Beta reporting procedure - and a few bugs

from Stardock Forums
I posted this to the Stardock Galciv newsgroup as well
but all the traffic seems to be here.

Hello,

I'm not seeing any traffic in this newsgroup, which is unexpected given the release of the beta. Lacking any information in this area in the beta itself I'll ask my questions here.

1. What is the preferred mechanism to report problems encountered with the beta?

2. Is there a pre-existing classification system for issues? I.E. bug, feature request, typo, etc...

3. Is there an accessible database of known issues / reports so we don't duplicate an existing, known issue?

4. With subsequent improvements to the beta is there an accesible list of what is supposedly fixed with each release?

5. The game is in need of documentation of at least some type. I realize that this is a beta and that the documentation is often left as the last thing to work on but there are quite a few features in the game
for which it's impossible to know whether things are working as they should without some knowledge of what a given feature is supposed to do.

6. Given that some things are known to be non-functional at this time is there a central list that we can look so we know what is supposed to be working and what isn't at a given time?

Just for the sake of completeness here are two bug reports. :-)

a) In the Reseach screen, at the bottom center of the screen is a little scrolling window that tells you that this is the technology window. Technology is misspelled.

b) During a battle between one of my ships and an enemy ship I witnessed the display of -1 hitpoints for my ship just before the game crashed unceremoniously to the desktop. Whatever was corrupted at that point hung around at some level because I had to reboot the computer before I could resume play for any length of time (Windows 2000).

And a feature request (or clarification request)

i) When saving the game there doesn't appear to be any way to have more than 1 saved game at a time. Is this the case? If not how does one differentiate between games at save and restore time?

Cheers
Magus
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
You can post bugs here in the forum. We prefer that you post separate bugs in separate posts, to make it easier to go through the posted bugs. This also helps to cut down on redundant posts. So a subject title that indicates what type of bug is being reported is helpful.

Typos, grammar mistakes and spelling are low on our priority list at the moment. Before we release the game, we'll run our input files through a spell checker.

I keep a list of bugs that have been reported but not fixed, but thus far I haven't made it available to anyone outside of the development team. When in doubt, report it. Doesn't hurt us to be reminded. :)

Brad is working on the documentation (if he hasn't finished it already)...in the mean time, if you have questions, post it here and someone should be able to help you.

Also, before you report a bug, check to see if you can reproduce it with your most recent save game, because a lot of times I'll ask you if you can. :)

Yes, the game only currently supports 2 save games: the autosave and the game that you save when you select save from the menu. (That's the one that creates test.sav and the test folder in your data folder.) To restore an autosave game, pick restore game from the opening menu. You can load the other saved game by clicking on Load Game from the opening screen or the options menu. If you want to save your game at multiple stages, you can rename your test.sav file and the test folder so that it won't be written over. Or you could just rename the whole save game folder to back up both the autosave and the save game. Multiple save games will be supported as soon as we get the screen done.