Increase the inf cap limit per toon

[CU_Krow]

2 billion per char seems bit small with current market. Instead of sending countless emails, or making new alts as inf holders, how about just simply increasing the inf cap?

 

Instead of 2B, make it a 10 billion inf cap. There's only upsides to this suggestion, imo.

[Apparition]

The two billion cap is due to a limit with 32-bit integers.  The highest number a 32-bit integer can go is roughly 2.14 billion.  As far as I know, the only way to raise it past that point would be to remove the 32 bit game client.

[Greycat]

Do away with inf all together! Think of the benefits -

 

- Heroes doing hero stuff because they want to, not "for the money."

- Fewer purse snatchings because there's no money to be had from them.

-- This leads to more people being on time to work and greater productivity.

- Fewer bank robberies because there's no money in the bank.

-- Bonus: Less energy consumption since banks can be downsized to just the vault and not really need as much of a lobby and the like. They can consolidate into fewer branches, too!

- No need to worry about minimum wage (or having to work a job you hate!)

- No worries about too MUCH inf either!

- Taxes are much easier. No money, nothing to tax!

- Greater minion / henchperson heath and safety benefits. With no banks to rob, no security will shoot at them. And there's no risk of failure, so there's a smaller chance (chance varying depending on who they work for) of being shot, dropped in lava, mutated, teleported into space without a suit, or being forced to hook back up with their ex - all things that cause stress in a minion's life.

 

Live the inf free life!

[CU_Krow]

42 minutes ago, Apparition said:

The two billion cap is due to a limit with 32-bit integers.  The highest number a 32-bit integer can go is roughly 2.14 billion.  As far as I know, the only way to raise it past that point would be to remove the 32 bit game client.

Would that be difficult to do?

[Apparition]

2 minutes ago, CU_Krow said:

Would that be difficult to do?

 

Considering that quite a few people still use the 32 bit game client, yes.

[Greycat]

1 minute ago, Apparition said:

 

Considering that quite a few people still use the 32 bit game client, yes.

 

... are there numbers on that? I'm kind of curious, given pretty much any system in the last decade plus should be able to handle 64-bit... (Yes, I am wondering how many do and why. Like I said. I'm curious.)

[MTeague]

I sort of have the "everyone should have a 64 bit machine by now" mindset, but, I'm a programmer by trade. 

My expectations are shaped by my job and don't always jive with the real world.

 

I have to perioidcally remind myself there's plenty of people whose real world situation may mean that a potato computer may still be the best thing available. 

[golstat2003]

48 minutes ago, MTeague said:

I sort of have the "everyone should have a 64 bit machine by now" mindset, but, I'm a programmer by trade. 

My expectations are shaped by my job and don't always jive with the real world.

 

I have to perioidcally remind myself there's plenty of people whose real world situation may mean that a potato computer may still be the best thing available. 

 

Yep. For example I work in QA in an IT department for a company that deals with law firms.

 

Microsoft has pretty much started to drop IE11 from the roof while setting it on fire.

 

Yet all of these law firms we have as customers only allow their lawyers to use IE11.

 

You can guess the hilarity that has been happening lately with development on our sites and systems, with the above in mind.

 

Never, EVER, EEEEEVVVVAAAR assume that "all the folks should be using this or this by now, it's 2021". You'll be sorely disappointed every time. 😛 

Edited March 28, 2021 by golstat2003

[MTeague]

4 minutes ago, golstat2003 said:

 

Yep. For example I work in QA in an IT department for a company that deals with law firms.

 

Microsoft has pretty much started to drop IE11 from the roof while setting it on fire.

 

Yet all of these law firms we have as customers only allow their lawyers to use IE11.

 

You can guess the hilarity that has been happening lately with development on our sites and systems, with the above in mind.

 

Ah but if you're dealing with lawyers (literally), you should probably be able to drop the phrase  "repesents a security risk" "may open you to ransomware for using unsupported software" etc, and get them on board through fear if nothing else. 

Edited March 28, 2021 by MTeague

[golstat2003]

2 minutes ago, MTeague said:

 

Ah but if you're dealing with lawyers (literally), you should probably be able to drop the phrase  "repesents a security risk" "may open you to ransomware for using unsupported software" etc, and get them on board through fear if nothing else. 

 

LOL, unfortunately their IT departments are as old-fashioned as many of them are. That works 1 out of 5 times. Which is sad (and scary for serious security risks)

[macskull]

Even if you could raise the inf cap, what would the point be? It might have made sense back on live when there were certain enhancements that would regularly sell off-market for 3-4 billion inf, but these days even the most ridiculously high-end builds aren't more than 500 million or so and you can store inf in global email so it's not like the character inf cap is an actual limit anyways.

[Sarrate]

2 hours ago, Apparition said:

The two billion cap is due to a limit with 32-bit integers.  The highest number a 32-bit integer can go is roughly 2.14 billion.  As far as I know, the only way to raise it past that point would be to remove the 32 bit game client.

 

That's the limit of signed 32-bit integers, unsigned 32-bit integers can represent numbers up to 4 billion. The problem with that is if you ever accidentally subtract a larger number from a smaller, you could get either undefined behavior or integer wrap around (eg: 100 - 1000 = 4 billion-ish), so you'd have to be very careful whenever you did arithmetic.

 

Also, 32-bit programs have no problem utilizing 64-bit (signed or unsigned) integers. That isn't the problem.

 

Where you run into problems is not only converting all instances of influence represented by int32s to int64s (databases, network packet definitions, in memory structures, function definitions, etc), but also making sure everything along the way is also converted to int64. A single missed cast could truncate all values above 2 billion, which I'm sure you can imagine would not be well received.

 

It's less of a technical limitation and more of a problem of how much effort it would take to make the conversion without making any mistakes.

[Black Zot]

3 minutes ago, Sarrate said:

 

It's less of a technical limitation and more of a problem of how much effort it would take to make the conversion without making any mistakes.

 

Made even more problematic by CoH's legendarily spaghettified codebase.

[Andreah]

Let me offer a serious alternative.

 

Keep the 2-Billion inf limit on each character. Much as I'd love to change this, it could create wide ranging unforeseen bugs.

 

Instead, add a new piece of special salvage, which is purchased at the merit Kiosk for inf at 1 Billion each, and which can be sold for 1 Billion Inf at the same Kiosk. These would be transferable only to characters on the same account. Or maybe even allow them to be traded/emailed to anyone -- that's how normal Inf works, after all. Each character could keep as many as 9,999 of these at one time. 

 

If this were done, we would no longer need to store inf on pages of special purpose characters, or float it in emails to ourselves, or in clever auction house bids.

[wjrasmussen]

4 hours ago, Greycat said:

Do away with inf all together! Think of the benefits -

 

- Heroes doing hero stuff because they want to, not "for the money."

- Fewer purse snatchings because there's no money to be had from them.

-- This leads to more people being on time to work and greater productivity.

- Fewer bank robberies because there's no money in the bank.

-- Bonus: Less energy consumption since banks can be downsized to just the vault and not really need as much of a lobby and the like. They can consolidate into fewer branches, too!

- No need to worry about minimum wage (or having to work a job you hate!)

- No worries about too MUCH inf either!

- Taxes are much easier. No money, nothing to tax!

- Greater minion / henchperson heath and safety benefits. With no banks to rob, no security will shoot at them. And there's no risk of failure, so there's a smaller chance (chance varying depending on who they work for) of being shot, dropped in lava, mutated, teleported into space without a suit, or being forced to hook back up with their ex - all things that cause stress in a minion's life.

 

Live the inf free life!

I like inf.

[Turric]

What on Earth are you buying that 2 billion is not enough?

[SeraphimKensai]

As Mac said this isn't live. I remember having multiple toons that when I IO'd I needed 9-12 billion worth of IO's to make and that is even before PvP IO's were a thing.

 

The general price of items right now if you were influence capped you could load out around half a dozen toons all with great builds.

 

I understand that we accumulate a lot of influence and need to shuffle it around. I typically buy Winter IO's and just stick them in a couple bins in my base to convert back to influence should I need to outfit a new toon.

 

Given the integer limit in the game isn't likely going anywhere, just convert it to other types of currencies like I do with Winter IO's. And yes I understand the market could tank tomorrow if the devs wanted to seed IO's for free and I'd be out like 25+ billion influence, but oh well.

[srmalloy]

19 hours ago, Apparition said:

The two billion cap is due to a limit with 32-bit integers.  The highest number a 32-bit integer can go is roughly 2.14 billion.  As far as I know, the only way to raise it past that point would be to remove the 32 bit game client.

Ummm... There is nothing inherent about the 32-bit client preventing the internal use of 64-bit integers in the code; I've written code for 16-bit computers that used 64-bit integers -- the operations on the extended integers were just much slower. What the problem is with changing inf to be a 64-bit is that 32-bit inf values are embedded all over the code and data structures, and changing it would essentially require a complete rebuild of the database -- the entirety of the AH, all the vendors, the character data structure, email, and more. Think of it as having a shelf tightly packed with books of various widths, and you want to pull out a one-inch-wide book and replace it with a two-inch-wide book -- you need to reorganize the entire shelf to accommodate it.

[Andreah]

5 hours ago, Turric said:

What on Earth are you buying that 2 billion is not enough?

It's not one thing, but many things. 

 

I'll give an example. If you want to buy more than, say, 200 superpacks at once, you need more than 2 Billion inf. Right now, it's kind of squirrely to stage that much inf at hand to do this. For my case, I would send it to my global in 1 Billion chunks from the alts I keep it stored on. It's an annoyance, and the various places where these data, email, market bids, alts, and so forth, are kept are potential points of failure and burden.

 

As I noted in my alternate idea post above, I think there are other ideas which would get us most of the benefit at possibly lower effort and risk.

[golstat2003]

5 hours ago, Turric said:

What on Earth are you buying that 2 billion is not enough?

 

That future moonbase that Paragon never got around to, but hopefully HC will one day. 😉 

[golstat2003]

33 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

Ummm... There is nothing inherent about the 32-bit client preventing the internal use of 64-bit integers in the code; I've written code for 16-bit computers that used 64-bit integers -- the operations on the extended integers were just much slower. What the problem is with changing inf to be a 64-bit is that 32-bit inf values are embedded all over the code and data structures, and changing it would essentially require a complete rebuild of the database -- the entirety of the AH, all the vendors, the character data structure, email, and more. Think of it as having a shelf tightly packed with books of various widths, and you want to pull out a one-inch-wide book and replace it with a two-inch-wide book -- you need to reorganize the entire shelf to accommodate it.

 

That explanation still comes to the same point though: Not worth if the amount of dev resources we don't have currently. 

 

Well they could do it, but I wonder if it's worth all the other things they couldn't do while they are doing it.

[Troo]

22 hours ago, CU_Krow said:

2 billion per char seems bit small with current market. Instead of sending countless emails, or making new alts as inf holders, how about just simply increasing the inf cap?

 

Instead of 2B, make it a 10 billion inf cap. There's only upsides to this suggestion, imo.

 

Is there something that costs more than 2B you are saving up for?

[WanderingAries]

5 hours ago, srmalloy said:

Ummm... There is nothing inherent about the 32-bit client preventing the internal use of 64-bit integers in the code; I've written code for 16-bit computers that used 64-bit integers -- the operations on the extended integers were just much slower. What the problem is with changing inf to be a 64-bit is that 32-bit inf values are embedded all over the code and data structures, and changing it would essentially require a complete rebuild of the database -- the entirety of the AH, all the vendors, the character data structure, email, and more. Think of it as having a shelf tightly packed with books of various widths, and you want to pull out a one-inch-wide book and replace it with a two-inch-wide book -- you need to reorganize the entire shelf to accommodate it.

 

Yeah, until they get to the point where they have Actual resources and can rebuild (or magically despaghettify the codebase) from scratch, then we'll have to use cheats like emailing back and forth. I mean, it's not like we're lacking space for "GlobalNAME_INF MULE 1", 2, 3, etc. As much as I'd Love to look at the raw code (with my Very limited-ancient C knowledge), I'd probably get as much of a headache as everyone else. 

[Hardship]

On 3/28/2021 at 1:39 PM, Apparition said:

The two billion cap is due to a limit with 32-bit integers.  The highest number a 32-bit integer can go is roughly 2.14 billion.  As far as I know, the only way to raise it past that point would be to remove the 32 bit game client.

That is the highest number that can be stored in one register.  2^32 power.  But another register could be added to count influence higher if the need was great enough.

 

You can only count to 5 on one hand (register), but if you add another you can count all the way to 10!

 

 

[arcane]

You can literally cover multiple purpled-to-the-teeth characters within one pile of 2 bil. There is no way that cap is unreasonable in the current market.