Introduction and some experiments

Hi all, this is my first post so first I'll introduce myself. I'm a bronze league player in the beta under the name Larbrokur, big fan of SC2 and also Crota's SC2 shoutcasts. In non-gamer life I'm a PhD student in computer science at Berkeley - where believe it or not the AI faculty work on AI for the original Starcraft.

Just for fun, after winning a short game I decided to try and test some of the limits of the game. Here's what I discovered:

If the spawn larva ability is used repeatedly, you can generate up to a maximum of 144 larvae across the map. Split across 8 hatcheries this was 18 larvae per hatchery.

The maximum number of zerglings one can have is 400, limited only by food. By the time I ran out of minerals, I had 400 zerglings and 376 overlords, for a total of 776 units. The maximum number of overlords (of anything?) you can select at one time appears to be 255.



At my maximum resources, I had 51205 minerals and 25135 gas. Since there were a total of 7*8 + 6 = 62 mineral patches with 1500 minerals each, this was only about 55% of the minerals on the map. Similarly there were 16 Vespene geysers with 2500 gas each, so I had only 62% of the gas on the map. Quite a lot got spent during the game (and during my silly amassing of hydras and mutas post game). If I had spent all the minerals on the map on zerglings and overlords, I should have been able to amass up to 730 overlords, which would have put my total units at 1130 (would I have reached a limit before getting to this point? I don't know.)

This raises the question, if I got out the map editor and gave myself infinite minerals, how many overlords could I have before the game stopped me, and what would the limiting factor be? The number that can fit on the map? The size of a 16 or 32-bit integer? Some limit imposed by the amount of geometry DirectX or the video card can handle at one time?

I also saw some really strange effects when moving the overlords - they could get into feedback loops where instead of spreading out they would stay clumped together and drift gradually in a particular direction without stopping. I guess even for air units pathfinding can break down if there are too many units. And if you're wondering, yes, my framerate dropped (I was probably getting no more than 3 fps with them all onscreen).

The replay was over 2 hours and the replay file was only 453 KB - according to Wikipedia it's compressed in Blizzard's MPQ format using LZMA, so it's not going to get much smaller than that. They did a great job keeping replay files tiny, although being able to randomly seek in replays - e.g. by using key frames with complete game state - would be really, really helpful.

Thoughts?

-Larbrokur

 

Nice work and welcome to the forum!

I think you can keep getting Overlords until you get the 'Warning unit can not be placed' message.
In other words, until the map is completely covered with Overlords.

 

Or till your SC2 crashes from too many unit sprites to keep track of and animate.

 

your computer should have blown up by now...lol

welcome to the forums.

 

the WC3 engine can handle much more in a custom game, and i doubt the SC2 engine could possibly be worse. not sure if maximum unit selection could be changed, but things like larva count, supply, etc. can easily be edited.

how smoothly was the game running when they existed, but off-screen? and what are your computer specs?

 

Not bad at all actually, the engine was not struggling - my laptop fan didn't even turn on, which means I probably didn't even saturate a single CPU core. My specs:

HP dv8t quad edition laptop (customized)
• Intel Core i7-720QM Quad Core processor (1.6GHz, 6MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 2.8 GHz
• 8GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
• 500GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
• 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 230M
• Running at 1920 x 1080 x 32, texture quality Ultra, graphics quality Medium

 

good to know that it's perfectly playable otherwise. and on a mobile chip at 19x11, too... this sounds like it should be smooth as butter on even midrange video card.

 

Ah, I LOVE thread like that!

I hope I can get some usefull information, too.

I read somewhere else that the maximum per hatchery is 19 larvae. But this needs to be verified. And as my SC2 doesn't work at the moment, I can't do that ...

 

I've reached a sort of a limit when it comes to max units. There were probably 3000-4000 or so units and once your at that point some of your units will become non-responsive. The game will say no units can handle that command(when simply trying to move your units).

It gets worse when trying to create more units, it seems like any units created after the cap will be non-responsive (ignores commands) and any units before the cap are fine and can move freely.

 

Is there a hard cap in the number of sprites (all players units + buildings) in the game. Can you build enough so the game simply says "nope you can't build anything anymore". Iwonder if Blizzard have something like this in the game.

 

probably is one, but it's probably in the millions, at least. i had a hard time reaching it in warcraft 3.

 

Welcome to the forums dcoetzee! Have fun!

 

Welcome to the forums, but I have to say I am a bit disappointed in your aptitude as a researcher.

If you're going to make that many overlords, then you should have tested the game's maximum tolerance for an overseer overload into infested terran drop.

 

Thank you. To be fair, that was pre-patch 13, back when Infestors had Infested Terran. That'd be a fun experiment.

 

I noted the recent but still several days old posting date and was wondering about that, but I was too lazy to do a date check against the patch date