Specialities

Introduction

This page collects the strange properties of the original game I or others discover(ed).

Details

Property	Resolution in Open-IG
Ion Gun for the Morgath empire has bad width/height	Uses the correct width/height derived from the actual image tile
Significant amount of the building image has height greater than the actual tile, causing a transparent bottom part	Introduced a vertical offset parameter to shift down the image
On San Sterling, the Colony Hub is placed actually on an unbuildable region	Open-IG enforces strictly the buildability region, but the rendering allows the placement of buildings everywhere. The default building deployment of San Sterling is simply forced. Note that if the player looses the Colony hub there, he/she won't be able to build it back on the same area
On Center 4, the pack of Military spaceport, Civil Dev Center and Radar 2.0 were built on an unbuildable tile	Deployed the buildings around the obstacle
Planetary Shield 2 for the Sullep Empire has bad width/height	Using correct width/height
Exterior 11 of the Sullep Empire has two Colony hubs	Keep both for now
Outer 7 of the Dargslans has Colony Hub on an unbuildable area	Manually force building placement
Center 7 of the Free Traders has Colony hub, Mechanics Dev and Nuclear Plant on an unbuildable area	Manually force building placement
Magellan 6 of the Free nations has Colony hub placed on an unbuildable area	Manually forced the building placement
Exterior 4 has several buildings placed on one another (reported by TCH)	Only the visible buildings where placed
Colonize undiscovered (open-ig: known but not by name) planets (from gharrach) and causing rendering anomalies due population race inequal to colonizing race	As of 0.71: the gameplay mechanic is undeveloped, I guess I'll add a check to the Colonize button to error: this planet seems to be colonized. In theory, Open-IG's planet surface renderer can display multiple race's buildings on the same planet as my map works differently (e.g surface basemap + building location map). I considered the ability to build those human buildings which are not available to the alien races.
Building limits (from gharrach)	The original unpatched game had 5000 building limit. Patch 1.2 lifted this but the DOS game could not address more than 64MB of RAM, still imposing an arbitrary limit of 100000 buildings. Open-IG has no limitation on the number of objects, but you might need to run the game with more JVM memory: 384MB for example.
Some planets contain mutliple research centers. (from gharrach)	This was a deliberate decision from the original developers. I double checked the Open-IG planets and only Exterior 2 of the Morgath Empire contains Statical and Mechanical centers at once. I remember seeing it on one of the Garthog planets, but somehow I didn't placed them - if someone could send me a screenshot, or better yet, use the OpenIG to build the appropriate buildings on a planet, then hit CTRL+S to save it in an XML, then mail me at gmail's akarnokd account. As for the demolish one case: I guess I adhere to the original case by default and provide a cheat option to build anything (what is already researched).
There is a hack shown on Youtube. This allows the control of enemy vessels and order them to shoot at each other!	Definitely an unfixed bug or unhidden test cheat of the original game. It won't be in Open-IG that's for sure.
The English (only?) message videos are half the size as the Hungarian videos.	The reason is unknown, as there were plenty of CD space to store the full-sized videos. The current version should scale the videos to the appropriate size if necessary, but I plan to convert the entire existing resources into a more modern format (e.g. truly split the composite images to parts, split the video and audio to allow hi-res videos with other languages, rename resources for a more appropriate and enhancable model.
Nuclear Power Plant seem to have random power output per planet and per instance, ranging between 3500kW to 9000kW. Other power plant types have the same random property.	I discovered this when I implemented the power/worker allocation routine, and all of the alien planets turned into power-lacking rocks. I haven't decided how to resolve it: do a power-override option per instance and manually overpower the existing plants; randomize it somehow; or simply raise the default power output by 100%.
Battleships' fire range is too high, rendering space stations useless (if ship stopped on time within range of station) (from gharrach).	Unfortunately, I have absolute no idea about the ship properties (firepower, range, defense) as the original game often freezes after I use cheats to jump in the tech tree. I'm sure the extended range is deliberate - just look at the aliens not taking advantage of it. If you compare the firepower of a capital ship and a space station, most of the time the pack of space stations would win. This property seems to ease the players work. If I want skirmish and multiplayer, I'll have to balance things out. In campaign I'll keep this property.
Some alien non-existent buildings are present, e.g. Dribbs Stronghold.	Obviously a copy-paste error. Will be removed.
Some buildings are vertically off-by-one, for example, most Morgath buildings.	Fixing the vertical placement permanently (pre 0.8 used offset corrections on the matter)