Maximum Array Size

[BatBlaster]

What is the maximum size of an array, I want to make a turn based game where there could be potentially millions of elements in an array.

[Daynar]

I believe you could make an array infinite and if not you could faily easily code a system to have it just use another array when you reach one's max capacity.

However, this is absolutely not what you should do. Unless you're working on something revolutionary there is surely a more optomised way to do what you want to do. Having a million large array would be a huge memory hog even if it was completely boolean variables, and I assume you want to store far more complex variables than that.

[BatBlaster]

I suppose I should store the bats in groups. The idea is to make a game about White Nose Syndrome, the fungal disease killing North American bats, and maybe I should store them in groups of hundreds or by roost.

[BatBlaster]

I'll do it by roost and simulate kills by doing n random ints and incrementing a counter if it is below a save value.

[Daynar]

Well since it's turn based you could probably just use a large array if needed. For some reason I thought it was an rts and was a dumb. It would be better to haved more specific array though as it will take significantly shorter or sort through them and may take up less memory. (that said if your planning on using the arrays primarily for storage it probably wont matter too much if you have a huge million index array or a thousand tousand index arrays)

[BatBlaster]

I will just store counts of each species per roost

[Blind]

I did a stress test, using objects with just one vector and one alarm I started getting slowdown at about 400'000 objects and I'm on a pretty good PC.

So, maybe that many?

+Also, if the individual bats don't need any AI you could render them as particles - you can have many more particles than objects plus they can have physics properties.

[BatBlaster]

I was just going to handle them with counters. In another question, how do I figure out the distance between every instance of a roost with every other roost, instead of just the distance to nearest

[Blind]

From the roost, do a with(roost) - not sure if it would double-check self

[BatBlaster]

I got it, I figured it out with help from the game maker documentation

[BatBlaster]

Screencap: http://batblaster.deviantart.com/art/WING-Newsfeed-521748867
Also, how do i find the index of the greatest element in an array, and then the second greatest...

[Daynar]

var largest_index = 0
for(var i = 0; i < array_length_1d(array); i ++)
{
if array > array[largest_index]
largest_index = i
}