GalCiv2 - WARNING, ships designs will not be saved in update

Roscoe · Post by **Roscoe** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 7:19 pm

This was posted in the GalCiv2 impressions thread, a quote from Brad Wardell:

Is the patch going to be out today?
Maybe.

We've been testing it and making tweaks. We had to change the way ships are handled and that's been a lot of work.

Previously, ship designs were not kept between versions of the game. So when you'd update the game, you'd lose your ships.

That is still going to be the case THIS TIME. But this version implements its own versioning for the ship designs so that subsequent updates won't require ship re-designs. But doing that required more work than we had anticipated.

We felt given the amount of effort people are putting into ship designs that we had to change the way we were handling the integrity versioning system to be independent of the overall game version. We don't want people to have to redesign their ships every time we do an update.

So when you update with todays patch (if it comes out today, or whenever it comes out) YOUR CURRENT DESIGNS WILL BE LOST!!!!

Clanwolfer · Post by **Clanwolfer** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 7:34 pm

Brilliant. A developer actually acknowledging a design flaw (not a bug, an actual design mistake), and taking a step to fix it so that it won't be a problem going forward, at the cost of annoying people right now.

Apparently, to paraphrase Tycho and Gabe, game designers, like game critics, have found their fucking testicles.

Erithtotl · Post by **Erithtotl** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 11:15 pm

So is this going to fix all my CTD's?

Asharak · Post by **Asharak** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 11:36 pm

Erithtotl wrote:So is this going to fix all my CTD's?

Allegedly. At least, allegedly, if your CTDs are being caused by an overheating GPU, which is what they think is causing most of the CTDs.

- Ash

Erithtotl · Post by **Erithtotl** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 11:38 pm

Asharak wrote:
Erithtotl wrote:So is this going to fix all my CTD's?
Allegedly. At least, allegedly, if your CTDs are being caused by an overheating GPU, which is what they think is causing most of the CTDs.

- Ash

I haven't been following this, why would GalCiv2 cause crashed and not Quake 4 and max detail?

Asharak · Post by **Asharak** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 11:45 pm

Given that it's vaguely possible that Brad knows more about this than me (;)), I'll just quote him:

Brad Wardell wrote:GPU Throttling. The graphics engine in GalCiv II is designed so that it will scale up. As early modders are finding, you can put in movie quality ship models and they'll run. We don't cap polygon counts. We use specular lighting. We use bump mapping. We use all kinds of different effects. And the result is that it can push your video card hard. Or, more to the point, hot.

Hot means power which means less battery life for laptop users. It also means users who have plugged in that Geforce 7800 into their existing PC may find it too hot and weird things can happen. The framerate counter in GalCiv at full screen is unreliable on LCD monitors (it will always say 60fps). But we have people getting 300fps. And that's just insane.

So the throttling OPTION will be on by default and won't make any difference in performance. It simply puts a Sleep(5) in if the frame rate gets crazy. Those 5 miliseconds can bring down a GPU temp by 20C in our testing. For 95% of you, this means nothing but 5% out of tens of thosuands is non-trivial.

There's a more detailed explanation of this here, as well, but I won't quote that here for brevity's sake.

- Ash