Inf Cap

Any ideas with the cost of some IO's actually hitting the 2000 mil inf cap that this could be raised to something else???

You've always been able to buy and sell stuff off-market. I kind of have mixed feelings about it, myself.

If the inf. cap was raised, it would be easier to store inf. on characters and the high price recipes would have more competition, being visibly bought and sold on the market. The prices would stabilize since the supply and sales would be more transparent.

If the cap remained, rare backroom recipe deals would continue to provide a source of extreme profit for the rarest of rare dealers.

I'd wanted it raised in the past...but I'm kind of attached to the actual existing black market concept, now.

No idea, but it may be unlikely depending on how they store the info in the coding that underlies the game. It's typical in 32-bit programs that the largest signed integer you can represent is 2^31, or 2,147,483,648, which is just slightly larger than our current cap.

At the time the game was created, there was almost certainly no imagining that some of us would be running around owning or buying things with more than 2B inf at a time, and it seems quite likely then that no one would have had the foresight to set this number to be a 64-bit number behind the scenes, which would be what is needed to usefully raise the cap. Of course I have no way to know no one did that, but I consider it unlikely.

They could change it, of course, but that's likely to require just all sorts of intensive testing to make sure they don't forget to re-declare any and all variables that might store inf as 64-bit numbers. Miss it in one place and you not only truncate someone's wealth, but potentially corrupt adjacent memory. There would also probably need to be database table conversions as well.

Now, if the above speculation about what's involved is close at all to reality, the devs would probably be reluctant to undertake that effort without a really good reason. Right now, there probably aren't very many players, percentage-wise, faced with the happy problem of having more than 2B inf to toss around. My best guess is we're stuck with workarounds for the foreseeable future.

Heh, that's a good point: the relative number of people affected by the cap has to be pretty small.

So why not just create a vendor that stores everything that is possible to carry.... like a bank, I'mk nerous carrying around so many items and inf. I'm ripe for a mugging !!

I love it when you talk all sexy, ZM.

They might be able to make "inf stored" an unsigned int and double the cap to 4 billion (or so). This reduces the scale of potential errors from "wrecking the data structure and dooming us all" to "maybe giving a lot of people 2^31 extra inf or having their net worth roll over and become negative."

Downsides:
1) Standard Code Rant
2) 4 billion is pre-exceeded by hundreds if not thousands of characters
3) Might only be easily applicable to character wealth and not to, say, item prices

... the more I think about it, the more it's not a real solution

What would you do by inflation...*hint hint*