quote:

---

Originally written by Iabrochium:

Well, let's look at Blades of Exile as our example. In BoE, there is a maximum of 256 terrain, item and monster slots. This is because there are 8 bits (binary digits) used to define each terrain, monster and item, and the maximum number of things you can uniquely define with 8 bits is 2^8, i.e. 256.

At this point you may well say "why not use 16 bits (you have to use a multiple of 8 bits to store a number), so we can have 65536 different terrain slots?" Well, the problem with that is that it's very unlikely that most of those slots will be used, so every scenario file would be padded out with 60000+ terrain, item and monster slots that aren't used, which would take up exorbitant amounts of space. To prevent them from taking up space, Jeff would have to rewrite the way the game handles all these objects, which he's far too lazy and stubborn to do.

---