With well over 4,000 views, this thread is--by a significant margin--the post popular thread in all of the Supremacy, New Beginnings, and BotE forums. So why is it that only a handful of people have posted feedback?

If you download one of my tech demos, I'd like to hear what you thought about it. Drop me a PM or e-mail, or just post a quick note in this thread. Tell me if you downloaded it and what your impressions are. Let me know if you have any suggestions, or if you ran into any problems. You can post as a guest if you don't want to register. The more I feel like people are keeping an eye on my game, the more motivated I am to work on it .

BTW, I'm hoping that the final release of the .NET Framework 3.0 will be available soon, at which point you will only have to download one prerequisite (as opposed to both .NET 2.0 and the WinFX RC beta). I'll be able to release more UI previews then.

Do you think my system:

P2 400 Mhz

could run it?

The main problem is if you're running Windows XP and have the prerequisites, sblewett.

If you meet those, then the demos *should* run - although they will be exceedingly slow.

It would be great if you could post feedback to MStrobel on it. As he said above, he's crying out for feedback.

Running the demos on low-spec systems would help him work out the requirements for the final release then.

the only problem with giving feedback is that not much can be given as you can't do very much , because you run out of dilithium and can't mine any you can't build anymore ships after a while.

Still so far looking good, though for some reason i'am getting nostalgic for a nice low res UI like the original lol

Run out of dilithium? Huh? It's just a map test. Perhaps you're confusing it with Birth of the Empires?

Yes, cdrwolfe is confusing it. BOTE is the one with the Dilithium problem.

Yes, I think so, too

@mstrobel:
Your maptest runs great at my PC, no problems with speed. Okay, my system is fast, too. But there are some little things I don't like:
- the big white lines (I think dotted thinner lines look better)
- the menue after a right click flickers two times
- in my opinion the space between the planets in the systemview is too small

But great work, looks very very good!

Thanks for the feedback, SirPustekuchen . Just a couple things...

What big white lines are you referring to? The grid should have thin, light, translucent gray lines, except for the quadrant separations, which are a 1px opaque white line. Are you referring to the selection rectangle that highlights the selected sector?

The menu will be a little choppy the first time it comes up. I'm not precaching the images yet, so it has to load them from disk the first time. Does it still flicker on subsequent popups?

I tend to agree about the spacing between the planets, but my reasoning for this is that at lower resolutions (down to 1024x768), the planets in larger systems will not fit, so the system view will need to be uniformly scaled down. Less spacing between planets means less downscaling in this case. I might go back and optimize it later to increase the spacing when extra space is available (e.g. at higher resolutions).

Cheers,
Strobel

I mean the lines, that seperate the quadrants. I think they don't match with the other style. I think without these lines, the map would look much better.

Yes, it flickers every time! Maybe I use an old version. I have assembly version: 1.0.2383.14991

Okay, I used 1280x1024.

Hmm...that might be true. My assembly version is 1.0.2414.28709.

Now that you mention it though, if I look closely, the menu screen does flicker on my version as well - but it does it so quickly that it is barely noticable.

It only does it if I right-click on an area of map, then right-click again in a different place. If I was to right-click again without moving the mouse, it doesn't flicker. Does that make sense?

My resolution is also 1280x1024. Like I said, the flickering is extremely quick, and I only noticed it because I tested it after SirPustekuchen mentioned it. I didn't notice it otherwise, and i could certainly live with it. It isn't the kind of flickering that can cause epileptic fits, anyway.

The context menu uses the same animation as any other Windows popup menu. That means it may slide out or fade in, depending on your settings. That's probably the source of the flicker. It's pretty fluid on my machine, but it may flicker on different CPUs and video cards. I'm not sure if it's possible to turn off that animation.

Don't worry about it. As I said, it's barely noticable.

In case it helps, my CPU is a Pentium 4 model 540 processor (3.21Ghz) and my graphics cards are 2x ATI Radeon 9250 128mb (256mb total) graphics cards.

So, the .NET Framework 3.0 has now been officially released, and wow, the Galaxy Map won't run anymore.
Does this happen only on my machine, or is the Galaxy Map not .NET 3.0 compatible?

Wow, .NET 3.0 was released and I hadn't heard yet?! The galaxy map test was built with WinFX Beta 2, so its dependencies are for an earlier assembly version. I'll look into releasing a new UI demo once I get the new Windows SDK w/ .NET 3.0 loaded up. Hopefully that will be in a few hours .

Anyone that's interested in running future tech demos of Supremacy should go ahead and uninstall any pre-release versions of the WinFX Runtime Components or the .NET Framework 3.0. Once that's done, you can download and install either the x86 or x64 version of the .NET Framework 3.0 RTM.

*Edit from Matress_of_evil - Microsoft have got an official .Net uninstallation tool that uninstalls all old prerequisites for you in the correct order. You can get it from Here.