Questions on Offsets

[Dirac]

Is [ljass]OFFSET=0x100000[/ljass] unsafe to use inside an array index for handles? why? is there any way to fix that other than using hashtables?

 

[Darthfett]

Safe to use for what?

 

[Nestharus]

He means to use in an array.


If you have over 8191 handles (all handles), your array will go boom.



For units and items, you can use indexing. For timers, you can either use a hashtable or T32 or one of the many timer tools I wrote. For most other handles it's going to be a hashtable lookup.

 

[tooltiperror]

Do widgets have their own separate pool for Handle Ids? What makes them special and safe to use Offsets with?

 

[Darthfett]

Do widgets have their own separate pool for Handle Ids? What makes them special and safe to use Offsets with?

I think by indexing he meant resources like AIDS, which use the custom value. You shouldn't use an offset with these unless you've got some sort of failsafe that lets even a removed item/unit get de-indexed.

It's safe to use the Offset for most other handles, (including timers, though timer systems makes the idea illogical), as any removal of these handles is done in the code (and it's therefore theoretically possible to de-index every destroyed handle). However, it's still not recommended, because as Nestharus mentioned, > 8191 handles means that handles can have an index outside this range. There's some stability reasons as well, but I'm not 100% sure about the origin of those issues. Hashtables just make it much simpler, and the speed difference is not large.

 

[Jedi]

You still can use offsets in your own map depends on your handle count, or you can add a constant boolean to your system

//set this to true if your map don't have over xxxx handles
private constant boolean USE_HANDLE_ID_OFFSET = true