Can SI please raise the 2 billion pound limit?

I feel that it is time for SI to raise the 2 billion pound limit. 2 billion pounds is not a lot of money these days and when my club's value reaches over 2 billion pounds, the value drops to 100 or 200 million pounds. Will Football Manager 2011 have this same irritating limit?

In all honesty, is it not a bit unrealistic for a clubs value to be more than 2 billion pounds?

Yes it will, because of the amount of numbers the game can hold.

SPAM SPAM SPAM.

2 billion pounds is not a lot of money these days and when my club's value reaches over 2 billion pounds, the value drops to 100 or 200 million pounds.

So it's not wrapping round to minus 2 billion any more? That's something to be thankful for I suppose.

Usually it just invests the money?

I think there are bigger issues for SI to sort out before indulging this kind of thing.

No football club should ever be worth £2billion, at least not without some serious inflation. Even Man City isn't WORTH more than £2billion; the OWNERS are worth a lot more, but the club isn't.

That the game even allows clubs like Cheltenham to acheive values of £100million in ten years is more of a fault than limiting its value to £2billion. The £2billion figure is set because it's not expected that any club can possible be worth that much. Ever.

2 billion not a lot of money? I envy you...

I don't see any problem with the limit, just bouncing down to 100m from there seems odd.

That the game even allows clubs like Cheltenham to acheive values of £100million in ten years is more of a fault than limiting its value to £2billion. The £2billion figure is set because it's not expected that any club can possible be worth that much. Ever.

I thought it was to do with the limitations of the game to store the required number?

Hence why it used to reset to minus numbers.

There IS a problem with the limit! Why can't SI make the limit 16 billion or 32 billion pounds? It is not that hard to do! Raising the limit further would then allow us to make the club more valuable, thus increasing the realism of this wonderful game!

2 bil is the limit because 32-bit programs can't deal with numbers greater than that...

So it's a technological restriction rather than SI setting a randomly chosen limit.

EDIT: Linkage... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2147483647

There IS a problem with the limit! Why can't SI make the limit 16 billion or 32 billion pounds? It is not that hard to do! Raising the limit further would then allow us to make the club more valuable, thus increasing the realism of this wonderful game!

Increasing realism would mean improving the financial model to avoid any club ever getting near that limit. Which it sort of does by investing the excess money but it's still an artificial solution as it should be impossible to raise that kind of money in the first place.

It's 2^31-1, which is a limitation on the data structure chosen. SI can increase this to a longer word length, say 2^63-1, but this will slow down things by quite a bit. And since it's likely only a couple of teams will realistically reach the 2^31-1 limit, it is not worth slowing down the game for the rest of the teams' computation just for this.

Another reason to make 64-bit FM...

is it not something to do with the coding

There IS a problem with the limit! Why can't SI make the limit 16 billion or 32 billion pounds? It is not that hard to do! Raising the limit further would then allow us to make the club more valuable, thus increasing the realism of this wonderful game!

Do you just post without reading or something?

Increasing realism would mean improving the financial model to avoid any club ever getting near that limit. Which it sort of does by investing the excess money but it's still an artificial solution as it should be impossible to raise that kind of money in the first place.

But shouldn't FM be inflation-proof?

In the year 2525, if Man is still alive, if Woman can survive, you may find.... That even Accrington Stanley have several billion quid stuffed under a mattress somewhere.

No football club should be reaching this figure anyway.

How you get 2b is beyond me. Anyway, doesn't the reserve investment feature stop you from ever getting there?

No football club should be reaching this figure anyway.

How you get 2b is beyond me. Anyway, doesn't the reserve investment feature stop you from ever getting there?

It is really not that hard. Well, at least on FM 2008 I started from quite bottom, Championship, about 2M£ cash and so on, but when I finally got my player machine rolling (good younger players, some even with World class -reputation, get game experience from other clubs so there are many players on loan who instantly play in my first team), I made about 80 M£ profit per year. Stopped career 2024 when I had about 600 M£ cash, club estimated value 1.4B£. But considering that I lost at least 1500 M£ because of ticket price-, sponsor-, coach-, scout- and stadium expansion bugs, that is not really hard to get 2 B£, if you start with team that has not these problems. If I would have started with Arsenal, played "as well as with this Championship team", I estimate that club's estimated value should be at least 3 B£ and 2B cash, no problem. If I could get that far of course...

Because of bugs, I started new career. Those bugs, excluding sponsor bug, were fixed on database. I started at Blue Square North with no improved squad, Semi-professional, stadium 2500 (270 seated), Basic training, minimal youth and so on. Just normal BSN team, with huge room for possible improvement. Finally, after 11 years, got richest clubs position 1. Estimated value 734M£. By the way, Total value of players sold: 88 M£, so my player machine is not started yet and I also played 7 seasons outside of my own stadium. I'm considering to play FM 2010 when next patch comes out so this career may end quite soon.

So with better starting team, 2 B£ is just piece of cake, at least on FM 2008. Only possible problem would be dividends, but I'm quite sure they are way too small to stop getting 2 B£.

I'm planning to try the same type career with FM2010, start BSN or BSS, and this time there is no need for database fixes, because ticket prices can rise and same goes to coach/scout restrictions. Tried this with "all players CA/PA 200 and go on holiday for 7 years" -career and no there seem to be no major problems.

you have to rember that value isnt just finances its also to do with player values, stadium value and youth/training facilites false take away expenditure, as a result £2B as a top end team for years on end isnt that hard an ask. If you have massive high valued stadium, and top youth and training facilities thats an easy £1.5B plus player values without to much of an expediture.

The chairman should, once you pass £1bn begin removing it to to put into "investments" for the clubs future - that you never see again (these should be accessable in the future if your club hits troubles). The game still has to use space in memory for the empty slots, its not like they can raise the limit from £2bn to £10bn because thats not how it works. They have to change it to a different number format, that is 15 or 18 digits long I think... uses far too much memory for all the data in the finances to be switched up to this to accomodate it at the end of the day.

No football club should be reaching this figure anyway.

How you get 2b is beyond me. Anyway, doesn't the reserve investment feature stop you from ever getting there?

What he said. And, should you get close, and your board invests money "for the future" - and then you go broke (or just buy a shed load of players for too much money) - the board will inject that money back into your club.

Actually, SI could easily double the limit... But the effect would be that all hard cash values would be in increments of £2. No more £15 seats, just £14 or £16.

Now, I don't think that'd be a huge issue, so if SI ever do decide to increase it (pre 64bit FM) it'll probably be this way.

After all, you can have 20billion Norwegian Krona in your account. They just have to make SIbucks the internal currency, with SI1 being worth £2.

As long as the loop doesnt take it down to too low a figure, I see no benefit of having a higher limit.

After all, you can have 20billion Norwegian Krona in your account. They just have to make SIbucks the internal currency, with SI1 being worth £2.

Indeed. And I think it's for this reason that we should all be glad that SI weren't a Zimbabwean (or Japanese, for a more realistic but less humorous example) company when they started coding FM.

Another reason to make 64-bit FM...

We don't need 64-bit processors to reference large amounts of money. We just need larger word sizes and with larger word sizes comes much slower (in terms of proportion) computation.

Actually, SI could easily double the limit... But the effect would be that all hard cash values would be in increments of £2. No more £15 seats, just £14 or £16.

Now, I don't think that'd be a huge issue, so if SI ever do decide to increase it (pre 64bit FM) it'll probably be this way.

After all, you can have 20billion Norwegian Krona in your account. They just have to make SIbucks the internal currency, with SI1 being worth £2.

This goes against the programming concepts such as Model-View-Controller. You're basically asking for a bit-shift - unfortunately, to convert things back, we need to bit-shift backwards. So to gain additional space for perhaps just one or two clubs who may remotely go close to this limit, you've changed the financial computation for every single club in the database. In addition, if SI have used processor-specific code such as using registers, this will force them to recode these as well. You also lose precision with bit-shifts.

It's not as easy as increasing the word size. Increasing the word size leads to wastage for clubs with little money and slows processing down (on 32-bit processors, it's 2 words). Conversion for processing these longer words with shorter words also adds to computation time. In addition, RAM usage may shoot up because you're asking to store more data. All because 1-2 teams may reach 2 billion pounds. I mean, come on. It's simply not worth it at the moment. When 64-bit processors become commonplace, then SI can start thinking about perhaps adding more bits.

Yeah, 64 bits are not needed but it makes this thing much more easier. As you responded to r0x0r, with 64 bits there is no real reason not to do this.

Yeh this is stupid.

I'm Real Madrid and I have 1.95 Billion pounds, however it's really really frustrating because that's no where near enough and I really want at least 2.95 Billion pounds. Without that extra billion my game is ruined because I don't have enough money to do everything I want. So i'm really considering not playing anymore because of it.

It's really unrealistic. How do you expect someone to manage a football club with anything less than 2 billion pounds?

Yeah, 64 bits are not needed but it makes this thing much more easier. As you responded to r0x0r, with 64 bits there is no real reason not to do this.

Wrong. Although 64-bit processors do have their advantages, it's still not clear whether performances scales. I don't think it does - 32-bit processors will process 32-bit words fairly quickly, but the speed at which a 64-bit processor processes a 64-bit word will not be the same.

The rest of the game would have to scaled just to meet it ideally to avoid various conversions, which cost computational time.

Just because a processor doubles its processing word size, it doesn't mean we can immediately double everything else. It is possible that a standard in the future won't use all 64 bits anyway, possibly 48 with the rest used for other processing.

32-bit words will always have a place in the world even if 64-bit processors become commonplace. Doubling storage requirements in terms of backing storage and RAM means it makes little sense to simply move over into the 64-bit world fully. I'd argue there is no need for 64 bits to represent money, and I'd argue against 48 bits too. To me, 32 bits is sensible and arguably only one team in the entire world has it at the moment - Manchester City - and the owners there do not plough everything they have into the club.

The fact is that there will always exist some possibility that no matter what limit we set, we will find a situation where this is not enough. 32-bit words make the most sense as they are commonplace in C++ (or whatever the game is written in).

Yeh this is stupid.

I'm Real Madrid and I have 1.95 Billion pounds, however it's really really frustrating because that's no where near enough and I really want at least 2.95 Billion pounds. Without that extra billion my game is ruined because I don't have enough money to do everything I want. So i'm really considering not playing anymore because of it.

It's really unrealistic. How do you expect someone to manage a football club with anything less than 2 billion pounds?

Are you joking? 1.9 billion pounds is more than enough needed. If you can't get things right with almost 2 billion pounds of cash you need to overlook your transfer strategies. It's not the cash that's the problem.

Honestly, I used to be "raise the cap!!1" too. But if they've gone 64-bits, then you can after 15-20 seasons with the right club and right skills become unstoppable. You can buy almost an entire team of the best players out there, each for 100-120 million £. Well, you still can. But even more so then. If you had, e.g., 10 billions of pounds after 25 seasons or something.. there's just no limits at all. The game will become easymode.

I'd say raise the cap to 2.5 and make it bank balance only and not 'club value'. Then let it stay there.

Bits and bits. 64 bit technology doubles amount of registers which is huge improvement. 48 bit memory space is found on AMD-processors, but 48 bits used for calculations, sounds strange because 64-bit technologtpy has given instruction set. Double storage size? No. Of course we already have 128 bit SSE-instructions on use and they do not quadruple storage amount.

Are you joking? 1.9 billion pounds is more than enough needed. If you can't get things right with almost 2 billion pounds of cash you need to overlook your transfer strategies. It's not the cash that's the problem.

Honestly, I used to be "raise the cap!!1" too. But if they've gone 64-bits, then you can after 15-20 seasons with the right club and right skills become unstoppable. You can buy almost an entire team of the best players out there, each for 100-120 million £. Well, you still can. But even more so then. If you had, e.g., 10 billions of pounds after 25 seasons or something.. there's just no limits at all. The game will become easymode.

I'd say raise the cap to 2.5 and make it bank balance only and not 'club value'. Then let it stay there.

I'm not expert, but I'd have said it was fairly obvious he's taking the proverbial Michael

And you can't just "raise the cap", it would require a change in the whatever-have-you m'thingy that FM runs off... (okay, I wasn't paying close attention)

Edit: At least I hope he was joking

Bits and bits. 64 bit technology doubles amount of registers which is huge improvement.

Its not double, its much, much more than that.

32-bit = 2^32 (about 4GB address space)

64-bit = 2^64 (about 16 EXABYTES, which is more than 4 BILLION times what 32-bit can address)

However, all 64-bit versions of Microsoft operating systems currently impose a 16 TB limit on address space and allow no more than 128 GB of physical memory due to the impracticality of having 16 TB of RAM. Processes created on 64-bit versions of Windows are allotted 8 TB in virtual memory for user processes and 8 TB for kernel processes to create a virtual memory of 16 TB.

Doubling the word size of the bank balance will double the storage requirements for the bank balance.

It also leads to wasted space for clubs with barely anything in the bank - a lot more than usual.

Its not double, its much, much more than that.

32-bit = 2^32 (about 4GB address space)

64-bit = 2^64 (about 16 EXABYTES, which is more than 4 BILLION times what 32-bit can address)

However, all 64-bit versions of Microsoft operating systems currently impose a 16 TB limit on address space and allow no more than 128 GB of physical memory due to the impracticality of having 16 TB of RAM. Processes created on 64-bit versions of Windows are allotted 8 TB in virtual memory for user processes and 8 TB for kernel processes to create a virtual memory of 16 TB.

The number of registers is doubled from x86-32 (8: eax, ebx, ecx, edx, ebp, esp, esi, edi) to x86-64 (16: rax, rbx, rcx, rdx, rbp, rsp, rsi, rdi, r8, r9, r10, r11, r12, r13, r14, r15).

The problem you're looking at really is the amount of memory wastage in a save file increasing the limit creates. Very few clubs get to the point where they make use of the full 10 digits available.

Even the wealthier clubs, the vast majority manage to use 8 of the digits, meaning 2 are excess memory. For the vast majority of clubs in the game, they use 5 or less I'd wager. The next step up from Long Integer is just Long if I'm remembering rightly, which is something like a 20 digit number unsigned, and uses twice as many bytes of memory.

Even at 64 bit, there will still be a rather substantial amount of memory wastage because, who the hell is going to have a bank balance of:

8,500,000,000,000,000,000.

For most clubs in league 2 or below the switch to this format would see their data as:

0,000,000,000,000,125,000.

Even the richest of players who get their budget to 10 billion would still be:

0,000,000,010,000,000,000

It's nice in theory, but I can only imagine how much it would bump up memory in saves, it is more than easily enough done on 32 bit systems all they have to do is change the long integer selection to "long" and its done. But the amount of data that then has a knock on effect, all club finances for all the teams would be doubled in memory. I'm not sure if enough compression could be done to get save files down to a reasonable size, and surely it would shorten the life of games as the save size only increases as you progress in the game.

I wouldn't expect to be spot on with it all here as its been 4 years since I was last looking at all this stuff, but it seems to be a disproportionate change which would only be of benefit to at most 2 or 3 clubs in a save.

I think there are bigger issues for SI to sort out before indulging this kind of thing.

No football club should ever be worth £2billion, at least not without some serious inflation. Even Man City isn't WORTH more than £2billion; the OWNERS are worth a lot more, but the club isn't.

That the game even allows clubs like Cheltenham to acheive values of £100million in ten years is more of a fault than limiting its value to £2billion. The £2billion figure is set because it's not expected that any club can possible be worth that much. Ever.

It's not about club value is it? I thought the OP meant when he gets £2b in the bank?

The problem you're looking at really is the amount of memory wastage in a save file increasing the limit creates. Very few clubs get to the point where they make use of the full 10 digits available.

Even the wealthier clubs, the vast majority manage to use 8 of the digits, meaning 2 are excess memory. For the vast majority of clubs in the game, they use 5 or less I'd wager. The next step up from Long Integer is just Long if I'm remembering rightly, which is something like a 20 digit number unsigned, and uses twice as many bytes of memory.

Even at 64 bit, there will still be a rather substantial amount of memory wastage because, who the hell is going to have a bank balance of:

8,500,000,000,000,000,000.

For most clubs in league 2 or below the switch to this format would see their data as:

0,000,000,000,000,125,000.

Even the richest of players who get their budget to 10 billion would still be:

0,000,000,010,000,000,000

It's nice in theory, but I can only imagine how much it would bump up memory in saves, it is more than easily enough done on 32 bit systems all they have to do is change the long integer selection to "long" and its done. But the amount of data that then has a knock on effect, all club finances for all the teams would be doubled in memory. I'm not sure if enough compression could be done to get save files down to a reasonable size, and surely it would shorten the life of games as the save size only increases as you progress in the game.

.

have you got more than 100MB free hard drive space on your computer? are you telling me that the new save file would be even close to 100MB?

nuff said.

It's nice in theory, but I can only imagine how much it would bump up memory in saves, it is more than easily enough done on 32 bit systems all they have to do is change the long integer selection to "long" and its done. But the amount of data that then has a knock on effect, all club finances for all the teams would be doubled in memory. I'm not sure if enough compression could be done to get save files down to a reasonable size, and surely it would shorten the life of games as the save size only increases as you progress in the game.

Alternatively, you could switch it to floating-point. Still only requires 32bits to store the data. Plus you'd be able to have a balance of up to £340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (apologies if I've missed a zero out there!). Sure you'd start to lose accuracy as the value gets really big, but when you have billions in the bank then the odd tenner here-and-there is irrelevent anyway. And for the clubs on the poverty-line, you'd have the benefit of increased accuracy - so you can represent the pennies too.

Alternatively, you could switch it to floating-point. Still only requires 32bits to store the data. Plus you'd be able to have a balance of up to £340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (apologies if I've missed a zero out there!). Sure you'd start to lose accuracy as the value gets really big, but when you have billions in the bank then the odd tenner here-and-there is irrelevent anyway. And for the clubs on the poverty-line, you'd have the benefit of increased accuracy - so you can represent the pennies too.

This is indeed a realistic amount of money! Why can't SI make this 340 (whatever amount of zeros) pounds be the ultimate limit? I just hate the statement, "the club has invested a certain amount of money into the reserve fund"!

have you got more than 100MB free hard drive space on your computer? are you telling me that the new save file would be even close to 100MB?

nuff said.

Not just hard disk space. RAM usage as well - the more bits you use to store data, the more bits you have to load into memory as well. It could have other knock-on effects like multiplying a long by an int - you'd need to convert the int to a long first, before you can multiply it.