Galactic Civilizations II impressions

[Will]

Graeme Dice said:
Running old versions of DirectX and old drivers is the users fault, not the developers.

... *snip* ...

How do you know? Did you make any attempt to fix the dozen or so problems that all computers have. Did you purge your registry of entries from programs that you uninstalled months ago? Did you update all your drivers? I dislike it when people aren't willing to perform even basic maintenance on their computers before making complaints.

Ok, I was under the impression that the problem was people had DirectX 9.0b, and the game wanted 9.0c... ok, so the release dates for the two versions of the library are pretty distant, so it could be "old" in that sense... but 9.0b -> 9.0c was supposed to be a minor bugfix release, as evidenced by the internal version number going up by only two builds (i.e., compile all the fixes, "oops, there were a few typos", compile again, done). It wasn't something where there were only functions that required 9.0c. There is really no reason why the entire game should crash from that. And any testing department worthy of the title would test the game out under a variety of boxes, under a variety of hardware and environments. That means having computers from low end to high end, cheap no-name video cards, mid-range and high-end cards from BOTH nVidia and ATI, use both crappy on-board sound and sound cards, use Windows 98 through XP SP2, test it with the first release of DirectX 9.0, etc. If you only test it out on the same boxes that the devs use, you're going to find jack [censored] for problems.

And Fyron knows what he is doing with his computer. If he says it's a problem with the game and not the box, it almost certainly is a problem with the game. He knows how to take care of his machine, and he would check on drivers and patches for anything before complaining about it. Most of the people on these boards are the same way. While it is annoying to deal with people who complain about things that they screwed up because they have no clue what they're doing, your assumption in this case is entirely unfounded.

Oh, and I have played quite a few games, including several in DOS. Two hours between crashes is bad. I remember keeping some games up for days by playing a bit in the morning, going to school, play a little more when I get home, and so on. Games should not be expected to crash after as light a load as two hours. Period.