» Fri Dec 16, 2011 5:56 pm
He took advantage of two things: the fact that elemental damage enchantments are 'cheaper' than absorb health, thus can have either more charges or a higher maximum, and the fact that the engine is coded to run off the higher of the two maxima when dual-enchanting something. To elaborate:
-all magical effects have a base cost to use, which varies with the effect; 'damage X' tend to be cheap, while status effects (such as paralyze) tend to be expensive
-this cost and the size of soul being used are run through an equation, which regulates the ratio between enchantment strength and number of charges
-since the equation only has two variables, when applying two enchantments at once it uses the one that will generate the highest number of charges when determining said ratio
-because two effects are being applied at once, the resultant ratio is applied to both at once as well, which allows the more expensive effect to exceed its normal limit
That last line is where the aforementioned 'bug' comes in, as the different costs cause a conflict when trying to determine the proper value to use. When solving an equation you can only apply one value to each variable at a time; since in this case there are two values to choose from for the effect cost, you have to arbitrarily pick one as you're not going to iterate (run again) the equation. In order to resolve this they chose to have it pick the lower one, when what they should have done is code it to iterate once and then apply the second ratio as well.