Hollow Man

Join Date 03/2006

+14

Drivers, and why we should not be forced to update them

I notice that a lot of advice given regarding crashing and other problems in GalCiv2 revolves around "update to the latest video drivers". This is perhaps decent advice in a lot of cases, especially if the video card or driver is really, really old. But what concerns me is forcing folks to update them, which will become a reality according to Brad's Postmortem at Gamasutra:

"Next time, the game will have a dialog that will simply not allow them to play the game until they update their drivers."

I respectfully ask that Stardock reconsider this position. Drivers can be a flaky thing. Video card manufacturers update them frequently in an attempt to fix all kinds of bugs (many introduced by new games), and as of late, I've noticed many releases to be buggy. Just last year when I updated to a later build for my NVIDIA 6800GT, I encountered problems with the temperature readout being too high. This was not uncommon, and plenty of people were reporting this issue over at Nvnews.net. I reverted back and things were better. This is only one example - I've had a number of cases where certain driver releases were buggy and not worth keeping.

I've since adopted the ye olde "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" stance. I'm currently running what many would consider to be an old build of the drivers (a 6x.xx series), but they work great for general Windows work and all games I play (including much more intensive 3D workouts than GalCiv2, such as Doom 3, Quake 4, and HL2/Counter-Strike: Source, and less taxing ones such as Civ4). Yes, GalCiv2 complained about them when I first started the game (I assume it simply checked the date of the driver rather than actually looking to see if they supported the proper features that GalCiv2 uses), but they work great.

I would be quite frustrated if Stardock forced me to update simply because their games detect what they consider to be an old version. Some gamers do know a fair amount about hardware, so although they're "old", if I know they support the feature set that GalCiv2 needs, I should be allowed to use them. If a problem occurs, then I'll look into possibly updating, but otherwise, updating "just because" will likely cause me more harm than good.

Please don't change your games and force us to update based on date of drivers alone,

-HM

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2341

We won't force people to update drivers. But we will make sure the warnings are more adament and consistent.

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some people miss humor...gotta use a sledgehammer to make them notice.

Grabs his humor hammer

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That is a very well-articulated opinion. However, I must say that one of my frustrations with forums is with people that encounter display issues, random graphic glitches, sound problems, etc, and immediately post a 'WTF this game is buggy and it sucks it crashes all the time!!!' thread, without trying what many people would consider to be fairly basic troubleshooting. Particularly if other apps are encountering issues as well.

I am also typically a fan of the "Ain't broke, don't fix it" method of keeping my machine running smoothly. But we're talking about situations where something definitely *is* broke, and therefore it'd probably be a good idea to go ahead and *try* to fix it.

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I'm in that camp too, I'm a gamer first computer expert a distent 6th. I really hate messing around with files or hardware as it never really works out for me. I've updated my video card drivers a few times and each time I'm sweating bullets hoping I don't destroy something. The instructions seem to become more confusing with each update Ati puts out.

A game I bought awhile ago would not run in my cd drive, so the company suggested I update the drivers for it, but this required a boot disc and had so many warnings that I did not feel confortable doing anything of that sort. Last time I used a boot disc, I completely and utterly destroyed my computer somehow. I wish that they make upgrades painfully easy, somewhat like a windows update or something.

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You mean like Stardock Central works?

Yeah, that would be nice.

One warning though, NEVER download a third party driver from Windows/Microsoft Update, they almost never work, and end up messing your computer up badly.

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Personally, I'm staggered that driver companies still use such arcane ways of updating. Some companies often provide all-in-one tools for updating drivers for their systems, but the drivers are often old versions.

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Frankly, I took GalCiv2's advice and updated the drivers, which promplty caused the game to stop working. Rolling back solved the problems. I definitely agree with the 'ain't broke, don't fix it' method.

omicron

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Brad (and others),

Thanks for the reply. It just sounded from that quote that you were really going to force the issue, so I'm happy it won't be that way. Believe me, I understand that us super-hardware nuts are in the minority (ah, I still remember the days in DOS of trying to shove TSRs in high memory with QEMM), so I fully get your frustration regarding people trying to play your games with equipment that's not in any shape to be running it.

I also tire of the folks who post their problems in the most blantently accusatory fashion imaginable. I tried the hardest I could to articulate my opinion in a constructive and polite manner.

-HM

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I'm running the game with 32k of memory from my old Commodore 64 cassette tape drive. I'll be damned if I'm going to let someone like Stardock push me out of the 1980s just to run a stupid game!

/humor hammer time...can't stop this

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well i have ati and i read their update notes for any new drivers they put out. they have a list of fixes for games. if i dont have any of those games i dont get the driver. they also tell you that if you arent having issues, then dont update!!! so even ati believes in the "if it aint broke dont fix it"
ati also has a download for a driver cleaner program. i would suggest cleaning out any old ones before installing. i hear just installing new ones on top can cause problems.

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No what you need is to have a screen that pops up and says "Your drivers are out of date this game has not been tested with these drivers. Please note the game may crash frequently." and you have that pop up whenver they play the game then after the 3rd or 4th ignore you give them the option to permantly ignore the warning.

But you set it up so when it crashes on these systems you have a screen pop up that says "See we told you it would crash now would you go update your video card drivers?"

you have to make the customer feel like a moron for ignoring the driver update warnings.

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I used to be pretty fanatical about keeping my system updated - drivers, BIOS updates for system and peripherals (like CD and DVD-ROM drives) plus patches for all my software. So there was the time I updated video drivers just because they were new, and everything seemed good, then a few months later some game I hadn't played in a while didn't work properly. I kept saying, "What the hell - it worked fine last time I played, and I haven't changed anything!" It took a while to figure out that, yes, I had changed something.

So I'm keeping my current ones until some new game hates them, and then I'll update (which will no doubt break some other game).

-HM

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While the latest and greatest drivers can be buggy.... please for the love of god at least update to the latest WHQL driver. Running on a 2-3 old Gfx driver with a 5 year old sound card driver is just trouble

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personally, I don't usually update driver, however, personally I do check the website for their new driver and their memo on the update and fixes of the situation to see whether any of programs from the list that I own. If I encountered any, I will have to try the game or program to see whether I can duplicate the error or encountered the bug myself, if I don't.... I don't bother.

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I try the new drivers, but I keep a copy of all the current drivers that work for my system on a flash drive. Then if I break something or reinstall or whatnot, I have them handy. But I usually am playing a good mix of new\old games to get a good idea of what works for me (playing Doom3, HL2, MoO2, Diablo2, Total Annihilation, WoW and Warcraft 3 currently)

But I do think that making the warning\advisory more persistant is a very good idea. The number of times that has solved a problem.....

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The issue is most new games use MS DirectX. And MS updates that software constantly to make it work more efficiently. Software devs make use of the new DirectX API's as they alow them to write better and more efficient code. DirectX is required so Devs don't have to take so many hardware confgurations into consideration. DirectX does it for them. This is the ONLY way modern PC games can be written at all. And the Video card companies must update their drivers to wrok with the new DirectX stuff in order for this circle to be complete.

Running an old driver that cannot take advantage of the newest DirectX features, since it was made before the changes, can be troublesome. That's life. It's not neccessarly fair. But reality has to be dealt with. It's the individual's choice whether to chance failures by not upgrading stuff; but they should not start screaming and yelling and cursing the devs when their own decision is the cause of the problem.

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Also, we have to consider Laptops. This game was specifically aimed at Laptops in terms of the graphics (and whether it would run on them), however Laptops cannot use 'normal' drivers, and have to use either the ones released by the manufacturer (which tend to be few and far between, and horribly out-of-date) or resort to third-party drivers. How would we be able to run a game on a laptop if it insisted we had the latest drivers, which the manufacturer may/may not have provided?

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insisted we had the latest drivers, which the manufacturer may/may not have provided?

Not the latest drivers, just ones powerful enough to work. The game will work on year old drivers if it must, it's just that two years ago was when directx9.0c came out, which is the issue. Without that, your computer is underpowered and can't run the game. When the next directx comes out, we will all need to update drivers for our new games.

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In the near future, any game using Direct3D 10 will probably require driver updates. Microsoft is redoing the way it works, and I don't think it'll be backwards compatible. It's a good thing that Stardock doesn't plan to support Windows 98 in any more game, but now they need to consider support for XP as Vista is just around the corner.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2341

As long as your drivers are 2005 or newer, you should be fine. Even 2004 may be fine. It's the people with 3+ old drivers who ARE, 99% going to have problems.

A lot of it has to do with our text handling. Next time you play a game, notice how nice the text is in GalCiv II compared to other games. That's because we're using actual True Type fonts and not sprite or some other font system. But the drivers have to be reasonably new to handle this or else you get into all kinds of weird problems.

GalCiv II simply has far more text than most other games and so the true type feature was important and when not using drivers that support it well, are likely to cause problems.

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