dmantione

Reply to World of Goo, a fantastic present in PC Gaming GalCiv2 Forums

I want to buy the Linux version of this game. Will it be available on Impulse when it is out?

Reply to SLI? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Since, I get the maximum vsync'ed framerate of 85Hz at 1280x960 at 4x anti-aliasing on my Radeon HD2600, would there be any point of throwing multiple graphics cards at the game?

Reply to Best "file rename' utility??? in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

Get yourself a book and learn how to use the Lego bricks of the command line. It'll give you everything that all those thousands utilities out there can achieve and more. Wether you want you a file rename, or extract data from an MP3, JPG or any other file content, there exists a Lego brick that can do it, while those utilities always have a fixed functionality. I'm sure the rename operation you desire can be achieved by the entering a well thought out command line on a Bash shell.

Reply to Adventures in manual activation. in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

It is possible to copy the game files from a computer running Impulse to another computer and run the activate.exe, then choose for e-mail activation. Then e-mail the activation request on a computer with internet connection, the returned data can be typed into activate.exe. Never tried this, but the possibility exists.

Reply to Product Activation? in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

This happens if you run Galciv2 on a Windows installation for the first time and Impulse hasn't done the activation for you. Just do what it says and you can play. Your serial number is shown in Impulse and on the webpage that did appear after you placed your order and on the e-mail that has been sent after your purchase, and should also be in/on the box in case you have a retail copy.

Reply to Adding defense and weapons to Starbases in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Note that you need "Starbase Fortification" and not "Starbase Defences" in order to build modules that defend your starbase.

Reply to A good High Memory MB in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

8 memory ranks is the maximum most desktop chipsets can handle, which if the motherboards needs to support dual rank DIMMs (which is the majority of DIMMs) limits the number of memory slots to 4. Using 2GB DIMMs, larger ones are IMO not financially attractive, you get a maximum of 8GB memory with desktop hardware. If you want more, desktop hardware is no longer sufficient, you need workstation/server boards. To allow more memory ranks per channel, AMD uses registered me

Reply to Weekend Impulse Sale! in GalCiv II News GalCiv2 Forums

[quote who="DivineWrath" reply="4" id="1974004"] GalCiv 1 Ultimate Edition: The discount only seems to apply to the digital download only. If I were to order a disc, it would cost me the full normal price. Is this intential? [/quote] I am confident it is intentional, it is clear they want to do large number of small sells. The amount of work to ship a $50 game is the same a for a $4 game, therefore doing a large number of small sells would mean a lot of work for the employee

Reply to DA has weird behaviour of race names in RaceConfig.xml in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

I have another one. In DA, techs are grouped: Miniaturization However, the group is not exempt from cheat flags, translate it and you get a cheat flag. Somehow it seems that Dread Lords was designed with localization in mind as regarding the texts that can be localized it is almost perfect (but still many "English" assumptions in the "business code". For DA I get the impression th

Reply to Just bought Gc2 and both expansions, where do i start?! in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

You'll learn some background information by playing the original, but not much. I think it's not wrong to start with an expansion, but I suggest you play the original one time, then perhaps the Dread Lords campaign, and then switch to the expansion packs. I don't recommend playing the original to death before trying the expansions, this will fatigue your appreciation for the gameplay a bit (allthough a game this good doesn't get boring that fast).

Reply to GalCiv II on Linux? Should I bother? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

OpenGL needs a surface to draw on. There are several library that can provide OpenGL this surface, the normal unportable way to do it in Windows is via DirectDraw. If you then port to Linux you need to rewrite this code, because on Linux you need an X11 surface. This is still considered "easy to port", because only the OpenGL initalization is platform specific, while all the game engine code is portable. There are several ways to make this portable, one being GLUT, another being SDL.

Reply to GalCiv II on Linux? Should I bother? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

[quote who="Zoomba" reply="13" id="1960554"]My point is that saying "it works on this application, it should be EASY for games" is a gross oversimplification. Anyone who says "Oh, it should be easy if you..." should put their money where their mouth is. If it was truely easy, there would be a lot more people doing it. [/quote] Not easily convinced, eh? :) No problem, I can understand your point of view. But seriously, I know what I am talking about. Give me an O

Reply to GalCiv II on Linux? Should I bother? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I would consider cross platform application development harder than writing cross-platform games. The reason is that for applications you need to inferface with the GUI, which is Win32 on Windows, GTK or QT on Unix and Carbon on MacOS X. This is are all many different API's so you need either an abstraction layer between GUI and application logic, or implement your own user interface. The latter is the easiest but gives you an alien looking and behaving user interface on all platforms. <

Reply to GalCiv II on Linux? Should I bother? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Yeah, you'll be very productive by spending 50% of your time keeping your system virus free. More seriously spoken, Windows lacks all the tools you need for productivity, like a good command line, PDF file creator, SSH client, a good scripting language. Sure, most of it is solvable, but it's a lot of working patching a Windows system to become productive and on Windows everyone wants money from you for the silliest of tools (and let's forget about EULA's for now). Also, I have anot

Reply to GalCiv II on Linux? Should I bother? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Wine is nice for some hacking to get something working under Linux. It is not a reliable tool. If you are serious, you have to install Windows. I made one quick attempt to do it by copying Galciv2 from my Windows to my Linux partition. With Wine 0.9 I could get the game activated by running activate.exe, it ran as well, but there were severe font problems. Surprisingly, 3D was very good. I then did upgrade Wine to 1.1 in the hope it would fix something, and then I could no longer g

DA has weird behaviour of race names in RaceConfig.xml in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

Hello, I have started to port my Dread Lords Dutch language Mod to Dark Avatar. While modifying the DA RaceConfig.xml I have encountered a very strange behaviour. In Dread Lords I translate just the displayname XML tag, this is sufficient to make the game display the translated text always. For example: Heerschappij van Korx<

Reply to Character set of XML files in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

For now I have changed the header of my XML files to ISO-8859-1, that is what the game seems to expect and makes them display correctly in my editor.

Reply to Let's solve the piracy problem. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote who="quantumdragon" reply="4" id="1952485"] I know I may be straying off topic but, some of that falls on the parents. The parents could pay for the thing online for the child. I did that for my first machine I built, gave my mom 2300 and baught all my parts online. There are cards now that take directly out of checking account and can be set to deny transaction if funds aren't there, preventing overdraft. If a teen is making enough money on his own to buy a game wouldn't it be

Reply to Let's solve the piracy problem. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

Let's focus on another issue: Affordability. As I have a good salary, I can afford to buy the games I play. As I can buy on-line I can get them even cheaper, I can simply buy in a U.S. webshop like Impulse and get the benefits of the strong euro. As I hardly feel the costs, I can simply do a few mouse clicks and have a game on my computer an hour later. Piracy isn't even worth the effort it takes. But now imagine a teenager that wants to buy Sins of a Solar Empire,

Reply to the dreadlords are killing me what do i do? in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

The Dread Lords can take out any ship almost regardless how many defence it has. Therefore, make small ships with as many guns as you can and no defence. Produce them faster than the Dread Lords can destroy them. Attack in large fleets of at least five but better 8 ships. Always make sure you are the attacker and not the Dread Lords, this makes your ships fire first so you have a chance to destroy the Dread Lord ship before it can fire. Protect starbases with

Character set of XML files in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

Hello, According to the header, the Dreadlords XML files are UTF-8 encoded, however, in practise the game seems to treat them as ISO-8859-1 encoded and pays no attention at all to the encoding tag in the header. Any idea what is the desired encoding of the files is, is this always ISO-8859-1 or does this depend on the current ANSI encoding of the Windows system in use?

Reply to .......... in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

Well, according to the source article, the number of words is estimated between 1 and 60 million. If you count the different forms of words you get to 60 million words. The low estimate of 1 million is still larger than 800.000. As for the example word Ron Lugge had trouble with, "power", I know at least 4 Dutch words that map to

Reply to .......... in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote who="EviliroN" reply="12" id="1942422"] WOAH! English is the biggest language with over 800,000 words! Just because you may not know them doesn't mean it doesn't have them. [/quote] English words do not always have a 1:1 mapping to a word in another language. There can be a group of words that mean approximaly what is intended. Even if a 1:1 mapping exists, the literally translated word may not be what a native speaker would use in that context.

Reply to .......... in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

Sounds like someone did watch Sicko? Well, to clear up some myths this documentary put into place about Europe: In Brittain healthcare is indeed mostly free, but the care itself is a bit basic. France does have the awesome healthcare services shown in the documentary, but not everything is for free. Healthcare in European countries is generally not run by the governments. The countries are trying to mix the merits of both of the market a

Reply to 2.0 update must be made available on Stardock Central in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

[quote who="psychoravin" reply="3" id="1932114"]You've GOT to be KIDDING US.[/quote] Troll alert, do not feed, please...