I was looking through mod releases and saw that obelisk thing, and it made me wonder. Has Mr. Tanbar ever suggested there being prefabs other than doors in Cortex Command? Like windows, crates, etcetera that aren't just terrain, but prefabs that if shot enough would gib?

I don't think Data ever mentioned placable MO bunker decorations. Also keep in mind that the more objects you place that you can hit (GetsHitByMOs = 1) the higher your MOID count will be. If the MOID counter gets above 255 (rather small, in my opinion) MOs will randomly gib to clear up the counter.

Oh yeah, forgot the Crabomb effect.

Why did Data make a limit at all anyway? It doesn't make sense that he'd have to do that with the modern computers of today.

Probably laziness, though the true reason may be lost to the sands of time.

Maybe it's to contain the MOIDs in CC reality, so real life stuff doesn't start blowing up.

Well I hope it's gone in B24...

...and I don't think it's Mr. Tanbar...

I still go with the palette theory.
8bit = 256 colors = 256 MOIDs
If the MOID palette was bigger, then it would allow more MOIDs, or alternatively if MOIDs didn't use color to be recognized, maybe the limit wouldn't exist.

Press Ctrl+M until all of the objects are highlighted in a different colour. That colour corresponds to one of 256 colours in CC's palette (excluding 255,0,255 because it marks transparency). Right there is one of the reasons that MOIDs are limited to 255.

I hope Data didn't set the MOID limit just because he didn't have enough colors to mark them.

Probably not, but it makes it a lot easier to keep track of the different IDs. There's also the problem that in almost any case with over 255 MOIDs, the game starts to lag pretty badly anyway.

Surely it's more the fact that he's just using a predefined set-size array and found it convenient to link it to palette colours? He mentioned expanding the limit at some point as fairly trivial, if I remember correctly..

I talked to him about it myself, and he said that unless it was absolutely needed for a campaign mission, it would take too much work to bother. I have to assume it's something related to an array size that needs to be used (maybe it's an Allegro thing?), as pretty much everything in CC is based on an array of 256.

Secretly, Data's using ♥♥♥♥ allegro, and he's using a shitload of pointers going to a single variable set as 2^8 to define the size of all his arrays.