Raknor

TA will have editors which you can use to greatly increase research costs.

Thanks for sharing this insight. The Survey Ship from TA looks really nice. It's a shame I mostly play zoomed out though.

Thanks.

Hungarian notation and CamelCase, odd indentation in CGameScreen::UpdateTechnologyContext. Stack trace looks fine considering the described oddity. Other than that the code looks sober. At least the small amount presented here. [quote]BUG: A lot of techs are missing animations[/quote] A lot of techs for Altarians even miss descriptions ;) Thanks for sharing this insight, I very much enjoy reading development forum posts, blogs, diaries, journals, changelo

[quote]Yes, I made up that word. Scrunching.[/quote] It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Being a developer myself I can fully understand this. Release dates are just good wishes that get missed way too often. Gotta agree with some of the other posters, a bit more communication would be nice. Unless you're too busy ;)

Grats. Does that include online sales?

[quote]I think the scout is flying backwards.[/quote] Covering its tracks? :P

Perhaps the faint red line from the ship going to the lower left?

The Creativity racial on it's one is strong, but not too strong. However, Creativity is a problem in combination with tech trading. In all my games I always trade techs with little long-term use against ability boosting techs. The Arceans usually sell me some nice creativity boosting tech (War Rooms if my memory serves me right) for little. And only then the bonus appears to proc really really often.

[quote]I thought this was a joke, but subsequent posts seem to indicate that this is to be taken seriously. You've got to be kidding! I speak as one whose salary is comes 100% through charitable donations (I am the pastor of a church). And I've got to tell you ... even with people who claim that God is #1 in their lives, you get a *lot* of "free riders" who will gladly take all that you provide without giving a bit of support.[/quote] Like I said before charity isn't the only i

From a purely technical standpoint, the pirates will always win. They are always one step ahead of the legacy content industry. Even if all the hardware you could buy would only run DRM'ed software it wouldn't help. There are enough people capable and willing to build their very own computers from scratch, it is actually not that hard. The next logical step would be to make self-made computers illegal. But as if that would help. One can still buy illegal drugs, illegal pornogra

[quote]The biggest problem with the whole idea of depending on merch, donations & support contracts is that there is pretty much 0 guaranteed return on investment. Spend 2 years working on a game with a team of developers, and you can't even count on X number of sales. You have to rely on an even less reliable income source. If I can get something for free, unless it's crippled, chances are I won't want/need the "extra" service.[/quote] The same could be argued about the classical di

[quote]I take it you're not a developer.[/quote] I am a developer. But not on proprietary software. There are lots of companies making money by giving away stuff. A common example would be the companies behind most Linux distributions.

Piracy is just the symptom of a perverted economy where official product price does no longer reflect its actual value. Basically there are two markets: The free market and the black market. The price of a product on the free market represents the officially governed price, made by the producers or the government, while the price on the black market represents the true value of the product. You want to make sure that the free market price is lower than the black marke

Yes, you need to design your own ships. The default ships are pretty much useless. If you don't care about how your ships look like, just double-click the components you want, they'll then be placed automatically, although at totally weird placed. Does not affect functionality though.

[quote]Dear Brad: Please Keep Working For the love of Raknor do not leave the AI alone. They are remaining way too weak for their own disdain. My first beta 5 game resulted in their astonishingly quick and unexpected defeat. I was more drunk for the second game and barely had any troubles. Painful still feels like Drooling. Absolutely endless hordes of my fleets, it's like I always have the Drengin super ability only I am getting good ships.[/quote] There, fixed it for you.

I think part of the problem is that the AI only seems to look at military rating when evaluating its strength. And based on that it decides to declare war or to surrender. A human player on the other hand always evaluates a complex set of variables: - Of course also military rating, but at a very low priority - Tech level. At least for me, that's the single most important factor. With high enough tech level, I can totally obliterate the galaxy with just a handful of techs -

[quote]Were the Drath at war with anyone?[/quote] Drengin and Korath.

So I've been playing a game on painful, medium galaxy, common stars, occasional plants, 9 AI players. About the situation: I'm Altarian, I'm at war with the Drengin which are opposite side of the galaxy out of harms way. I'm also at war with my neighbors, the Korath. They did not yet research spore weapons or invasion techs. So I'm happily researching away at zero military rating. Suddenly for no reason, 2 races surrender in the same turn: Both Terran and Korx surrender to the D

Don't let the Thalans get it. Fear the might of a few dozen Embassies!

[quote]For 64 bit Windows, I imagine access to physical memory would mainly be limited by the number and capacity of memory modules supported by the motherboard. Access to virtual memory may have some limitation, but I would expect it be much greater than what most programs ever need.[/quote] Most likely Microsoft has been unable to test Win64 on systems with more than 128GB RAM, so to be on the safe side they've disabled support for more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_double

I had played a couple of Arcean games in TA beta and they didn't seem that bad. Other than the fact that the speed penalty kinda negates their special ability, they seemed fine to me.

Parts of the Altarian tree only shows up if you choose good alignment.