In future vers. will it be possible to... - remove unit limits, etc

[Nagelfar]

will, down the road in a future upgrade, Myth II ever have it's unit/item capacity greatly expanded? So I could make a map with, say, hundreds upon hundreds of thrall without it randomly removing units upon startup?

[Myrd]

Right now the limit for maximum visible monsters at any given time is 400. There are no plans to increase this for the next Myth II update, version 1.5.1, which is to be released fairly soon. If you're making a co-op map, you should be able to be within those limits and still make it "seem" as if there are a lot more units, by only making enemy units appear as they are needed with scripting.

[Nagelfar]

Yeah, but I just wanted a chance to cake the whole length of the battlefield thickly with smoldering ash & limbs

So though it's not planned, it is possible for the future?

[The Elfoid]

I want a game with 800+ units. It would be a melee rush of d00m. I just wanna see a large scale melee battle, since they look so great in Myth III and Myth II's fights are so cool.

[Myrd]

Eh? Myth III has the same limit of 400 visible monsters at a time.

[Sam The Butcher]

What is the reason for keeping the unit limit to 400? I can see that it would have been originally cause comps at the time couldn't handle more than that. Now though with high speed connects and fast comps 1000 units wouldn't be a prob. Would it be difficult to change the limit? It would make for some awesome multiplayer games. Also with using half scale units like some of us have been working on you can zoom out and see all of them. Maybe if it wouldnt be to hard, you could consider raising the unit limit.
Thanks

[ChrisP]

Apparently, the more units moving around, the more chance of a multi-player game going OOS. Even at 400, you don't want to have that many for a multi-player game. As much as I love the idea of huge armies, I keep my maps at a 228 unit limit just to be safe.

I'm not a programmer, but from how I understood it, fixing this particular OOS problem would require a major change to the fudamental structure of the program, hence, it probably won't happen for quite some time, if ever.

[Pistol_Pete]

Sam, Myth is a game about moderate amounts of units fighting it out. If you want hundreds of units fighting it out, check out Rome: Total War. Honestly, that game sounds like what you want. And R:TW has *major* saved replay issues, and a goodly amount of multiplayer bugs, so just having more powerful hardware and better internet conncetions doesn't mean combat with thousands of combatants will work flawlessly.

[TopGunZ]

There's not much room for stratagy anyway with a mondo melee rush/fight. Too much chaos! And yes a lot of carnage is exciting, but no need to overdo it. I think 400 is a good limit.

[mauglir]

Another problem is you wouldn't just be able to raise the unit limit, you'd have to raise the object and projectile limits too -- a LOT. Even just a handful of units suffering hard deaths generates dozens of projectiles and objects. Now imagine hundreds of units suffering hard deaths within a period of about 10 seconds or so. That's a huge amount of projectiles, objects and physics number crunching data for the game to spew out. This would essentially require returning to step one of QA testing for the entire game, just to make sure things were playable in reasonably number of settings and circumstances.

[TopGunZ]

If you want mass numbers of fighting to occur try Mazzarins Demise. I use ths level to take out my anger...

[Sam The Butcher]

I understand the probs that could accure with raising the unit limits. Hell no I dont want to play Total War series. I played Shogun Total War. It was alright except I kinda look at the Total War games that they take away ppl that could be playing Myth. The higher unit numbers isnt just about having a big nearly uncontrolable fight in the middle. More what I was thinking was with making units half scale was to have like 8 teams with large armies fighting. At half scale there is enough room on a map to do this. I have a partially finished map with the units half scale that I have 400 units on. While testing it out I had them all mid fighting. I was shooting lots of flame arrows and bombs. The FPS rate dropped from b4 the fighting at 300 or so to about 260. That is offline. Online I usually start at about 240 fps. So even with massive dead bodies and fires I still had a nice smooth game. That is why I thought that a higher unit level could be totally do able.

[ChrisP]

One day perhaps, Sam. You're not alone in wanting this, but it is a much bigger step than one would think, and once started, it will take a long time and lots of work to implement.

[William Wallet]

As I recall, it's not so much the computer that dictates the slowness when there's 400 guys on screen, but Myth itself. Isn't it just because it's an old game, an old engine, that wasn't designed for that kind of action? If someone spent ages reworking it to specifically handle 100s, maybe 1000s of units, then of course it would play reasonably well.

[Nagelfar]

I simply want more units for single. I'm not into making maps enough to know how to script very well yet, so I just want to throw a ton of Thrall down on a big open map and see how many Trow it takes to wipe them all out.

Maybe each version it can be upped a little at a time, maybe to 500, and then later if the engine is tweaked to run more smoothly on a later version, to 750 or 1000.