What is Dominions II?

[Gandalf Parker]

Pickles said:
I do not know - I only play on one platform & it is far worse than any other interface from recent times. This is the problem really - I am far less a computer geek than most people here (I reserve my geekiness exclusively for games) & I am used to good windows interfaces.

There are slick interfaces available for any system. Unfortunately if its for 4 different systems then its hard to find common ground. Not much good to have buttons doing things on one that cant be done on the others.

I would rather the game was produced slickly for one platform only (& penetrated the mass market) but this seems unlikely...

No not too likely. But isnt it nice that they compiled a Windows Version? (it was made on linux)

I think most of my issues are unpatchable eg why is the thing so resource intensive?

The same thing I think. Less resource intensive games on Windows let the windows dll's take care of alot of the overhead. That way each program isnt loading and using modules for common things like how to draw the screens or how to display fonts. But everything has its pros and cons. Not going that route allows it to make the best use of linux abilities for things like hosting games.

Also everyone knows how poor the in game message system is both as a relay of ingame info & as a inter player messager.

Thats kindof standard for a PbEM game. Its easier for people doing blitz games to use voip, or irc, or emails than to have the game put something like that into it. Thats kindof the other side of the resource thing.

This is not really a criticism of the developers BTW. They are only 2 and do most of the truly important stuff well meanwhile the whole thing has an amateurish feel to it.

Most of the best strategy games do. No game will cover everyones preferences. Arguers on the other side of "has an amateurish feel to it" might word it as "will not appeal to the xbox set"

Its definetly a niche market. Whether or not they would do better continuing up the path of "deep and well balanced strategy play" or do better trying to jump in the pool with all of the shelfware stuff is a debate between them and their publisher.

I dont want to seem too defensive. Its just that Ive already gotten used to the interface. Except for little fast improvements to make it easier for new players, I tend to be against alot of time spent on the UI. Id rather time was spent on the AI but its in the same boat as the UI. Not really prime target for the game.

[Sheap]

Gandalf Parker said:
There are slick interfaces available for any system. Unfortunately if its for 4 different systems then its hard to find common ground. Not much good to have buttons doing things on one that cant be done on the others.

No one is complaining that the window borders look funny. None of the UI issues that are being brought up have anything to do with what platform the game is running on. I could give a list but I don't want to turn this thread into a rant session

The same thing I think. Less resource intensive games on Windows let the windows dll's take care of alot of the overhead. That way each program isnt loading and using modules for common things like how to draw the screens or how to display fonts.

Whatever is going on to make Dom2 more resource intensive than usual doesn't have anything to do with module loading overhead. But whatever the reason, it hardly matters. Do I really need my fire darts to run at 60 FPS?

[Gandalf Parker]

Sheap said:

No one is complaining that the window borders look funny. None of the UI issues that are being brought up have anything to do with what platform the game is running on. I could give a list but I don't want to turn this thread into a rant session

Well he mentioned keypresses. I think that the keypresses used originally were the ones that would work standard across windows, mac, linux and solaris. As it is they are already sliding into ones which dont carry over well into all of the platforms which slows down getting patches and new demos done.

Whatever is going on to make Dom2 more resource intensive than usual doesn't have anything to do with module loading overhead. But whatever the reason, it hardly matters. Do I really need my fire darts to run at 60 FPS?

Its that Dominions does not load modules. They do everything themselves rather than use things already loaded such as screen-write API's or optimized for windows such as DirectX. Most FPS problems are graphic card problems. I think from not making best use of drivers for the cards.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

Gandalf Parker said:Its that Dominions does not load modules. They do everything themselves rather than use things already loaded such as screen-write API's or optimized for windows such as DirectX. Most FPS problems are graphic card problems. I think from not making best use of drivers for the cards.

Eh.. Last I check dom used openGL (and maybe SDL, though I don't know), which is sortof DirectX, made right this time. There should be no performance hit for this. Probably, the code just needs a bit of optimization, that's all. And lots of small objects has always been the death of 3D rendering system (such as openGL (and Direct3D)).

[Arralen]

There is an issue with DOM2, SDL, OpenGL and ATI cards:

No matter what system you have, what screen resolution you're running, you'll get either 8,15 or 32(?) fpm.
But it is NOT over-use of ressources, it's a programming glitch in one of the sub-systems (not necessarily even in DOM itself).
E.g. it runs with 25+fpm on my P3/400 (G2Ti) and only with 15 fpm at work (D1800/Rad7000).

Sadly, it looks like the problem is just to "sophisticated" for the developer(s) to figure out - remember, we're talking a part-time hobby programmer here.

And, at Last, I really like the interface.

[reverend]

Arralen said:
There is an issue with DOM2, SDL, OpenGL and ATI cards:

No matter what system you have, what screen resolution you're running, you'll get either 8,15 or 32(?) fpm.
But it is NOT over-use of ressources, it's a programming glitch in one of the sub-systems (not necessarily even in DOM itself).
E.g. it runs with 25+fpm on my P3/400 (G2Ti) and only with 15 fpm at work (D1800/Rad7000).

And, at Last, I really like the interface.

fpm? Frames per minute? Now THAT would be a "glitch"

The problem is unlikely to be addressed by ATI though. The majority of other games do not have that problem, and the Dom2 community is too small to have an impact on their driver development. Although, I heard they almost rewrote their OpenGL implementation for the 4.9 Cats. Maybe THEN my X800 will give me more than 16 fps during battles.

The interface is ok. Right click or left click doesn't matter you get used to it. The messaging system IMO is the part of the GUI that needs fixing. I'd even propose collecting money from the community to "sponsor" their programming time to rewrite it.

[magnate]

reverend said:
The interface is ok. Right click or left click doesn't matter you get used to it. The messaging system IMO is the part of the GUI that needs fixing. I'd even propose collecting money from the community to "sponsor" their programming time to rewrite it.

Do we even need to do that? Can't they just refer to an EDITOR environment variable, and fire it up for writing Messages? Then you can use whatever you want - Notepad, vi, whatever. Then the only recoding is to let you see Messages you've written this turn, re-edit them etc.

CC

[alexti]

Arralen said:
There is an issue with DOM2, SDL, OpenGL and ATI cards:

There is an issue with OpenGL and ATI cards, Dom2 is not the first and is not the Last game that works poorly on ATI, actually, is there any OpenGL game that works well on ATI? I believe there were some non-ATI OpenGL ATI drivers around, which were working better than original ones.

[Cainehill]

Gandalf Parker said:

Well he mentioned keypresses. I think that the keypresses used originally were the ones that would work standard across windows, mac, linux and solaris. As it is they are already sliding into ones which dont carry over well into all of the platforms which slows down getting patches and new demos done.

The up/down arrows are already used in other portions of the interface, so it's not that the keypresses aren't standard across the platforms. (And yes, I've programmed X for many years on *nixes, and know what a PITA many of the keys are.) But while it's possible to scroll through commanders, and to scroll the map, it isn't possible to scroll through the spells in the research screen, or the spell scripting screen, or through the commanders in the troop deployment screen.

The entire spell list section - having the spells in a sane order has nothing to do with the multiple platforms. But as Sheap said, we don't want to turn this thread into a rant.