DireFog

Reply to Launch Day Experiences in GalCiv Journals Stardock Forums

Did you consider a public bug tracking system? That would give you an "excuse" to weed out posts without being accused of censorship. If something has already been there, mark it as duplicate and be done with it. It's true that deleting forum messages may look like censorship, a BTS could avoid this and give you the possibility to lock whiner threads early without looking all too bad. So far, I've only found four really annoying things durin

First game over, alliances confuse me. in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I just won my first game. Medium map, "Normal" difficulty, default 5 opponents. It was more or less a cakewalk, but it took too long. I tried getting an alliance with the Torians and the Arceans, who were the only civs left. Getting the Torians to sign the treaty was no problem. With the Arceans, things were different. I could not offer them an alliance, but I could ask for one. So I offered them some higher miniaturization tech and they agr

Reply to STICKY: Dual Core Machines may need a driver update in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

I don't know of any new problems caused by the hotfix. Google finds some stuff for "kb896256 download", like this: Link (German site) See the first download. -ENU is for english installations -DEU for german. (edit: GAH! Stupid link parser!)

Reply to STICKY: Dual Core Machines may need a driver update in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

1) AMD drivers for the dual core itself. 2) MS Drivers for XP? (not sure about this one) 3) The Cool and Quiet (CnQ) functionality messing up the threading. 1) Something like that. It's different than what Windows has and it's from the CPU maker. Plus it doesn't seem to do any harm (didn't help me either, but well.

Reply to STICKY: Dual Core Machines may need a driver update in Bug Reports Stardock Forums

About the post in the Serios Sam Forum: it might seem that disabling Cool'n'Quiet solves the problem. It doesn't. The cores' times still drift enough to cause significant problems. The MS hotfix may be a bit problematic, it didn't seem to work at first. After installing the hotfix several times recently (thanks to RAD Game Tools support), I haven't encountered those timing problems anymore. Your best bet would be to really close all programs

Reply to Won my first game! in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

Still in my first game. Medium map, default opponents (Altarians, Arceans, Yor, Drengin, Torians), on "normal" difficulty, me playing as humans. The Arceans are kind of too strong right now, they own half the map after the Altarians (which I supported) and the Yor (whose home planet I managed to snatch not one turn too early) surrendered to them. I even got the Drengin to surrender to me, which gave me a nice foothold in Arcean territorry. S

Reply to Alt tab = crash? in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

Here's my tab-experience: WinXP Prof, SP2 (all current updates installed) CPU: Athlon64 X2 4200+ (hey, the timing stuff seems to work after I installed the hotfix several times ) Board: nForce4 Ultra based, drivers are one version out of date Graphics: GeForce 6800GT, 81.89 drivers The game was "idling" on the map screen when

Reply to Ship design crash in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

That bug has been there ever since the Beta... If it happens, use "done" do get out of the designer, get back to the save window and cancel. That way, you lose the design but the game doesn't crash. It happened every now and then in the last few hours I played, but I kept frustration to a minimum by keeping my designs simple. (I'm thankful that it didn't occur when I built my "Moloch" class...)

Reply to New Design in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

Well, the quote thing has been broken in the old design as well. The messages in forum threads are too far apart. It's not really HTML. There's a form outside the HTML element, no DOCTYPE, the index page starts with that unfunny nonstandard MS-intro ("" which AFAIR is used to declare a UTF-8 encoding in what MS thinks is XML, but which is wrong anyway since the content-type HTTP-equiv sets the encoding to ISO-8859-1). <br/

Reply to Brad's known issue list in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

An issue with the manual in the pre-release version: The table with galaxy sizes on page 9 is a bitmap, complete with Cleartype convergence error.

Reply to DOWNLOAD WOES! in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

I had that problem on California and 4, on Chicago I had >700kbyte/s.

Reply to DOWNLOAD WOES! in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

The lack of information seems to be due to Ethereal not running too well on Windows. The Stardock server seems to return an awful lot of 404's, on which SDC reacts by waiting three seconds and trying again. Should've bought a better server, eh? (edit) The chicago server seems to be *much* better.

Reply to DOWNLOAD WOES! in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

I just tried putting Ethereal on the link, but there was nothing even remotely resembling sane data transfer in there, just a bunch of RST messages to 66.28.242.195 (which is the server hosting www.galciv2.com) and the second part of the standard IIS error page.

Reply to DOWNLOAD WOES! in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

And since the edit button takes me to a lovely "0": I sincerely wanted to put off the whining to a later date, but after cancelling the download (after about 10 minutes, still at 0%) and restarting it, it restarted at the first file. I see some serious potential for improvement in SDC.

Reply to DOWNLOAD WOES! in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

The 1.0.x version doesn't show up in the list here, but actively checking for application updates in the Tools menu does find something. Downloading it seems to be rather painful though, it tries one or two very small files, then waits three seconds (that time would be enough to transfer about 1.5MB), and then tries again. Oh teh noes, at the current rate I'm looking at over 3.5 years of download goodness.

Reply to Ok I have to ask.......... Dont kill me..... :) in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

Hard to call it a utopia when the humans were losing the war for most of the book. As I read it, the war and the protagonists are just a plot devices. It's human society what Heinlein is writing about in the first place. And about Armor: that's a great book too, but it has a completely diff

Reply to Schedule of Pain in GalCiv II News Stardock Forums

This has probably been asked before over and over again, but: what about a P2P distribution system like BitTorrent? Share the pain a little? Stardock should at least consider making the data available as one big ZIP archive or creating a streaming protocol (perhaps tar?). Most of the download time is wasted on protocol overhead for all those little, packed files.

Reply to Ok I have to ask.......... Dont kill me..... :) in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

If you want a slightly different Utopia, get "Starship Troopers" by Robert A. Heinlein. (No, not the movie! That's a different thing! Go sit in the corner, here's your hat!) It's relatively short, but a good read. keep in mind that the author has rather conservative views, and some parts of the book seem like a lecture, but give it a thought. You don't need to like his views, but think about it for a while. IMO, that should be mandatory lecture in school.

Reply to Masochists wanted: GalCiv preloading this week. in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

It's the ultimate christmas eve! All the presents are under the tree, nicely wrapped, and we're not allowed to play with all those new toys. Let's see what comes first: release day or the first mod. Bonus points will be awarded for a total conversion. (TC makers will be granted an additional two days after release to make it run.)

Reply to Ok I have to ask.......... Dont kill me..... :) in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

You're talking about GC1 terror stars, which aren't in GC2 for schedule reasons. There was a thread on this recently.

Reply to Ok I have to ask.......... Dont kill me..... :) in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

And the topic went BAM only two posts into the thread Lucifer's Hammer by Niven/Pournelle is a good read. For some other really good stuff, try and get copies on Alan Dean Foster's "Icerigger" trilogy (sadly, it appears to be out of print for some years now) or some things by Vernor Vinge, like "A Fire Upon The Deep" or "Across Realtime". But seriously, building a

Reply to Size Really Does Matter in Ideas Stardock Forums

The displayed size of ship addons is purely cosmetical to give you more freedom in ship design. You want a pea-sized Superlaser Of Doom? That's no problem, neither is a cheapass 1-damage flashlight almost as big as a tiny hull.

Reply to Is this game going to be avaible on DVD? in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

Stardock Central does have a backup/restore-mechanism that zips the installed files and allows installation from there, so you can just burn the archive(s) to whatever you like, along with a copy of the SDC installer.

Ship Designe problem in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

After designing a ship, I gave it a name and clicked "Save". Nothing happened. Other things seemed to still work well. After leaving the designer, it turned out that the "Save" popup had opened under the shipyard. Clicking "OK" made the game crash. Version is 0.91[b].002

Reply to SMP/Timer problems? in Bug Reports Stardock Forums

It's back. Had the machine running under load for some time and it started again.