influence cap

Count me in as one of the 90%+ who still hasn't reached the 1 or 2 billion influence mark. It's not that I haven't played enough, I just end up spending the influence when needed like a druken' sailor when upgrading my enhancements for my toons. I mean it probably would be nice to have the PvP enhancements that sell for big influence bucks 1 bill on up. But having those prices so high forces me to go for the lower end (but still pricey) enhancements. Why buy only one PvP enhancement and have to wait until I can get enough influence to buy the other 5 PvP enhancements when i can buy all 6 cheaper enhancements at one time? I do know that the PvP enhancements might be a game changer for some toons based on all the benefits they offer. I play the market religiously and the other day just got a respec that I sold for a cool $300 mill in influence. I will have to agree that only about 10% really obtain this 2 billion threshold on a regular basis. My goal is not to reach that mark but for giggles, I may try it and see what all the fuss is about when you reach the big 2 billion mark. I may just have to crack open a beer and celebrate!

qft+1

The OS bitness, per se, is not the key factor, true.

The actual factor is going to be the math libraries of the compiler they're
using.

That said, the standard libraries for C, C++ back when this game was written
are almost certainly going to use long int as the signed integer variable type.

At that point, appx -2B to +2B is the hard limit.

Are there libraries that implement larger numbers? Certainly. Mathematica
was doing so in the 1980's...

I'd bet a bunch of inf though, that the code this game is written in very probably
uses the standard long int data type prevalent in the 32 bit OS implementations
of the compiler.

Can they change it? Sure.

Are they likely to? I very seriously doubt it.


Regards,
4

It depends on the specific language. That's one of the reasons why in .NET (which City of Heroes is NOT programmed in) not only defines your standard byte, int, and long, but also Int16, Int32, Int64, and even IntPtr so that "bitness" is as abstract or as specific as you need it to be for your particular use of it.

I know for a fact--because I was recently bitten by this--that in PHP, the "bitness" of your OS will determine how large an integer you can store in a variable. In PHP, all variables are signed. On a 64-bit OS, you can store numbers between -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 and 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. On a 32-bit OS, you can only store numbers between -4,294,967,296 and 4,294,967,295.

I think (though I'm sure I'll be corrected in short order if I'm wrong) that in C and C++, you need special libraries to handle 64- or 128-bit numbers on a 32-bit operating system, that they're not natively supported.