1.0X Preview

I can't believe we get paid to do this. We play a computer game and as we play it, make tweaks and changes and additions.

The team has been monitoring this thread looking for little things to tweak and change.  We've also been reading through bug reports, documentation errors, that kind of thing. 

Now, the marketing side of things here thinks it's not a good idea to put out two updates so soon after release. The rationale, which I think many of you will agree with, is that it sends a message to potential critics that would say "Oh, man, they had to put out 2 'patches' in the first week to get that thing good."  Hopefully players of the game can attest that generally speaking, the game's pretty solid.

Though, we could kick ourselves for the Goto bug we introduced in the 1.0D release (the retail version didn't have the goto feature) which resulted in ship designs crashing.  I guess we got too cocky.

So why are we doing an update this week? Two reasons:

1) A lot of people didn't get their preorders fulfilled until this week. In fact, quite a few people still haven't gotten it.  If we were the emperor of Earth, we'd have more direct control.  As-is, it's hard enough getting many retailers to simply get a box shot up or list the developer AND publisher as Stardock (Take 2 is the distributor).  So getting the game on shelves in quantity is a trick.

So we want those players who get the game this week to be able to come home and know that their "wait" was rewarded with a better game.

and

2) For people who already have the game but ran into issue XYZ or really wanted some playability tweak.  We don't want them to have to wait a month to get that stuff.

So what have we done?

This is not a complete list so bear with me:

GPU Throttling. The graphics engine in GalCiv II is designed so that it will scale up.  As early modders are finding, you can put in movie quality ship models and they'll run. We don't cap polygon counts.  We use specular lighting. We use bump mapping. We use all kinds of different effects.  And the result is that it can push your video card hard. Or, more to the point, hot. 

Hot means power which means less battery life for laptop users. It also means users who have plugged in that Geforce 7800 into their existing PC may find it too hot and weird things can happen.  The framerate counter in GalCiv at full screen is unreliable on LCD monitors (it will always say 60fps).  But we have people getting 300fps.  And that's just insane.

So the throttling OPTION will be on by default and won't make any difference in performance. It simply puts a Sleep(5) in if the frame rate gets crazy.  Those 5 miliseconds can bring down a GPU temp by 20C in our testing.  For 95% of you, this means nothing but 5% out of tens of thosuands is non-trivial.

Better tooltips. Let's face it, our tooltips suck.  We're sorry. You get playing the game and you just never use them and forget that new players use them like crazy.  So we're working on making that better.

Better slider controls. It's annoying to be playing for the 11th hour straight and the various slider controls seem to lose their grip. So we've made that better.

Social Production Bonus. The Social production bonus ability that is documented but not in the game is in the game now.

New components. Telepathic Defense, Subspace Rebounder, Dynamic Shielding, Arnorian Battle Armor.

Metaverse tweaks. This is going to be an ongoing thing. So if you're dissatisfied with your score on the metaverse, definitely let usk now because we will be adjusting the system and making those adjustments retroactively. 

Versioning. Saved games will include the version now so we can warn you if a new version is going to mess up an old version. Similarly, this will help us be able to update the save game system without it affecting your ship designs. Same for race configurations.

User Interface. A ton of little UI tweaks that I suspect most people won't notice.  Fixed some typos ("high-densitive" - we made up a new word! w00t!)

Cosmetic improvements. Added icons to the trade window offer area, few other tweaks here and there to make things nicer looking.

Exploits. This will be an ongoing thing but we're trying to fix exploits since that can damage the integrity of the Metaverse.

Capturing Planets. Trade goods, galactic achievements now transfer their benefits to the conquering planet.

It's only Tuesday so we'll be tweaking more.  Tomorrow afternoon we'll start putting it through QA for a release later this week.

After that, we'll be moving on to a more significant update based on player feedback.  The ship design features in the game have clearly taken on a life of their own.  There's also a ton of tweaks, small bugs, playability issues that need to be addressed.  We also have 3 significant issues that as soon as we figure them out and can reproduce them we'll address (GF 6600/6800 disappearing mouse issue -- use the hardware mouse cursor in the meantime, loading a saved game multiple times within a game will cause a corrupt autosave on some systems - still not able to reproduce here, and the people who get random CTDs while playing, we think the heat issue will resolve most of that).  But we're still working on those.

The bigger updates will require a beta so what you'll end up seeing on Stardock Central will be betas which you can optionally download if you want. 

It should be noted: You do NOT have to use these updates.  We just consider free updates to be part of the support you receive when you bought the game.  So don't feel you have to use these updates if you don't want. !FROGCARE!