LDiCesare

I tend to agree with many points in the op but think the game deserves buying for several reasons. GCII's ai is good, but once you get to know it, the game loses much of its charm (which was not the case for games with a pitiful ai like MoM). The ai has weaknesses, like not detecting a buildup, or detecting buildups which do not exist, which aren't much of a problem in a game like Civ IV because Civ IV has open borders agreements. GalcivII could b

Cheating is bad if it lets the ai do/avoid things you cannot do/avoid. I want to play by the same rules as the ai, I don't want to play chess against an opponent that plays go. I have no problem if the ai starts with more/less cash/units, in better locations, or has production bonuses/maluses to provide for some challenge. As for the original post "Fairness doesn't apply to a computer" I disagree. Computer games are programmed by humans, and playi

Why is the End Turn button just by the minimap? I just wanted to click in the lower right of the minimap to zoom there. I missed and clicked end turn. ok it's my fault but that's annoying as this just screwed the game. I find out there are several other small things which are definitely annoying: You click somewhere and actually click twice by mistake. The result: The next ship selected, after the window is automatically centered there, starts mov

Here's the last error log. I am no longer convinced it's linked to internet connection. I tried to load the game, crashed. Checked the active processes. Killed ssh-broker-gui.exe since it's internet related. Retried, loading worked. Ended the game. Reran ssh-broker-gui, reran, loaded and no crash... I can email the save game if this can help. Debug Message: Version v1.0X last updated on: Fri Mar 3 17:16:22 2006 Debug Message: Co

I'll try to post that tomorrow - must connect the good machine to the web. Would you need anything beyond debug.err?

Thanks Tremo I wish I could do that but if I want to run 2 games in parallel that may cause problems in the former game? I'd like an option to have the ships saved per game rather than per player. I'll typically run a campaign game and a regular game in parallel and don't want to mix designs (what if I upgrade the same design in one game and cannot in the other).

The game crashes on loading a save game if I am not connected to internet. If I am, the game runs fine. I cannot provide more data because I must leave and won't have access to the internet from the game computer for a week, and don't have the time to download diagnosis tools. I checked and unchecked the skip internet test, but generally speaking, I see no readon why the game should check the internet (I didn't click on metaverse, and don't want t

Is there a way to forget all previous ship designs? I find it extremely annoying to have the ship designs from previous games appear when I load a new one. The circumstances and choices change. I find the current behaviour horribly painful, although I understand some may like it. I already dislike being unable to delete the default ship designs by the way, but that's more bearable since I can recreate a ship and hide the default designs.

I had the same bug. Thus happened when I tried to design a ship. I selected hull, propulsion, weapon, then wanted to add some structure. I didn't understand how to do it/what it would do as nothing seemed to happen. I tried to select a slot, then add the structure by dragging and driopping it. Nope. I saw a scrollbar in the ship view, fiddled with it and saw the structure superposed to the ship zoomed in/out. I clicked on other structures, and ended up unable to leave. More exactly, the "done" b

I'd like the game to save preferences per user. I thought the game didn't run on my comp as it crashed twice. Then I saw my son play. So I tried and it worked (why????). Anyhow, he had renamed the Altarians as his choice race. I'd rather not have his renaming when playing. For instance if I choose to rename Terran Alliance as The Foos and my son wants to call them Th Bars and play with them, we have a conflict. The game could look for the current user name (I'm using WinXP) and de

I manage sometimes to run the game. My card has only 32 M so it's a bit short. Anyhow, after one black screen and one crash straight on starting the game, I got one crash after colonizing a planet. I mentioned it in beta2 too: The colony ship seems to still be selected. debug.err pasted here: Debug Message: Version v 0.31 Beta 3a last updated on: Thu Sep 1 13:47:44 2005 Debug Message: *********DXDiag info follows.********* System Info Time: 9/10/2005, 11:04:33 Di

That's why I make my home project in java. Far easier to debug than C++. And the time not spent debugging can be spent optimising, so there's little or no performance loss even with a slower language.

Why did you think it it would have something to do with the STL? I tend to think that the STL is quite stable and secure to use (it's just that the C++ template syntax has been created in order to show programmers what sadism ment). Don't you have a tool like Purify that helps find memory corruptions? Or is purify too slow and bloated to work with GC? I remember hunting a nice function pointer cast for several days. Do you pass funciton pointers as arguments

if you had to implement your own linked list or btree every time you needed one. I think Brad's saying he uses simple structures like arrays rather than linked lists (which are just another kind of list, arrays do as well except for removal) or btrees or maps. I wonder how he deos without Sets. Iff he's got a limited numb

So that's essentially a debugger problem. A simple thing like dbx allows to evaluate methods so seeing and dumping state of objects in the debugger is easy. I have a certain dislike for MS debuggers. They have nice features (set next statement can be a boon) but are not consistent in allowing one to call methods from the debugger (it sometimes work) and crash far too often. But then, I use a very old version of MSDev at work...

Changing values and tweaking is what resource/text files and scripts are for. I don't really see much difference here. And in the app I work on at my job, I spend lots of time changing a boolean here, a float there, when I debug, in order to simulate a problem or revert to a stage of the scenario I would otherwise have to replay everything.from scratch (including maybe loading a model that can take 1 hour to load).

I'm not a great programmer as I've mentioned many times before. But my coding style does lend itself to easy debugging and easy readability. I.e. I can go back and look at my code from 4 months ago and know what I was doing and in a pinch, put it through the debugger with all the important stuff just a click or two away in a debugger watch. <

I ran into a crash like this. Hadn't smartexcpetion installed yet... What happened: I colonised a planet with my initial colony ship. Got the planet screen, selected a few stuff to build (2 food and 2 manufacturing tile improvements), clicked done. Main window showed a selection cursor around where the colony ship used to be (thus selected empty space, which looks weird and suspicious). Then I selected the planet and game crashed.

It's almost always better to spend everything on one tech than spend on several in all games that let one split their spendings. Even if splitting had a benefit (for instance splitting lets you find 2 techs in 5 turns whereas 100% would give one in 3 and the second in 6) it's usually not big enough to compensate the benefits from the early tech itself.

Having the same problem, I think the current interface is really counter-intuitive. What is the extra click for? What does selecting the tech do?

I have some remarks which are the same as Evil Roy's: 4. research build button not intuitive? it took me a while to work out clicking the tech didn't actually research it. and 5. the research screen, as has been stated, does need work. the advanatge of GC1 was that you alway knew at a glance where you were on each strand of research. perhaps researched techs should just disappear collapsing the lines to simple what's next in each tech? I'm j

i reckon some add-ons (eg armour, life support) should be a % of hull space. it may be then that if you armor a cargo chassis, you won't have any room left for a colony pod..... That is the case. Propulsion is a % of hull space + a fixed number. I wonder whether new sizes of ships could be unlocked by getting new

Stardock has a lot of time to rename Miniballs 2 into something more menaingful till the release. And I am sure it can be modded so we could name the weapons Miniballs, Deadly miniballs and Repearting fire deadly miniballs from outer space if we like.

Yes AZERTY is French keyboard. The weird thing is that it manages letters properly but not the other keys. If the Dvorak works, I'll probably try harder to make it work for the next beta (though I can live with the bug).

I have an AZERTY keybpard. When naming a ship, it works mostly right, but not quite. Although alphabetic characters are handled correctly, other keys are not. For instance instead of 2, I get @. I normally would have to type shift+é in order to type 2 but get @ if I do that, and get 2 without typing shift. Here's some of the results I get instead of what I'd expect in GC2 save design screen: 1234567890[+ instead of &é"'(-è_çà)= azertyuiop]; instead of az