Ship Cap

posted on January 3rd, 2009, 6:41 am

Every time i amass a large fleet, say about fifty ships, the game boots me to the desk top and i'm forced to make an error report. I tried to get it to happen again to see if it was a fluke. Sure enough, as the feds again, i would go against three AIs, free-for-all. I'd sit back, expand to about four moon sets, build a fleet, research everything, then with all my mines going at full crank out ships in quick time. I can avoid battles fairly well until i have an overwhelming force but once i get to a point of having forty ships, boom!

Anyone else seeing this, at least with the federation?

Any theories?

posted on January 3rd, 2009, 6:50 am

This has happened to me before in a mutliplayer match, though we had far more then 40 ships. It was a 2 v 2 match, my ally had nearly 5 full groups of Romulan ships and I had a full 10 groups of Breen cruisers and Battleships. after awhile the game randomly crashed so I presume there is a limit the game can support before dying. I know for sure it can handle a hell of a lotta' ships though, far more then 160.

posted on January 3rd, 2009, 11:53 pm

yes it can. back in the day when I was very good (not so good now) I would set the ai to build very fast like instantly and it would get more then 1000 ships at least cause I would edit the officers so you could build unlimited ships.

posted on January 3rd, 2009, 11:58 pm

Meredith, I know how you feel. I've been playing Fleetops since the first publicly released mod was done, and A2 since 2002. I've gotten more than 2000 ships by making the Fed's vessels take no time to build, however.

posted on January 4th, 2009, 12:30 am

I've had 4 players building more than 3000 ships each and it's still run okay lol

posted on January 4th, 2009, 1:20 am

think it has something to do with the hardware ppl use, cause the engine wasnt meant for this amount of data, which leads to upperclass hardware needed, otherwise the ctd happens. but thats just my wild guess

posted on January 4th, 2009, 9:57 am

My system is in my signature lol. And I get the same problem. However...before I upgrade to 64 bit Windows 7, corei7 and 16GB of Ram...what else can I do T_T?

posted on January 4th, 2009, 11:24 pm

Yeah, i get the crash also and im running a Q6700 Core 2 Quad 3.0Ghz/ 6Gb DDR3 high performace RAM/ 1 TB HDD/ 9800GX2 2Gb DDR3 VRAM/ 1.7Gw Power source.

Thats some mighty power that runs crysis maxed out, and Far Cry 2. But FO still crashes.


I can tell you right now its the engine. And its not to do with all the ships cuz the A2 engine can support large fleets. Its the way FO renders the ships, with Dinamic lighting from dynamic sources, D3D Bump mapping, Bloom light rendering, normal mapping.

But it think that all coupled with the one mistake the A2 engine does. And thats render ships inside the FOW and shroud even in you cant see them, Supreme Commander does this, and that game frerquently freezes cause it  hits the 2 Gb memory use limit.

Its all the engine ppl.

posted on January 4th, 2009, 11:39 pm

is there a way to updte the engine, or get a new one?

posted on January 5th, 2009, 11:24 am

is there a way to updte the engine, or get a new one?

lol, engines are unique. Like the Unreal3 engine running Mass Effect and GoW. The A2 engine with its age now, would be hard if not impossible to port. Modern engines render the same way but are more CPU bound... like multi-core support. The A2 engine is to old for that.

To find a new engine would mean the mod would have to be stand alone, no A2 CD or anything. That is a) expensive, time consuming, needless when you have one right here that just needs to be tweaked.

posted on January 6th, 2009, 12:25 am

lol, engines are unique. Like the Unreal3 engine running Mass Effect and GoW. The A2 engine with its age now, would be hard if not impossible to port. Modern engines render the same way but are more CPU bound... like multi-core support. The A2 engine is to old for that.

To find a new engine would mean the mod would have to be stand alone, no A2 CD or anything. That is a) expensive, time consuming, needless when you have one right here that just needs to be tweaked.

at this point I'm not sure but their is not much of the A2 engine left if you look at the folder layout most of the game is handled by their own exe, and I think the only reason they have not messed with the dll's it so that they dont get kicked off of some sites (A2 files cant have a mod that changes the game engine for example) but I think if they could then they would change more. thou it might be considered copyright infringement, but I'm not sure.

posted on January 6th, 2009, 6:13 pm

You're probably right, Meredith. In the User Agreement page of installation there's a part about not messing with sensitive areas like source codes and engines. The newer games' engines are still complicated to most likely avoid hacking from (to quote a phrase here,) people with lite hackzor skills like the Fleetops team and certain people that I know.