Is the money limit not big enough?

[Miow22]

I've noticed that money is a very easy asset to get in starmade, & hitting the limit is easy.

But I've also noticed that alot of my ships, have been so expensive they go passed the limit.

Is the limit too small?

Should prices be valued less?

 

[Seris]

the number i believe is literally a hard limit. the number is a 32 bit float meaning its maximum value is only 2.14 billion... so unless schema comes up with a hacky way of dealing with it. the hard limit on money will remain 2.14 billion

 

[Evilchicken]

The limit is that value becuase thats the largest interger that can be stored on 32bit (I think it 32) number, and using a double lenght interger (If there is support for that) would increase the max value or if you want to have really really big numbers just store each digit in a long list (E.g 23 cell long, we all like moles don\'t we ). But for the most part the current limit is very hard to reach, exept for very very large ships.

 

[liq3]

It\'s actually 2.14 trillion, and yeh it\'s the 32-bit signed integer limit. There are ways around it (various bignum libraries etc). Also, you can store huge numbers with just 64-bits (18 quintillion or billion billion), it\'s just 32-bit systems need hacky work-arounds to do that.

I think it\'s more a problem with loot though. I doubt you\'re supposed to be able to reach it. I know I got it because I got 800~ L5 minerals from a pirate base drop.

 

[Miow22]

It\'s actually 2.14 trillion


thats debatable. depends whether you meanenglish trillion, or american-english.

 

[LETHALVIP3RZZ]

Its clearly billion! Trillion has 13 digits whereas the credit limit is only 2,140,000,000 which is 10 digits

 

[Trafalgar]

Schema can just change \'int\' to \'long\' in his code for all the variables that contain money amounts, and suddenly have 2^63-1 as the limit instead, because he\'s using java.

You\'re right that the rapid money gain is a problem with loot, but that\'s not the only problem, because with the limit right now so close to the price of an L5 mineral the purchase or sale price overflows or underflows if you try to buy or sell more than a thousand or so at a time. So there are multiple problems, and they can be addressed multiple ways (and ideally #1 would be done in addition to one of the others, or all three):

1. Detect the underflows or overflows and do something about it such as preventing the player from selling or buying enough to overflow the price. This would only keep them from instantly getting near-max-cash at the start of the game and wouldn\'t solve the problem of hitting the limit fast through normal gameplay or ship costs reaching the limit.

2. Disable loot and drastically lower item prices across the board, resulting in lower overall ship prices, less rapid money gain, and ships not reaching/passing the cash limit. This is something server admins can do.

3. Change loot to generate loot with a set value, or a value within a certain range, rather than a wildly varying amount, lower the values on L5 minerals, and possibly raise the money cap by changing the cash variable for players and ships and everything else to a (java) long.

If all three happened, server admins might not need to keep loot disabled once it was being generated in a balanced fashion.

 

[TheCIS]

but if i have aship whose value should really be, say 4 billion, i could still buy that for just 2.14 billion, right?

This works under the premise that because the game can\'t caluculate values past 2.14 billion, then it doesnt matter how expensive your ship is if its over that amount right?

cause i tried loading a game that had a giant cube of L5 minerals in its local shop catalog, and, when loading the game, it crashed ( a -1 bug in single player). I suspect that this was because the ship cost more than 2.14billion (it was a big cube) and so the values became negative. When i deleted the ship from the local catalog, all became well and i was able to play the game as normal.

But does this mean that having a ship whose cost was more than 2.14 billion in your local shop catalog would crash your game?

Can it be fixed?

 

[Scud]

A ship that costs that much would probably have a mass upwards of one million. Have any ships even come close to that yet? Even if we lowball it to, say, 500,000 mass, that\'s still immense. Anyone have any figures on really massive ships?

 

[Benjamintruth]

while disabling pirate loot does decrease the value short term, with the new factory systym its easy to crank out tons of Lvl_5, or if that has been reduced hardened hull, or what have you. So let\'s say, for example, that on a server you disable pirate loot and redue lvl_5, 4, and 3 all too 5000 credits. Let\'s say it takes 5000 of one kind of material to get the recipe. I spawn in a ship that is actually just a big wad of hardened hull. I gather all of the hull, and buy the recipe. Then I start cranking out hardened hull like no tomorrow, use it to buy more recipies, ect. Keep growing my factory. Pretty quickly, I have a money factory. So I guess it\'s more difficult than pirate loot, but its not exactly what I\'d call an \'economy.\'



Also, if you reduce prices across the board it makes catalogue ships cheaper. If you leave them as is, then they can just factory exploit their way to cap. To easily buy catalogue ships. So :/

 

[Benjamintruth]

The only time it really comes up is with big chunks of level 5. This also opens up an exploit, since money cap is only 2.4 bill/trill you can just keep adding level 5 exponentially. Once you reach the cap, you just buy your supermassive lvl 5 ship, use advanced build mode to rip it all off, then you (effectivly) have 1000x more than the credit cap. Even if you reduce lvl 5 cost, once someone reaches the credit cap on your server they can use this exploit to become infinitly wealthy.

 

[Layl]

Or... you know... he could just change \"int\" to \"unsigned long\", making it an unsigned 64 bit number rather then a signed 32 bit one.

Edit: seems there\'s no equivalent of \"unsigned\" in Java, didn\'t know that :/

 

[Trafalgar]

Until you nerf the value of L5 into the ground, rendering their stockpile worthless. But then they\'ll just repeat it with build blocks or whatever else.

 

[Dire Badger]

people who use ice crystals or light blocks heavily in construction can break the bank even on large (not titanic) sized ships. As can stuff with lots of armor.

Considering that rock and other asteroid and planetary materials are apparently just as tough as hull blocks, at a fraction of the cost, I have been using them heavily in interior construction to try and keep my large ship costs down.

 

[Morhe]

The problem with using rocks as your hull material is that they have a mass of 1 instead of 0.1, meaning they will tax your thrusters much more. Cheaper, yes, but much heavier.

 

[Dire Badger]

heh, well, I don\'t tend to have much non-armor interior structure



I guess that\'s a good reason not to use \'lavalamps\' as well