ezolak

Join Date 02/2006

Cosmetic Bugs

Here are the cosmetic bugs I've encountered in the most recent beta:

1. Ship graphics. At some point colony ships and constructors start using the wrong ship graphic on the main map -- usually the freighter graphic, but not always. Note that this does not occur immediately, the game does use the correct graphic at first. I have not been able to determine what triggers it, but it seems to get worse if I ever Alt-Tab to a different app and come back to the game.

2. Minimap Influence. I've listed this in a separate post, with no response. Very quirky and very annoying. Influence disappears (goes black) on what seems to be a quadrant-by-quandrant basis (some remain colored while others go black) pretty much every time the minimap is recentered or zoomed in or out. It can be fixed by zooming in and back out again, but I basically need to do this every time I move a ship. It pretty much makes the Influence option on the minimap unusable because of how much this slows down the game.

Note that these bugs do not cause a CTD, but I will provide the beginning of the debug.err file that shows my specs. Note also that these bugs occur with every map size/options/resolution that I have tried.

Debug Message: Version v1.3 beta 1 last updated on: Thu Jul 27 18:22:18 2006
Debug Message: *********DXDiag info follows.*********
System Info
Time: 8/7/2006, 16:33:56
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Machine Name: MBRAN91911
Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519)
Languages: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: System manufacturer
System Model: System Product Name
BIOS: BIOS Date: 12/14/05 11:50:14 Ver: 08.00.12
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.0GHz
Physical Memory: 2048MB RAM
Page File: 310MB used, 3630MB available
Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS

Display Info
Display device 1:
Device Name: \\.\DISPLAY1
Card Name: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Chip Type: GeForce 6600 GT
DAC Type: Integrated RAMDAC
Key Device: Enum\PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0140&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_A2
Display Memory: 128.0 MB
Current Display Mode: 1280 x 768 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Monitor Name: Plug and Play Monitor
Monitor Max Resolution: 1600,1200
Driver Name: nv4_disp.dll
Driver Version: 6.14.0010.8198
Driver Date: 12/10/2005 07:06:00
DirectX Acceleration Enabled: Yes

Sound info
Sound device 1:
Description: SB X-Fi Audio [CC00]
Default Sound Playback: Yes
Default Voice Playback: Yes
Hardware ID: PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0005&SUBSYS_00211102&REV_00
Manufacturer ID: 1
Product ID: 100
Driver Name: ctaud2k.sys
Provider: Creative
Driver Version: 5.12.0001.1144
Driver Date: 10/29/2005 23:16:24
Type: WDM
Other Drivers:
Acceleration Level: 3
Cap Flags: 0
Min/Max Sample Rate: 0, 0

Locked Post

Advanced Search

Watch this post

Do not email me updates for this post Email me updates for this post

Successfully updated karma reason!

Err...I forgot 2:

3. Fleet icons. After a fleet is formed, the graphic where all the ships/fleets are shown in individual icons is often blank. Example: form a fleet, move one more ship to the same location, when you select the icon of the fleet and the ship to join them the fleet icon is often blank.

4. Colony list. At some point early in the game hitting F2 for the colony list displays a blank window. You can scroll on that list up to see the colonies, which makes it seem like the window is displaying "blank" entries after the last "real" entry.

Successfully updated karma reason!

kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

Just looking at the debug info, a video driver update would be advisable. The ones you have right now are just about as old as you can get and still run the game, but who knows what bugs the older drivers may have that could cause game problems.

Successfully updated karma reason!

1. Ship graphics. At some point colony ships and constructors start using the wrong ship graphic on the main map -- usually the freighter graphic, but not always. Note that this does not occur immediately, the game does use the correct graphic at first. I have not been able to determine what triggers it, but it seems to get worse if I ever Alt-Tab to a different app and come back to the game.

3. Fleet icons. After a fleet is formed, the graphic where all the ships/fleets are shown in individual icons is often blank. Example: form a fleet, move one more ship to the same location, when you select the icon of the fleet and the ship to join them the fleet icon is often blank.

These have been fixed for beta 2.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Using control panel to update drivers indicates that there are no updates. Is there a better way to update drivers?

Successfully updated karma reason!

kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

Using control panel to update drivers indicates that there are no updates. Is there a better way to update drivers?

Definitely. The drivers on windows update are often old and sometimes even harmful to some setups. You can get the latest reference drivers for your card yourself at nvidia.com.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Lucky_Jack

Join Date 01/2002

+62

There are a number of usability problems with scroll bars and twirl buttons (or what looks like they should be twirl buttons) that I would like to see addressed.

Scroll bar action is inconsistant, both within the game and when compared to the defacto standard of operation across general applications. The normal behavior for a list many times larger than the viewable area of the list with a scroll bar outside GCII is that when you click on the scroll bar "background" (the space within the scroll bar not occupied by the scroll tab) is a movement of the list up or down to the next viewable segment of the list, not moving the list up/down one line, or moving to the top/bottom of the list.

Two examples of what looks like should have "twirl buttons" (buttons that cause a numerical value to increase or decrease) are on the trade screen when negotiating a monetary or influence amount as part of the trade. In GCI, these functions behaved acceptably, but in GCII they behave very poorly when the range available for negotiation is large (anything over, say, 100,000). Grabbing the tab in the scroll bar and dragging it causes huge jumps in the value, while clicking either side of the tab causes jumps of only 1 and clicking on the value (if you can find the hot spot, which is almost impossible) will move it only by 10. . Also, clicking the up/down arrows only moves the value by 10 and clicking on the left or right arrows only moves the value by 1. The only way to zero in on a negotiable value of, say, 121,927 out of 4,291,603 is to try to drag the tab very gently from the left edge of the scroll bar to the right until the value changes from 0 to 112,936. Then click continually on the up arrow (this arrow does not show any reaction to the "click and hold" methods of some applications that will cause a value to start "spinning" or "twirling" until you release the mouse button) until you get to 161,930. Then, if your fingers have lasted that long, you finally get to the easy part of selecting your target negotiation amount. Also, use of the mouse wheel in this case is next to useless, as it also takes forever to get such a large change established.

Successfully updated karma reason!

I made a post about bug #2 with pictures a little while ago if any developers wants to have a look:
Link

Successfully updated karma reason!

You can always type in numbers if you don't like using the numeric scroll bars.

Successfully updated karma reason!

I updated video drivers, unfortunately same problem persists. For selfish reasons I am glad others have the same minimap errors because hopefully this will lead the devs to fix them.

Successfully updated karma reason!