Ever buy games where the developer pretends a given problem with their game doesn't exist?
Wish they'd just admit to a problem and fix it? Well here's our list of problems that we've encountered and some of them are going to sound pretty obscure but if they affect you, better to know. We plan to address these by release:
Item #1: Windows 2000 on Non-English versions. There is texture corruption on non-English versions of Windows 2000. It works fine on Windows XP and Windows 98 all languages, just Windows 2000. We expect to have this updated by release. If anyone here has a non-english version of Windows 2000 as their main machine let us know.
Item #2: The video tutorials stutter. Click the "view full screen" option. This option isn't in the retail release but is in the digital release and subsequent updates.
Item #3: If you're running in 16-bit color, you need to switch to 32-bit color in some cases or the game will simply fail to launch (or launch with an error and die).
Item #4: On Some nVidia cards, if the game isn't running on your primary monitor, the mouse cursor may get flakey.
Item #5: It takes a LONNNG time to get back into the game after alt-tabbing away. This has to do with a trick we used to keep memory use down. The game isn't crashed but it can take awhile to get back. If you're going to be switchign around, run the game in a window (see the video options screen).
Item #4: TNT and Geforce 1/2 users (technically not supported but they do work) will not get lighting on planets.
Item #5: On Windows 98, if the system has less than 20% resources left, there may be problems with late game performance (frame rate).
Item #6: If you are using an older nVidia card and running your system in 16bit color, the game may not launch. You will need to set your desktop color depth to 32bit. Nothing we can do on this, some older cards don't support DirectX 9 video depth switching.
Item #7. You need to be running your system at 1024x768 or better. That means 1280x600 won't work both X and Y needs to be equal or better. 1600x1200 is fine. 1280x1024 is fine. 4000x3000 is fine. This should only affect certain older laptops.
Item #8. Certain CRT older (non PnP) monitors may need to tweak the brightest and contrast settings of the game to their liking. The defaults were set to PNP CRT / LCD norms.
Item #9. You can run the game in a window from the options are or by running the game from a command prompt galciv2 w
Item #10. You can turn on cheat mode by running the game with a "cheat" parameter (i.e. galciv2 cheat)
Item #11. We have not tested the game on non-Indo European languages yet. That means we don't know how it runs in Mandarin, Hebrew, or other languages. We plan to look at those OSes in the future but our access to those kinds of systems is limited. It might work fine, we just haven't been able to try it.
Item #12. One of the weapons thumbnails in the ship design screen is missing if you run at a very high resolution on certian versions of ATI video drivers. We have fixed this internally already. Most people will likely never see it anyway since it is a very very high tech (we were able to find it through cheat codes).
That's all for now. We'll keep updating this. Hopefully we haven't scared anyone off. We have found from our non-game software that the best policy is to treat customers as partners.
Most of these issues won't affect anyone (they certainly didn't come up during the beta and there were thousands of people in that). But they will likely affect someone and we want to make sure they're taken care of.
