Is it possible to raise or remove the $2 billion limit?

OK, every time when my finances hit nearly $2 billion dollars, the board always invest around $300 to $700 million to a so called investment fund. When this is being done, my balances always show a negative value because the game sees this as a dividend expense.

This issue has been going on for the previous FM versions as well.

As the sale of players get even higher and inflation being taken into account, can I request SI to raise this limit? Is it even possible? Reason being, when I make a loss (actually this is not the case, but the funds being transferred to a dividend account shows as an expense), I am always afraid that I would not pass the Financial Fair Play. Every season, my finances state that I am about to fail in this area but somehow miraculously, I managed to pass it. I guess the Financial Fair Play does not take the dividend expenses into account.

Thanks and have a nice day.

In short its unlikely to be raised for a while, as it would increase the space the game saves take up and in general increase the total amount of memory.

I haven't had to dabble in it for a while, but I believe the finance field is a signed integer which is from somewhere along the lines of -2.1 billion through to +2.1 billion. I think the next is a 15 digit number, or has 15 0's after the first numbers.

I could double check this but I'm lazy and making a quick post from work but if I'm remembering right now a balance in game of £100,000 in the memory is:

0,000,000,100,000

There's 7 redundant characters already there for that number which still take up memory, if you increase the length of the field to the next level you end up effectively doubling the number of redundant characters in there still just to show £100,000.

I don't know if its been changed since FM09, but there are other examples of number limitations in the game because an AI controlled Real Madrid scored over 255 goals in the league but the game stopped counting at 255. I think for international players who scored more than that, or made more appearances would get reset to 0 and begin counting again as well.

It could quite easily be done but it doesn't justify the bloat it would add to the games total size.

It was put in to stop the much more serious issue of the money rolling around back to zero when it hit that point.

santy is correct that it's because of the data types used. To change that would cause the values to need more space to store, but it's also not just as simple as raising or removing the limit. The data type used for the value can only store so much, so can't be raised. You could change the type, but that would be a pretty fundamental change that would touch all areas of the game. I can only presume that it was decided against when they put in the investment fund fix, but the reasons are speculation.

How come a few digits take up so much space? How much space does a calculator have then? A terabyte?

A calculator does not remember the product of a calculation when you move to another calculation.

I would change my currency to euros, tht atleast works in EA sports FIFA(not fifa manager)

It wouldn't surprise me if that seemed to artificially bypass it Sankalan.

The source/core number would most likely still be the number in £'s but with a list of multipliers per currency and then multiplying them together but the output being a text field rather than number because in some currencies, two billion isn't all that much comparatively.

£1 is over 40,000 Iranian Rial though I think so by the time a team has like £50,000 in the bank they'd be approaching the limit if Iranian Rial is a base currency that it could be done in. Although its purely lazy guesswork on my behalf as to how I think I'd try to approach some of the problems SI would face when making the game.

I wouldn't be surprised if all monetary values were stored in one common way and converted for display, rather than being stored in whatever the user chooses.

I could understand the space limitation in the number of digits used for currency, but why is the limit 2 billion pounds? It should be able to go up to 10 billion minus 1 pounds (sorry to lazy to write it out), since the number 9 doesn't take up more space than a 0 or 2. Unless some other currency/multiplier is used which does reach the maximum number.

If you were to go broke, is this money reinvested into the bank balance? I would assume it would. I have just never gone far enough into a save to see a massive club go deep down (league 1 or 2).

I could understand the space limitation in the number of digits used for currency, but why is the limit 2 billion pounds? It should be able to go up to 10 billion minus 1 pounds (sorry to lazy to write it out), since the number 9 doesn't take up more space than a 0 or 2. Unless some other currency/multiplier is used which does reach the maximum number.

It's a count limit rather than a digit limit, for 32bit that limit is 4 billion & the 2 billion cap is because cash balances can be positive or negative.

I could understand the space limitation in the number of digits used for currency, but why is the limit 2 billion pounds? It should be able to go up to 10 billion minus 1 pounds (sorry to lazy to write it out), since the number 9 doesn't take up more space than a 0 or 2. Unless some other currency/multiplier is used which does reach the maximum number.

The number 2,147,483,647 (or hexadecimal 7FFF,FFFF16) is the maximum positive value for a 32-bit signed binary integer in computing. It is therefore the maximum value for variables declared as integers (e.g., as int ) in many programming languages, and the maximum possible score, money, etc. for many video games.

It's nothing to do with different numbers taking up different space. As soon as you hit the two billion mark (or 2,147,483,647 to be exact) then you simply don't have the space in a standard signed integer data type to represent a higher number.

EDIT: Having said that, and getting it down into pure exciting territory, but does make me wonder why an integer is used to represent it. I'm sure there's a good reason for it. Guessing it's related to the fact there'd be no point representing it as a double or anything because it's to the nearest pound, but would've thought it would get around this. Like I say, sure there's a pretty good reason for it.

I could understand the space limitation in the number of digits used for currency, but why is the limit 2 billion pounds? It should be able to go up to 10 billion minus 1 pounds (sorry to lazy to write it out), since the number 9 doesn't take up more space than a 0 or 2. Unless some other currency/multiplier is used which does reach the maximum number.

This is because the numbers are not stored as they are. They are stored internally in a format called binary format which is made up of 0's and 1's. 2 billion roughly corresponds to 31 1's. To put it simply, the 32nd bit acts as a sign ie. whether the number is positive or negative.

Barside and forameuss, out of curiosity, what aspects of the game do you think would converting FM to 64 bit integers have an impact on? Most of the user base already have 64 bit OSs, am I right?

Thanks for the explanation guys. As an IT guy, I should've known this

What if we had a second value called 'user-finances' which could also store 2bn and is assigned to a user. So we would have a second 2bn not for every but only for user clubs which stretches the possible finances to 4bn.

Then what if you get to 4 billion? Not really a scalable solution.

TBH who needs more that £2bn?

I'd still prefer club owners to be more prone to taking club profits for themselves, if I owned a club that made £100m profit I'd take most of that for myself & FM owners should do the same.

If you were to go broke, is this money reinvested into the bank balance? I would assume it would. I have just never gone far enough into a save to see a massive club go deep down (league 1 or 2).

I'd like to know this as well. Is the money genuinely in reserve, or is it just lost?