More than... + other

[Alan]

Is there *really* a need for more CEs? (Yes, Alan, I know your opinion about this -- you would ask for more CEs even if there were 1024 of them )

Well I haven't asked that one for a while

But after making confedit and getting a better internal knowlage of levels and CEs, I understand it would be very difficult to add even one single CE to RND at the moment. It would take a massive re-write of most things. I remember when it had 128 CEs.......you added another 128 "just like that", but that was easy since it still used one byte (still, I was impressed at the time)

I actually like optimizing levels and cramming more stuff in anyway, it's much more satisfying I think if I had 512 CEs to play with, I'd never get anything done! (imagine all that scrolling in the editor palette )

[Holger]

> I understand it would be very difficult to add even one single CE to RND at
> the moment. It would take a massive re-write of most things. I remember
> when it had 128 CEs.......you added another 128 "just like that", but that
> was easy since it still used one byte (still, I was impressed at the time)

Well, the reason was not the "256 element numbers still fit into one byte" thing (which could really have been true, and was true for other things in the past), but because when starting with the initial 128 CEs, I thought to myself "some crazy folks out there might need even more ;-)", and therefore kept the next 128 element positions reserved for just that purpose. So it was easy, yes. :-)

Adding another 256 (or going to 1024 CEs) would also be possible, by just using a new, unused element range, and converting the old CE element positions to that new range when loading a level that uses CEs. So it wouldn't be too much work indeed...

> I actually like optimizing levels and cramming more stuff in anyway, it's
> much more satisfying

I perfectly know what you mean! :-)

If you can do "everything", this sometimes stops the motivation for really doing "everything". Working with (or breaking) limits, doing things that were thought to be impossible before, is sometimes so much more fun! :-)

> I think if I had 512 CEs to play with, I'd never get anything done!

I think this is true, also for the above reason... ;-)