-1 crew= infininite?

Quick question to which the plug-in gurus (such as Martin Turner) should be able to answer in a matter of minutes. If a ship has -1 crew, does it have infinite crew? The crew field is MISSING for some funny reason in the EVO Bible. :blink: It says the next field tells how many crew members are on each type of ship. But the field explaining crew is missing. There is only a field explaining mission bits. So there is no way to know what -1 crew means. And no, dont say it was too simple to be included; "next field tells how many crew members are on each type of ship" clearly shows they were intending to have it. And by the same logic, something like shield should be missing because its one of the simplest things to understand. Yet it was included. Coraxus Redeeming plug says in its Readme that the crew has been maxed out, and the ships he uses have -1 crew.

Arg, I should know this, but I've never really played with crew figures that much. Anyway, I do know why he would say that the crew is maxed out and it comes up as -1: He used a hex editor to enter the value, and entered 0xFFFF. Thanks to our friend signed 2's complement notation, this becomes -1 in decimal.

Whether or not this has any meaning at all is left as an exercise to the reader.

Edit: I do know that if you really want to max out the crew in the normal way, you are best off entering 0x7FFF or 32767 in the field. That's the max value a 2-byte signed int field (used in most of EV's fields) will hold.

This post has been edited by Masamune : 09 December 2004 - 01:03 PM

Let me warn you: putting too high a crew value will make the capture probability fail when attempting to capture a fighter due to some calculations overflowing. Other than that, I dunno nothin'.

Zacha Pedro, on Dec 9 2004, 01:04 PM, said:

Let me warn you: putting too high a crew value will make the capture probability fail when attempting to capture a fighter due to some calculations overflowing. Other than that, I dunno nothin'.
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That annoys Polycon players to no end :rolleyes:...

All too true...