Galactic Civilizations II impressions

[Graeme Dice]

Imperator Fyron said:
Irrelevant. There is no reason why the game shouldn't have been able to run _at all_ with 1 version out of date drivers.

It wasn't a problem with having 9.0b. It was a problem where the install routine Microsoft provided didn't upgrade 9.0c installs to the latest version of 9.0c.

More like, extremely high. There is no excuse for a $50 game from a huge company to crash in anything but the most obscure of situations.

Have you ever played more than a half dozen various games? Games have crashed every few hours well back into the DOS era.

The game would crash _every turn_ after playing for a while in many cases... It was absurd.

Did you make any attempts to fix your computer if the crashes were that common?

[Graeme Dice]

And Firaxis didn't really care whether ATI users could play their game within two months of buying it, or whether anyone could play more than 2 hours without a crash or more than 10 turns (mid game) without restarting.

The lead developer certainly cared.
Civ 4 Problems

[Atrocities]

SimCity 3 was better after the Rush Hour expansion pack came out. So yes, it was broken at game launch.

[Fyron]

Graeme Dice said:
It wasn't a problem with having 9.0b. It was a problem where the install routine Microsoft provided didn't upgrade 9.0c installs to the latest version of 9.0c.

Please don't shift the blame away from Firaxis here. A patch of the game fixed the problems without ANY reinstalls of DirectX or video card drivers. They did not test the environment very well and did not initially make the game able to run well with those older drivers or versions of DirectX.

Have you ever played more than a half dozen various games? Games have crashed every few hours well back into the DOS era.

I have played many games, and stop playing the ones that have inexplicable, repeating crashes. Very few games I have ever seen crash periodically _in the middle of every turn_. Forget every few hours... It is not excusable for anyone to release horridly buggy games. I no longer buy games before trying them out because of this widespread beta-as-release phenomenom.

Did you make any attempts to fix your computer if the crashes were that common?

My computer was never broken or in even slightly bad shape. The computer never crashed, only Civ 4 crashed. In the first version that wouldn't even have the game start, I did attempt to perform the ridiculous procedure that Firaxis posted of reinstalling drivers and the game, but it did nothing to alleviate that problem. After some patches it would run, but crash once the game had progressed to a certain point. There was nothing for me to fix, short of hex editing fixes into the Civ4 exe, since there was never anything wrong with my computer, but with the game. Now that they are finally progressing from the beta stage, the game runs rather smoothly, without any further dicking around with reinstalling drivers and DirectX.

Anyways, this thread is about GalCiv II, not Civ4, so I won't post anything further about it in this thread.

[Graeme Dice]

Imperator Fyron said:
They did not test the environment very well and did not initially make the game able to run well with those older drivers or versions of DirectX.

Running old versions of DirectX and old drivers is the users fault, not the developers.

I have played many games, and stop playing the ones that have inexplicable, repeating crashes. Very few games I have ever seen crash periodically _in the middle of every turn_.

Then you haven't played very many games at all, and especially not many DOS games as I said. Random, unpredictable, even predictable crashes have always been, and always will be part of PC games.

I no longer buy games before trying them out because of this widespread beta-as-release phenomenom.

Please don't attempt to rationalize a justification for piracy.

My computer was never broken or in even slightly bad shape.

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.

[Fyron]

Borrowing a game from a friend (where he does not make a CD image to keep playing it while you have the CD) is totally within the realm of fair use. I only respond to this because this bizarre assumption of piracy from left field might lead others to believe that it is not. Without a demo, there is no other way to test a game on your machine to see if it will run. You can't return opened games to stores these days (at least in California), since everyone that wants to return software is a dirty pirate.

[Sivran]

I dislike it when people make ridiculous claims like

one crash every two hours is extremely low for any kind of game.

Listen to yourself! Or rather, read. Can you not see just how ridiculous this statement is? That's a candidate for Sivran's Most Ridiculous Item of the Day, AFTER I spent an entire day listening to novice computer users describe their problems to me!

I suppose you're also going to say that Windows 9x/ME could not possibly function for more than twenty-four hours at a time, and that spyware "just happens," and that deleting your browser cache is actually useful in more than a small handful of situations?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I foresee yelling. Much yelling. And I've got a headache.

[Renegade 13]

Graeme Dice said:
Then you haven't played very many games at all, and especially not many DOS games as I said. Random, unpredictable, even predictable crashes have always been, and always will be part of PC games.

I don't want to wade into the arguement too far here, but this statement is, in my experience not true.

I have bought many games through the years, and few have crashes at all let alone crashes every couple hours.

I also have to disagree that random, predictable and unpredictable crashes always will be a part of PC games, since that implies there is nothing that can be done about it. That is not true. Crashes are inevitable, yes, given the massive amount of hardware and software combinations that exist. Something won't play nice with something else, and cause a crash. However, there is absolutely no reason why the vast majority of such bugs can not be caught by the developer during beta testing. The rest that emerge after release should be taken care of in a patch as soon as possible.

There is no reason a gaming company should have a "finished" product that crashes in more than the most unusual circumstances. Crashes are not an unavoidable part of PC gaming.

[Suicide Junkie]

Over 20 years, I have had more DOS "crashes" due to power outages than software problems.

Windows itself is very unstable compared to DOS games.

And just to be clear, attempting to run DOS games under windows dosen't count. Boot to DOS with a floppy, and keep in mind that your hardware is a hundred times more than the game and the OS was designed for. It works damn well.