Question about galaxy size

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imperiusdamian
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Question about galaxy size

#1 Post by imperiusdamian »

Hi all,

Newbie here, although I've long been a lover of space-based 4X games like MoO2 and GalCiv. FreeOrion is looking very promising!

Anyhow, onto my question. I saw in the Single Player option that the default number of systems in a galaxy is 150. I was able to generate a galaxy with 999 systems, so I'm curious: is there a practical upper limit, or is it limited only by performance?

(I'm also a programmer, so don't be afraid to get technical!)

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MatGB
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Re: Question about galaxy size

#2 Post by MatGB »

The hardcoded upper limit is 5000 (I think), but unless you've got an incredibly powerful machine you'll find lag kicks in at much lower than that.

As the game progresses, the more effects you have, especially population centres (ie planets), the more work it has to do to do anything, especially in production. Lag can become noticeable and even game breakingly bad depending on size of game and machine power (on my old laptop I found having more than 150 populated planets made the game too slow to be worth playing, the same applied for roughly 200+ ships, I haven't played enough on my new desktop to work out what the limits are but it's higher).

With reasonable graphics and RAM you should be OK at way over 150, and if you find it starts to slow too much but you like larger maps then setting Planets to Low helps, and I'd personally love to have a machine capable of running a full 5000 system map, if I win the lottery it's On The List ;-)

(edit: both the 150 planets and 200 ships limit was in my empire, fairly sure the AIs would have an effect but it's not so bad for the client)
Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

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Dilvish
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Re: Question about galaxy size

#3 Post by Dilvish »

We should probably also increase the limit on the number of AIs-- right now the cap is 20, which (IMHO) is not really suitable for anything above 1k or at the most 2k systems, certainly rather low for 5k systems.

imperiusdamian, if you're on Linux then FO is pretty easy to compile with standard tools/libraries (and on Windows and MacOSX we have dev kits that makes it quite reasonable as well). Then you could adjust these limits to your pleasure. A word of warning, for very large galaxies you'll start off with a blank screen that will make you wonder if the game has hung, while the server chugs away for a while setting things up (we haven't adjusted that startup process to be friendly for such large galaxies). On my machine 5k systems takes a bit over four minutes to set up, with the screen blank nearly all that time.

P.S.
Playing any large galaxy game will probably rapidly get bogged down by monsters unless you use the None or Low monster settings.

I think I'll bump up the AI limit to 40, to at least be a somewhat reasonable match for 5k systems.
If I provided any code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0

imperiusdamian
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Re: Question about galaxy size

#4 Post by imperiusdamian »

MatGB wrote:The hardcoded upper limit is 5000 (I think), but unless you've got an incredibly powerful machine you'll find lag kicks in at much lower than that.
The RAM and graphics are reasonable; my CPU is a great steaming pile of horse manure. (Although, that may be an insult to horse manure...)
With reasonable graphics and RAM you should be OK at way over 150, and if you find it starts to slow too much but you like larger maps then setting Planets to Low helps, and I'd personally love to have a machine capable of running a full 5000 system map, if I win the lottery it's On The List ;-)
Likewise. ;) No doubt as computers grow ever more powerful, that hardcoded limit may be raised? Might be interesting to have it ultimately set as a 16-bit unsigned integer resulting in a limit of 65535 systems...
Dilvish wrote:We should probably also increase the limit on the number of AIs-- right now the cap is 20, which (IMHO) is not really suitable for anything above 1k or at the most 2k systems, certainly rather low for 5k systems.
In other words, far too few to actually *encounter* anybody else within about, oh, 3 days of gameplay? ;)
imperiusdamian, if you're on Linux then FO is pretty easy to compile with standard tools/libraries (and on Windows and MacOSX we have dev kits that makes it quite reasonable as well). Then you could adjust these limits to your pleasure. A word of warning, for very large galaxies you'll start off with a blank screen that will make you wonder if the game has hung, while the server chugs away for a while setting things up (we haven't adjusted that startup process to be friendly for such large galaxies). On my machine 5k systems takes a bit over four minutes to set up, with the screen blank nearly all that time.
I'll keep that in mind! I dual-boot Win7 and Linux Mint 17 on my system. It *is* 64 bit, but it's an aging 2008-era Celeron, so I'm certain the build time - and blank screen time - would be beyond atrocious...
P.S.
Playing any large galaxy game will probably rapidly get bogged down by monsters unless you use the None or Low monster settings.
I shall keep that in mind too. ;)
It's certainly different from, say, GalCiv II where you pick a galaxy size. I've often wanted a more flexible model. This is it. ;)
I think I'll bump up the AI limit to 40, to at least be a somewhat reasonable match for 5k systems.
Sounds good! :)

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