This doesn't help anyone when I say this but it still needs to be said:
A product or service will always fail for some % of people. Someone, somewhere will have a problem. The question is purely what %.
I've spent all day today working with different people who had crash problems.
One person had their VM locked at 512MB. So eventually, in a largish sized galaxy, the game would run out of memory and crash. It would happen on any game that used quite a bit of memory.
Another person had NO VM. They had a system with 512MB of RAM and no page file. Same as above.
I also worked with Def (in this thread) who was updating his ships and saving them as the same name but not upgrading the existing ships. I'm not sure what the deal is. But his problems went away by simply giving his new ships a new name. Is this a bug? I don't know, it dpeends on what the cause was. We don't know yet. But obviously not a common issue.
I worked with someone this evening who got random crashes and it turned out he had an ancient computer that he had upgraded the video card to some monster but his system was not set up to handle that card very well when it was stressed at all. His last game he played was COunterstrike (the original).
If you have enough of your game out there, these things will pop up. And that's on top of the genuine bugs that are our fault. But I don't see how we could have prevented these things.
For example you write:
| Industry on several planets crashes which makes it impossible ti build anything on them etc. etc. |
That tells me little but more to the point, I have not seen a single report like this.
I have a beta build up on https://www.galciv2.com/latestbuild
You can try that and run the debug parameter (c:/> galciv2.exe debug) and post the debug.err if you want to help try to find out what the problem is.
I realize it's tempting to just say "Well these guys rushed it out and hav ea buggy product." But I don't think that's a fair charge. We had thousands of beta testers. Our gamma testers all felt it was ready to go. We felt it was ready to go. And based on the reception, the game was ready to go. You will always have some glitches or things that got missed along with compatibility problems.
All we can do is try our best to make as many people as we can happy. But we also know that some %, some very small % but probably high in absolute numbers will simply not be able to run the game.
And that's true of any product -- look closely at the Xbox 360 launch for instance. Their first run at manufacturing problems that caused overheating in a small % of users. Civ IV didn't work right on a significant % of ATI cards when it shipped. I won't even touch on BF2 or its expansion.
It's not because people are lazy or greedy or stupid. It's simply a matter of numbers.
