We can slowly get started. Development diaries. 1. So. Today I spent a great deal of time on a bug I noticed yesterday. When I simulated a colony's population for roughly 3,500 years, negative birth values suddenly appeared and were written to the arrays. These weren't two and a half miners; they were anti-miners! Several debugging factors compounded the problem, so I didn't catch the exact figures until the evening. And what do you think happened? The number of women who could potentially give birth simply exceeded two billion and a bit, hit the limit of a 32-bit integer, and miraculously flipped into the negative. I had to convert some calculations and variables to floating-point numbers. Now the limit is two billion newborns, but that occurs with a population of about 40 billion, so it should certainly be enough to simulate a whole planet as a single unit, if anyone manages to grab such a prize. And it happens somewhere around the year 4800... Since we're planning to play through a period of no more than 1,200 years, there's a decent margin. For the curious, here's why I didn't just make the limit enormous: I don't want memory and CPU use to grow without bound. It's very important to stay within 32-bit integer arrays. They're very fast. ;)
If you have questions, requests, or suggestions about this topic or the development diaries in general, don't hesitate to write!