the galaxy is HexSectorSize +1, so a HexSectorSize of 380 means the actual size of a side or radius of an Insane galaxy is 381 hexes.
The formula I use in my spreadsheet is =1+6*(HSS+1)*HSS/2, where HSS is the HexSectorSize. I confirmed this by counting sectors in the smaller map sizes. An Insane galaxy with a HexSectorSize of 380 has 434,341 total hexes. My formula is slightly different from lyssailcor's because I use HexSectorSize, and he uses radius.
Since we all will soon have machines with 8-core or more CPUs, 64 GB or more of RAM and at least 2 very-high-end GPUs , I think bigger galaxies should be in an update before too long.
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
Good point, didn't think of that.
.............4000 holes in Blackbird Lankershim........"
made me think of counting holes....
You people are as more-than-Insane as your map sizes!
I find the present Insane quite satisfying, however, I will admit to wanting to try even larger just to see how well it worked. I do have one of those eight core, 32gig, SSD systems and am very curious. I have done things more extreme to other hardware. Then again, I often had to fix things afterward. Sometimes, I was fully authorized. They were certain it couldn't be broken at all, let alone spectacularly. I was seldom re-invited to those kind of testing sessions.
I moved down to Immense for now to get some shorter games and because of some lag on Insane. With the performance difference Brad was showing off, that second excuse is gone, so soon, it will be back to Insane for me!
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