Now that the previous demo video is out of date, I've uploaded another one. It's a bit large (~266mb), but this time I've zipped it up since people had trouble downloading the last one. You will need Quicktime 7 to play this. Get it before AFC forces me to remove it for eating all their bandwidth .

Click to Download

EDIT: Those of you who have downloaded the UI demo shouldn't bother downloading this video. It won't show you anything you haven't already seen, and it's just a waste of bandwidth.

Last time i downloaded a demo it was only a few screenshots and as a big download.

May i ask why you arnt using divx or xvid compression. It would be easier to dl.

I use the h.264 (AVC) codec, which is the MPEG-4 specification used for HD-DVD and Blu-ray. The compression is on par with DivX (h.263), but with better video quality. The video is large because it is 720p high definition (1280x720).

There seems to be a bug or two, but I'm not complaining :p The video looks mint.

On the resource screen, you allocated a unit of population to replicators but the bar at the bottom remained lit.

Also on the resource screen, there is no way to determine how much energy and food you need to keep everything running and not dying.

Observation: when building the same type of unit, they get queued on seperate lines. So, if I order 20-30 buildings built, even though it's only three different types of buildings, there will be a line for each. That would get a bit tedious when I decide to cancel them all because some empire decided my system was a bit close to their "territory" and needed "fixing".

Random idea not related to the movie: Would it be possible to impliment some sort of pop-up box that would occur when a detectable enemy starship enters your territory or drifts close to it (depending if there will be "neutral-zones" or not)? With such a HUGE galaxy, if you expand to a quarter of it, there is no way in hell you are going to see the group of enemy ships making a beeline for one of your fringe systems and/or outposts/starbases. Again, that's only if you can detect them. If they are already inside that buffer when they become detectable (for instance, if a group of warbirds decloak over a system in preperation for bombardment), I'd expect the pop-up box to come up.

It might be a bit tricky to get it right. For instance, it popping up all the time would be annoying so determining a way to get it to pop up once would be ideal. But if the ship becomes undetectable or moves outside of the range of your territory, then decides to reappear near/inside your territory, I'd expect the box to pop up again.

It's a random idea, one I'd find useful though. I don't know why, but your movies and screenshots typically generate one.

Why HD resolution when 320x... res would do?

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The reason im not in favour of big downloads right now mike is that my isp is traffic shaping so downloads are very slow at the moment.

I'll give a thought to enemy movement indicators. Perhaps they could be included in a separate overlay.

There is a glitch with the production sliders where the labor pool sometimes doesn't get decremented. I haven't gone back and picked it apart yet. I'm aware of the problem, but not the cause.

The Food and Energy totals on the left-hand side are net production levels. In other words, the total food minus the amount needed to sustain the population, and the total energy minus the amount needed to sustain the active buildings. They go into the negative red when running a deficit.

Skeeter, a 320x2XX resolution wouldn't do well, since none of the text would be readable. I wanted people to be able to see all the subtle details of the UI. Fear not, if you don't want to download the movie, I'll likely be releasing a demo in the next couple weeks with the same functionality shown in the video. Such a demo should be significantly smaller than the video (40-50mb or less), depending on how many game images are in place.

Thx mate.