Frogboy's Quote about the second patch. » Forum Post by MisterDonut

I haven't really experienced any issues. If there were some, I didn't notice them.

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the actual game is sound i've only had 1 major bug with the cursor disapering but i haven't gotten the dang movies to download!!!!

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Right on the money. I'm done for the night playing it prematurely again, because it crashed, once again.

Gal civ is making me angry. The game is designed really well. Stardock just needs to hire some programmers who understand how to make a game. Crashed to desktop this frequently in a release product are simply unacceptable. I don't even know how this got beyond their testers. I have a pretty common machine I would think, Windows XP amd64 3200, 1 gig of ram, ati 9800 pro. Yet, this game crashes at least once a play session for me. This is EXTREEMLY frustrating to lose upwards of 30 minutes of play time ( I need to set auto save closer together). I don't like saving frequently since I have a tendency to backtrack when things go wrong if the save game is there. I shouldn't have to worry about saving to avoid crashes. But just now I crashed after loading a game. I'm afraid to take any kind of action that will take some cpu time for fear of crashing.

Besides that, there are just a bunch of minor issues, as you mentined, that really make playing the game more of a headache then the joy it should be. For example, I do not even understand why they have an update button for ship designs. It does not work AT ALL. This amazes me that such a glaring bug would make it to release. When I hit update from the ship yard on a design, I click on a part, then remove. It removes the part, but as soon as I click another button, the part returns. I've clicked around to try to get around this and it had even more wacky behavior past that. Rediculous.

Why can't I delete a rally point off of a starbase? I have tried clicking at it for a long period of time and I just can't get rid of it.

Sliders are still a mess. They are just hard to use. Once I click on a slider and hold the mouse button down, it should not matter where I keep my mouse vertically on the screen. Sliding around looking for diplomacy green shouldn't be an exercise in mouse accuracy.

In the past I had the sound randomly cut in and out. I haven't played under the newest patch enough to know if this is a problem still, since every crash makes me put the game down for the rest of the day.

The order of things popping up on screen is silly. Someone needs to sit down and really set a pop up order when a new turn occurs.

I don't know what frogboy was thinking when he called his game solid. Gal civ 2 is simply one of the greatest pure strategy games I have seen in a few years. But the product itself lacks polish. It doesnt even have the begining stages of polish. Some patches have started adding a bit in, but the developers are going to need another month or two before the game can be called "pretty solid".

I hate to come off so harsh. One thing I have loved about stardock is their development journals and candid communication about its development. Not only that, their approach to copy protection and digital distribution of the game has been fantastic. The gameplay itself is a work of art. The silly thing just needs a lot of turtlewax. I can get beyond interface quirks and learn to avoid poor features (ship updating), but I can not get around crashes to desktop.

Though reading the journal about throttling the framerate solving crashes made me chuckle. I was right, that was not going to help. When something overheats, the whole computer shuts down, the game wont just crash to desktop.

For crashing, I would suggest looking at loading and saving games with large galaxies, since that seems to be operation that has caused most crashes for me. I have played most games with the huge galaxy setting and 9 opponents. Most of my crashes have been when I tried to save the game (via crl s), or when trying to load the game. I have crashed other times, but I can not remember what button I hit to cause it.

I have had other problems with loading the game. Once I loaded a game and I was unable to move a fleet. It was stuck with the autopilot marker on it, with zero moves after the load. Turn and turn again would not move the fleet or give it back movement points no matter what I did. I finally disbanded the fleet, took a turn, then reformed the fleet, and it was ok. This happened with almost every fleet that was on autopilot.

I am trying to be somewhat constructive here with this post. My day job is programing, so I understand how difficult it is to fix a crash that you can not reproduce on your own machines, especially something that is intermitant. Usualy problems like this have to do with a memory leak somewhere.

I have calmed down the more I write the post, and I understand the difficutly of your situation in trying to debug the problem. But please don't think the problems aren't there, just keep looking for them and fixing them. I am putting the game down until the next patch, just like I did before this recent patch.

The game was not ready for release, but you guys appear to be doing really well and the crash to desktops don't appear to be hurting your reviews, so buisnesswise I guess release was the right move.

Anyway, yeah, not solid at all.

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I've said it once, I'll say it many times more.

TOO MANY BUGS. Not just the show-stopping CTDs, but also interface, economics, diplomacy etc. Everything, really. Certainly many more than the average game release. I wonder if it's because Stardock is small company without enough resources for proper quality control, or is it simply because all the excitement of rushing out a game simply made them careless.

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I'd say it's fairly solid, at least relative to the current norm for newly released PC games. Furthermore, what issues do exist seem to be getting quickly addressed with patches.

I posted a complaint about a recurrent CTD bug in one of my games (related to planetary invasion). Within five minutes, Frogboy had posted a link to a download for a beta patch to correct my problem. I downloaded and installed the patch no problem, reloaded my game, no more bug. That's what I call "solid" customer service.

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dude are your drivers and your chipset up to date

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One minor issue where the zoom level changes when I didn't want it to. Nothing that affects the game's playability.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

Well Reapy, it's hard to answer your allegations without any system info.

Every time I sit down and spend a couple hours on IRC with someone who talks about the game "Constantly crashing" we end up resolving the issue the same - updating the video drivers or if they have an AMD dual core., updating their chipset.

Did you look at this thread:

https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=274&AID=105107

I realize it's frustrating to buy a game and have problems. But it is equally frustrating on our end to have spent 2 years working on this game only to have people who run into a problem tell us how "buggy" our game is when it's clearly not buggy for most people.

My answer to you is if 1.0X is buggy (as in crashing and such) for you then you should return it. Period. Because at some point, we are not going to be able to babysit the forums and tell people to read the pinned topics to update their drivers or check to see if they updated their AMD dual core drivers (I noticed you have an AMD64..)

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Xan

Join Date 01/2003

+29

I've yet to experience a crash in many hours of play.

People like Reapy are the kind of people who don't read readmes, don't check FAQs and then scream when something goes wrong.

As for "minor" issues, read carefully about what people determine as "issues". Ex, update ship. I update my ships as standard practice. Works fine.

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I am playing on a 1.7 celeron with 1 gig of pc3200 and a geforce fx5200 pci card and have not had any issues

well one bug with a invasion tech that made me crash when invading but i think they said they were gona fix that in the X patch

I am soo please, I havent bought a game forever and took a chance with this one and am hooked

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I have not expirienced a crash although I'm a computer consultant by trade and keep my machine that I play games on in perfect condition. Not to be arrogant but guys, update your damn software.

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I just got done playing an epic 2 day game. No problems to report.

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Been playing like a madman the past few days. No serious bugs. The initial version had a couple of bonuses that didn't apply which was more of a docs issue than anything. They fixed that pretty quick.

There are some bugs with upgrading of ships depending on how you did things. But I think there should be some fairness on that, the ship design is practically a cad program. Very complex.

So how solid is the game? More solid than most games I've purchased in the past year. About as solid as Civ IV was after its second patch. More solid than Civ IV was when it first came out.

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Seems okay to me. I haven't had a CTD since the final beta and i changed the game to match my desktop resolution.

None of the problems of undeleted ship models have shown up for me and none of the so called bugs that are present affect gameplay to any significant degree.

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I havent crashed once and im running on an older machine. amd 1800+ 1.5 gig ram, x800 radeon. Im upgradingmy system next month to amd 64 3500 2 gig ram radeon x1600 or better.

Only issues i have are with the economy some of these issues were stated in other posts so i wont bother to repeat them.

Other than that, game is good.

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Thank you for your response. My drivers are up to date, and just to check before playing today I did download and install the latest drivers. I do not have a dual core.

I am not asking you to babysit the forums, nor did I want any tech support (I would have gone through those channels if I did). I was simply frustrated and needed to vent.

I understand that you have a passion for the game you have worked on for two years, it definitly shows in the game, and that is perhaps what frustrates me so much. I see greatness in galciv 2. I see an instant classic. I see so many great elements coming together to create a fantastic game. I've read your journals adimantly and the way you play the game is the way I play these games, which is what got me to buy this immediatly upon release. I had a feeling that the things you love in strategy gaming would be the things that I love in gaming, and I was not dissapointed.

All that said, there ARE numerous bugs and quirks in your game. It IS buggier then the average game released. I am 26 now, and have been gaming in some form or another on a PC since about the age of 5 (obviously with parental help). PC gaming has been my life. I've been through all the trials and tribulations of DOS gaming in the 90's, jumpped the hurdles and all that. I feel like I have a great background when comparing products.

But this is only from a consumer perspective. My comments about your programming team were unwarrented and I appologize for them as they were made out of frustration. I have no experience in this department, and should not be making statements about things I do not know anything about.

Your game is buggy frogboy, but don't take it the wrong way. Your game is also AMAZING, and because it is so amazing, is why most of us posters here get so FRUSTRATED, that here is a TRUELY BRILLIANT GAME that we can not play!

So we have both made assumptions about one another. Niether of us is an idiot. I have read all the sticky topics and and been lurking the forums for a while. Most of my issues have been posted by other people, so I never felt the need to throw in my two cents. Tonigh I was just upset to see the game still in the state that it is.

I won't return your game. It is a well done game, and you guys have more then earned my 45 dollars with the time that I have had with it. I look foward to upcoming patches, and hope the game becomes more stable as you continue working on it.

Again, thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.

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My computer crashes sometimes with GalCiv2 . . . but then it also crashes with just about every other game I have as well

Hopefully it will be winter soon and then my CPU/Graphics Card/etc etc etc etc will stop overheating . . .

I'm having a lot of fun with the game so far

Autosaving every turn doesn't bother me, as I think it's cheating to go back and change what I've done

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I wonder what type of Motherboard Reapy has. His system sounds just about identical to mine. An ATI 9800 Pro, check. 1 gig of RAM, check. AMD64 3200 proc, check. My game is as stable as I can ask it to be (ie, I can play all evening long, and not get a crash). In fact, I updated my video drivers before installing the game (i tend to make that common practice anyway, but a lot of people do not), and have the game on my main machine and on my toshiba laptop, and no problems of crashing have ever occured.

Sure, there are MINOR issues. Nothing fantastic. Tooltips when I started sucked. It was admitted as such by Frogboy. I have yet to even turn them back on. Just sorta kept reading the forums and figured things out by playing the game. Apparently improved, but not a show stopper by any means. There were minor issues with fleet creation and the autopilots, but I have not really encountered that in the new patch (albeit, I've only played about an hour with the new patch).

I have not encountered the intermittant save bug yet. Thank god. I would be annoyed too to lose the progress of a game with a bug like that. But by all accounts to those that have encountered this problem, Stardock is working on it and trying to solve it best they can.

This isn't to say Reapy's problems don't exist. I am sure they do. But I also think they are solveable by the simple steps to take when someone reports these problems. I sympathize a little bit for Stardock having to keep on repeating, post after post after post that people should update drivers for their systems. I sort of wish people would say that they've updated their drivers with version xyz, and post their debugg.err file when they report problems as big as Reapy's. Kind of useless to complain about an "unstable" game that "shouldn't have been released" when its your own ignorance at times that causes those issues.

All this to say that the game is stable for me, and I have to say its much less "bug ridden" then most of the other games out there. Not only that, you go onto forums for other games, and you won't even hear so much as a peep from the devs to help you out. Nevermind the IRC chats that they hold at the same time. This is far above what any other game company has done for a lot of games. Can't complain at all for the A+ customer service.

EDIT: I take too long to type. In all that time, Reapy responded and so did Frogboy! Anyway, my statements stand on general. But I do hope Reapy solves his problems

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

Reapy54,

Thank you for responding. But we do disagree. I too have played a lot of games, I love games enough I made it a major part of my career.

Look at the other posts in this thread, you say the game is buggy and I believe it is buggy -- for you. But the issues you run into are not universal. IF the game is crashing on you, that's a serious thing. But what would you have us do?

The number of people having crash problems is very very small. I spent all day Saturday hanging out on IRC with people. Whens omeone would come in with a crash problem, I'd work with them and every-single-time it was some system specific issue. One guy turned off his page file. Another guy had ancient video drivers. Another guy had an AMD dual core. another guy had too small of a page file (only 512MB). I didn't find one person, all day that had a crash problem that was related to anything in the actual game.

And that's par for the course for all week. When you see the updates we do, you're not seeing "fixed crash bug" because we're not getting any. If you really want to solve the problem, you could check out the stickies, get us some info and maybe we could solve it for you. But I'm telling you, there's a 99% chance it's system specific.

We want you to be able to play the game. We want to help you. But at the same time, we do take this stuff personally. We care about the game deeply adn we want ot make sure eveyrone who plays it is happy with it. But we can only solve problems that are within our control.

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Just to respond to you guys about calling me the type of person who does not read readme or faqs.

You do not know me at all, so I can understand why you would think I am the type of person to not read readme files.

But say this to anybody who did know me, and they would laugh in your face. I am the guy who reads EVERYTHING about games and gaming and computers. I read FAQs. I read the forums. I read the stickys. I read the posts. When I buy a pc game, I sit down and read the entire instruction book front to back before I even install it.

I do not have any spyware on my computer. I keep it clean and fresh. There aren't 5 million background tasks running on my machine slowing it to a crawl or anything like that.

Most every time I have a problem I read the forums for HOURS until I find a way to resolve the issue or problem.

This time, I wasn't looking for tech support. I was frustrated. Frustrated at having so many problems with such a great game. I haven't enjoyed a strategy game like galciv 2 since master of magic. And seeing that stardock might be trying to aquire the license for a sequel, and seeing the great work they did with galciv2, brought a big smile to my face.

But I don't think it is too much to ask for a game to not CTD when I keep my drivers up to date and my computer spyware/virus free. I don't mind waiting for future patches. I've seen others with my problems and I am confident that stardock will eventually get around to discovering where the crashes are coming from. I'm not looking for tech support. I love gaming, and theres a million games for me to get to. Gal civ is just going on the backburner for a bit for me is all. But I don't feel like my money was ill spent on this product.

So, now you know a little bit about me, and I would appreciate not being flamed in the future, but I know that is a silly request.

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Frogboy and others, thank you again for responding.

I honestly think Stardock is a breath of fresh air in the gaming industry. Just being so up front and honest about everything, frustratins included, is fantastic. I also do not doubt your passion for the game.

You are right, my problems might be machine specific for me. My friend who is another strategy gamer has had similar crashes too, running a completly different machine. His story is the same as mine, comp is up to date and all that.

But anyway, I really do appreciate your frustrations. I really do. I hate having made you beat your head against the wall in frustration. "Fix the problem!!", says the angry gamer, while you stand there with all the tools and time to fix it with no problem in sight to fix. The worst part is there are probably hundreds of people like me, where typically I'd just go quietly into the night and never have said a word to anybody about my specific crashes or problems. Like I said, gal civ is an exception for me due the amazing gameplay.

So again, I would like to appologize for having been another person to have caused you to beat your head against the wall. But the one posative you should take from this thread, is for every one of me, there appears to be at least 20 other people who are ready to scream at me and jump down my throat to defend you and your game. Even in the middle of the game crashing on me all the time, I'm still calling the game amazingly great.

So, from a long time gamer, and there hasn't been many pc games that I've missed playing, ever, in the past 20 years, I want to let you know gal civ 2 is a masterful game, and all your passion and creation shows in ever aspect of it. You really captured the heart of a good strategy game, "simply complex" I like to call it. An easy to grasp set of rules, leading into an amazing amount of gameplay variety. Even managment of the game and empire was handled beautifully with rally points and goveners.

So while I feel the little things need some work, all the big things are there, and are great, and are perfect. Everything comes together beatifully. Don't let angry people like me take away any bit of your pride that you have for what you have done. You deserve it, and you guys did a great service to pc gamers everywhere.

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Reapy,

We're on your side. I hate people coming out and getting on you because you have a negative thing to say. I think some of that is because there have been too many people who were too quick to blame the developers for something on their machine and now people are skeptical when some one has a real problem.

Here is where people are objecting. You are making sweeping generalizations about the game based on your single experience.

Do you think all of us, who have been running the game without incident since release are wrong and only you are right? I play the game every day. Many hours. I have experienced 0 crashes so far.

You want to make the sweeping charge that the game is buggy but who determines whether a game is buggy? You make it sound like only you have that right. None of us are running into anything resembling a serious problem.

Frogboy has said repeatedly that "it's all about percentages". "Somebody somewhere is going to have a problem". You got the short straw it appears.

We're not against you. I understand your unhappiness. I would feel the same way.

I agree people shouldn't assume you don't know what you're talking about. But the forum regulars like myself have seen it time and time again. Some person comes on, puffs up their credentials ---everyone is a software developer now--- and then after going back and forth with Frogboy in a post here it turns out oops, they had old drivers or oops, they had some other system problem that they should have been solved without coming here first.

The Civ forums still have people claiming Civ4 is a buggy game. I have never had a problem with Civ4 other than the ATI problem that most people ran into. But it was quickly resolved and it's run like a champ since.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

Reapy:

Feel free to email me at brad@stardock.com. Any sort of debug.err along with a Smart Exception (Stardock Central in the free stuff - download that run it and it will give us ar eport that will tell us exactly where the problem is).

It matters a lot to me that we make sure the game runs fine for everyone. One of my motivations to make games is because I got tired of paying $50 for a game that required patches to work. Too many times, developers will rush things to market.

In GalCiv's case, we didn't rush it to market. We basically sat around playing the game for about a month before release making sure it ran fine. I find crashes to be completely unacceptable. I want to know what causes them and how to solve them.

I was serious about what I did on Saturday, I literally spent morning to 2am doing nothing but hanging out on #galciv on irc.stardock.com talking to various users. I'd get their saved games, look at their debug reports, etc.

Nothing would make me happier than to find something in our code to fix. It would be so much easier that way. It's the stuff that's outside our control that drives us crazy.

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It's thousands of times more stable than Tribes 2, and I stuck with that game for whatever insane reason.

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Thank you John Hamp. I understand. I have been reading forums probably as long as most people here. I usually refrain from posting. I am not trying to trump myself up. My initial post was done with anger, and, rereading it, was very disrepectful to the development team. I am no software developer. I have only been programming in my job for 3 years, and my field is Simulation and Modeling, which is VERY different then game development. I am hardly a professional.

I call the game buggy, because of what I have experienced, what my friend has experienced (similar crashes), and because of numerous posts here. All of the problems I have identified, I have seen similar threads from other people with the same problems as mine. My problems, if perhaps rare, are not unique. There is also the STICKY: The Glitch Report Thread, that has some issues that I have mentioned in it.

I don't do anything extreem to my machines, I keep them pretty standard, because the purpose of them is mainly to run games, and having problems like this with a game is a very rare incident from me. I guess as you said, we are all destine to draw the short straw sometimes.

But again, I completly understand everybodies comments towads me. I have read lots of message boards, and been online for a long time, and re reading my initial post, I would react the same way. I also understand what you mean about long time poster frustrations, people making wild accusations, and it usually just being a problem that is solved in 5000 other threads or whatever.

Anyway, sorry to have caused a ruckus. I'll be going back to lurking now, and I hope to have ended this on a somewhat posative note.

Thank you all for replies.

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