A couple of days ago I've been searching the web for a place to pre-order the SEV. Not anymore, until I see a playable demo first.
I'm a big fan of SEIV. My system: Intel Dual Core 2 Duo E6600, 3Gb RAM, Nvidia 7950GX2/1Gb graphics with the latest drivers. This system runs Everquest 2 at the highest settings (but the shadows) without a problem. In the SEV demo the mouse pointer is so slow that it's work just to navigate the menus. The pointer is very slow and lags constantly.
I've tried some suggestions in this thread. Removing AA and AF gave nothing. Setting the affinity of my dual-core to a single CPU seemed to help a bit, but still not enough, I still feel like I'm fighting with the cursor. Maybe it has something to do with the instant tooltips? Some even stick to the screen until I move the mouse cursor over them again. All screens are bad, but the worst are the game setup screens (when creating the race and stuff before a new game), the research and the ship design screens.
Then there is screen corruption on the 3D combat screen. I've tried to start one with the combat simulator, using a ship I so painfully created
. After a few seconds of combat the 3-D screen starts to stop being updated, in large lines from the bottom to the top, the cursor leaves a trail on it, yet the menus at the bottom are being refreshed. I have to pause the simulation then resume it for the refresh to kick back in.
So, with the empire management screens (the meat of the game) unusable, and some weird corruption on the 3-D combat display, I'll give it a miss until I can see some changes without paying upfront.
Another thing - a suggestion about the planetary screen rotation. How hard would it be to implement a rotation system that does not involve moving the mouse to the sceen edge? We're not in the early 90s anymore, and many games, namely the RTS ones, have shown that it is quite possible to rotate a 3-D view by simply holding the right mouse button for instance then moving the mouse. Or maybe holding shift or control then moving the mouse? Moving the cursor to the screen edge to rotate is as clunky as... having 'hotkeys' that require to hands to be used (like the Shift-<key> ones), while the third hand is on the mouse to select objects
.