*** How was this game Released?*** » Forum Post by Stpinmass

Its easier to be a critic than a chef.

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It's easier to be a chef than eat the food at my university's cafeterias.

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Thats a good one.

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I have yet to encounter anything but quite minor bugs. I can live with them for how great this game is.

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First retail build was very buggy, not unplayable, but very buggy. Now after the first fix the bugs are barely noticeable. And the games so good anyway.

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Well! That's an easy question to answer spitmass. You see what happened was the game was made available for download from a couple of servers somewhere, AND get this coz it's cool right, it was put on some shelves in some shops. Wow huh?! So yeah, it was that simple really. Why do you ask?

mmmkdone

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Aint it amazing to see all these game experts suddenly sign up for accounts in the past few days and have ALL this knowledge of how buggy the game is....
As for buggy or not buggy.. Nope.. not even close to some games out there. MooIII was a bit of a nightmare and while I loved Civ4 (still play it) it didnt even work for me for the first 32 hours as they had a BAD ati video bug. Nothing like this happened here.
Do I get CTD's? Sure... After 4 hours of playing.... I think of it more as a reminder that I need to eat and sleep. If the designers hadnt been nice enough to crash the game once and a while I would probably have lost my job by now.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

1) The vast majortiy of 'bug posts' are people complaining about the same things.

2) The vast majority of bug reports are about CTDs, found to be caused in most part by video card overheating, not bugs.

3) Most of the remaining bugs are math errors that you don't even notice unless you dig about and check the various bonuses and formulae.

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RonLugge

Join Date 05/2004

+50

My thought? Bugtesting and fixing is a LOT harder than anyone who hasn't tried to do it thinks. Go take a programming course and you'll begin to get the ideas -- a simple program can take literally DAYS to debug if you don't get outside input (the good old fasioned "see what I thought I had and not was actually there") and its difficult to get outside input on a game which can easily span millions of lines of code.

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I bought it from a store and have actually had no bugs. only one crash, and the patch fixed the mistakes like mislabled tech or what not. no real problems though for me. remember that bugs change per computer. the game interacts differently on different computers so random things they never had happen could happen to you yet not to anyone else, and yet another person could have problems you never encountered

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I'll stick to playing while you sit in the corner and whine.

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I've seen far buggier game releases than this one and on much bigger titles.

With that said it does seem, based on statements made by stardock team members, that the game was either a bit rushed or the QA team isn't quite up to snuff. I spent 2 years as a QA lead at a notable game publisher and a desent stretch of time doing normal QA work and there does seem to be a few issues that should have been caught prior to shipment, especially considering the numerous statements made by stardock folks about how everything looked ready to go gold a week before they actually did. On the other hand I've seen games pushed out the door in far worse shape than this game (although I was lucky to never be a lead on any of them).

So in summary, I think there are a few things that could possibly have been caught prior to release but by industry standards this game seems to be doing just fine. When one considers the prompt patches and lack of copy protection problems (every game I ever worked on always had some sort of compatibility problem with certain hardware and the copy protection my company used) Stardock might even be a bit ahead of the game in some areas.

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It was obviously rushed for release without a decent job done with beta testing.. I admire Stardock's commitment to updating and working on the bugs.. but it's a bunch of BS that they released it in the first place.. I mean c'mon..

I can understand your frustration over bugs in a game -- I think we've all been there, at some point.

But as somebody who has been playing computer games since the mid-80s, I think GalCiv2 is one of the most stable games I've purchased in a long, long time. Yes, I've encountered bugs...but in terms of number and severity they absolutely pale in comparison to what I've seen in other games recently. Battlefield 2, MOO3 and Thief 3 -- all A-list, big-publisher titles -- have been released with crippling bugs.

Stpinmass, I'm not going to say that you are not entitled to be upset about the errors you've encountered. But I will tell you that it could be a lot worse. Far bigger developers than Stardock, with budgets far greater, have churned out software that was in much worse shape. I'm convinced that Stardock will continue to support this game and fix all but the most obscure, unrepeatable bugs....I can't say that for most other game developers. Take comfort in that.

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The poster is trolling because he has obviously not played the game. Minor bugs here and there, but absolutely nothing compared to most games.

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There are plenty of minor bugs but they don't interfere with the gameplay that much. At least for me, not enough that it diminishes the fun.

Also you have to factor in that its a turn based, single player game. Games in this category are typically played by people for a long time and so you're more tolerant of waiting for patches.

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Bullox about the retail version being buggy. I can't think of anything beyond the "typo" level that I've run into yet. With all the people posting and Stardock not censoring, why isn't the forum full of pissed off people if it's so buggy? Check your HW.

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How many bugs did curttasker's post turn up? 100's! That's ridiculous in this day and age..

I'd just like to point out that my post is mostly composed of annoyance issues and suggestions for improvement. There are a handful of minor bugs that do not seriously hinder gameplay. The only serious bug i've encountered was the CTD bug, and that has been found and fixed.

As a software developer, I'd also like to say that this game is remarkably free of major problems. As to the minor issues, well, software of this level of complexity can be in testing for months, and sitll issues can sneak through. When I'm testing my own software, often I don't even notice how bad a particular interface is, or how I'm not presenting information in a user-friendly format. When you're developing and testing a piece of software every day for months, you become so occustomed to it that you just can't see these issues until someone points them out to you. Often just watching someone else use the software, and getting their feedback, can find areas for improvement 10x as fast as testing it yourself.

That's exactly what we're doing in that thread, pointing out some minor annoyances and offering up suggestions for improvement. The occasional bugs we report are just a bonus

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How many bugs did curttasker's post turn up? 100's! That's ridiculous in this day and age.. Particularly with a sequel.. I'd love to hear everyone else's thoughts on this..

Did you actually played the game and encounter all those bugs? If out of all the players out there and there are only 100 bugs due to different system and drivers, that would be an amazing feat.

Now that is not to say each bug only applies to one person. But if you took the time to read the post (bugs, annoyances, suggestions) , you will see that a lot of them are what people think will make the game BETTER. Not what people need to make the game work.

How many companies have you seen that would update the game and make it better per the suggestion of the players instead of just fixing bugs and imbalances?

Those who contributed to the list and for curttasker who organized the list did not do it just so you can claim the game is not up to modern day standard without even going through the thread. We did it because we are trying to help the game better and worth the price for everyone.

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So, if it's so buggy why are unpatched versions getting 90%+ from almost every media review so far?

Personally i played for 8 hours on release day after i downloaded the last part of my preload with no adverseties.

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Istari

Join Date 05/2001

+20

Nearly every game released has a significant quantity of minor issues of one kind or another.

It is impossible on any project of any serious complexity to find every last thing. The types of issues Curtaker's list refers to are mostly cosmetic or usability suggestions.

The shipping retail boxed version of the game contains no level 1 bugs. That is, reproduceable bugs that would severely effect the playability of the game.

1.0D, the digital release of the game did add a single level 1 bug which has to do with the shipyard crashing on if you went to it through the new goto button system that was put in. It was addressed 3 days later, before the game hit the shelves in most places thus the retail users went from one solid version to another.

Everything else we've seen reported are either system specific or level 3 or higher issues (i.e. something that would annoy some people, typos, features that don't match documentation, and so forth).

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I havent noticed any bugs yet.

If your asking about games being a waste of money, go and check out Battlefield 2, up to theirs 7th patch and still got major problems

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Playing devils advocate here but...

The shipping retail boxed version of the game contains no level 1 bugs. That is, reproduceable bugs that would severely effect the playability of the game.

I don't know how you define your bug levels but I would consider the over heating computer crash a level 1 bug as from what I understand it made the game almost unplayable for some people.

Edit: I suppose this could be termed "system specific" but being "system specific" to high end machines seems rather broad

Of course this would be a hard bug to find in QA and it was promptly (or will be very soon) fixed on discovery so I'm not making a big deal out of it. Just saying it looks like it shipped with at least one level 1 bug

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I have to say I am as frustrated as the parent poster. While I think the game itself is great, I get enough CTDs to make the game almost unplayable once I get far enough into a session. I can tell you that it is NOT my video cards overheating. My temps never get anywhere above 54C on the cards, my drivers are completely up to date, and my system is a new build hardware wise.

My system is 100% stable other than this game. I can run Prime95 for days, and games like FEAR and COD2 do not crash at all after hours of play on max settings.

I have submitted multiple reports of crashes and don't get any responses any more. All I hear is that it is likely the video card overheating when I know it is not an issue and the system is otherwise rock solid.

I paid $45 for this game, and would like to be able to at least play it for more than a little while without a crash.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2423

I don't know how you define your bug levels but I would consider the over heating computer crash a level 1 bug as from what I understand it made the game almost unplayable for some people.

Edit: I suppose this could be termed "system specific" but being "system specific" to high end machines seems rather broad

Of course this would be a hard bug to find in QA and it was promptly (or will be very soon) fixed on discovery so I'm not making a big deal out of it. Just saying it looks like it shipped with at least one level 1 bug [/quote[

How exactly is this our bug? This would be in the "nearly impossible to find" area. From our research of this issue and talking to people, it's almost always people with home grown machines that they put in a one or two high powered GPUs.

You could just as easily argue it's the graphics board makers for that one.

I have a feeling that 1.0X is going to "magically" solve these issues even though all we really did was throttle the GPU which, as developers, we shouldn't have to do.

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In fairness, Brad, the overheating issue is an issue on my non-homegrown laptop.

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