Credits Question

[BigBucks]

I have a question about the credit system in Freelancer/Discovery.

It is in my understanding that the credit limit in Freelancer is around 2.1 billion credits, but I'm not sure exactly how that's calculated. Is it calculated based on the current sell price and value of the credits + ship/equipment, or is it based on the original value?

[Nodoka Hanamura]

It has to do with Freelancer being a 32bit application. If you go beyond a certain integer in a 32bit application, it'll rollover to 0. In computers, data like this are stored a hexadecimal addresses, the max value being FxFFFFFFFF. After that the computer can't do anything but reset the value to zero, 0x0 (which is shorthand for the full address, 0x00000000. 64bit applications have much more than this amount, to the point you could never reach the maximum amount of credits if FL were 64bit.

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[Joe Pickens]

It is based on each characters total credit amount plus the resale value if it's ship and all equipment.

[Toris]

I think he rather asked if equipment value on the account character is worth the price you can sell it for, or the price you buy it from the equipment vendor.

[Laz]

It has to do with Freelancer being a 32bit application. If you go beyond a certain integer in a 32bit application, it'll rollover to 0. In computers, data like this are stored a hexadecimal addresses, the max value being FxFFFFFFFF. After that the computer can't do anything but reset the value to zero, 0x0 (which is shorthand for the full address, 0x00000000. 64bit applications have much more than this amount, to the point you could never reach the maximum amount of credits if FL were 64bit.

This is incorrect. There are many cases within Freelancer where the game handles 64bit values. The problem was that the credits value was assigned an integer value, rather than a long value.

Edit: In FriendlyFire's words

32 bit just means it's using 32 bit addressing, it can support 64-bit values fine.

They didn't design the game such that 2.3B credits was a problematic limit. Only modders decided that ships costing hundreds of millions was necessary. In the base game you were rich well before hitting 100M, a limit 20x that wasn't a concern.

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[St.Denis]

To actually answer the question, it is the sale price to NPCs, of items/Ship + credits on the Ship.

I would always suggest you give yourself a slight margin, just in case of mistakes.

On a restart Ship, I keep a maximum of 1.9 billion credits.

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'I would like to be half as clever as some people like to believe they are'
Life is full of disappointments, it is how we handle them that helps to define us, as a person

[BigBucks]

Ah okay, thanks guys for the responses!