Raise Oni's particle class limit to 2048

[Iritscen]

Oni's maximum particle class limit is set to 2048, and a warning will appear if the game exceeds that. However, the actual limit is 1024, per Neo. Why? Because apparently there's a 32-bit variable used to link particles to classes ("particle reference"), and it has the following space allotted:

Version - 4 bits
Particle Index - 10 bits
Class Index - 10 bits
Block Index - 7 bits
Validity - 1 bit

Of course, this means that the Class Index only provides 2¹⁰, or 1024, spaces. My guess is that when Oni's classes got close to 1024 during development (they're over 900), someone at BWest increased the particle max number from 1024 to 2048 and forgot about this link that still had a 10-bit index.

Anyway, regardless of how it happened, Neo suggests stealing a bit from Version to add to Class. I guess that means moving Particle Index back one bit:

Version - 3 bits
Particle Index - 10 bits
Class Index - 11 bits
Block Index - 7 bits
Validity - 1 bit

I'm a bit out of my element here, but just conveying what Neo told me. He said that Version is essentially the unique ID of a particle within a certain class, assigned sequentially as new particles in that class are spawned. So I guess that taking a bit will mean reducing the number of particles that can be active in one class from 16 at a time to 8, but Neo doesn't think this will be a problem. I'm a bit less convinced myself, but perhaps there's another, better solution here.

Perhaps there's no need to worry about bit stealing if we hook the function that reads the 32-bit particle reference and replace it with our own. Why not replace the 32 bits with separate variables of our own for each element? Then we can make them whatever size we want. However, I'm not aware of what math that might be done on this reference bitmask, so maybe this isn't a good idea.

[Samer]

Just wondering anyone else going to try to address this ?

[Iritscen]

I'm sure they'll get to it when they can. There's three older outstanding bug reports for the Daodan which are all simpler than this one.

[Samer]

since there's current discussion about "limits" ... I hope this isn't forgotten.

[Christian]

Will not be done unless someone with god like reverse engineering skills like sfeli takes over this one or we get access to the source.