A great work indeed mstrobel, i`m sure it will be a great sequel to botf mate!

Thanks, Janus. Always nice to see another satisfied customer .

Hey, here's a question for those of you who had downloaded my Galaxy Grid Test earlier on. Have you noticed any performance difference with the galaxy grid in the demo compared to the Galaxy Grid Test? Is scrolling or selecting sectors faster or slower at all? You won't be able to run the old Galaxy Grid Test anymore if you installed the .NET Framework 3.0 RTM, so you'll have to work off memory. It's not critical, I'm just curious...

From what I remember of it, it's actually running faster than the old grid.

I've noticed that the game generally slows down while you have a system actually selected - it's probably something to do with the rendering of the Planets as you've said before, MStrobel. If you select a different sector (Non-Planetary) the game speeds up though. It's best to try that if you're a speed freak and want even faster turn-processing.

Hey, sorry it took me so long to upload that screen of the UI bug I found.
Here it is:





It seems to appear only after I mouse over any of the "Lower Production" arrows.
Seems to be just a minor layering issue, but I'm not sure.

Now that is weird. You're getting some serious jaggies on some of that geometry, too. This is what it should look like:



Note the nice antialiased edges. This looks like a WPF/Direct3D/Driver issue. It's not nearly as strange as the glitches I was getting on my friend's ThinkPad, though. All the text got sliced and shifted diagonally. Whatever is causing these problems, it must be somewhere in the layers of code between the WPF, Direct3D, and the kernel. It could also be a hardware issue. Either way, it's outside of my control .

ok , maybe I am doing something terribly wrong , but I am getting an "unhandled exception" error when I run the supremecy client. Cannot create instance of 'SplashScreen' defined in assembly 'Assemblyclient' .... error in markupfile.

Any idea what I might have done wrong?

Ok here is that screen shot of the error I reported earlier

No , I am running the Media Center Edition of XP , though I do have a 64-bit CPU. I also installed the 3.0 .Net before running also. Just by chance , do I need to unistall all the previous versions of .Net , i.e. 1.0 1.1 2.0 etc.. I was under the impression I only needed to remove any pre-release 3.0 release! Maybe that will help.

Excellent work from what I can see in the forums by the way! Really professionally done if I might say so! Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the compliments, Mabus . No, you do not need to uninstall any previous versions of .NET (that would actually be a bad idea), as they coexist quite peacefully. I was running the game just fine on my Media Center Edition 2005 box, so I guess the OS version isn't the problem. I'll see if I can figure out what's causing that error.

I just uploaded another revision of the demo. This one includes quite a few bug fixes (double resource production in some cases). It also includes a "fuel" system where each ship begins to expend fuel from its reserves once it travels beyond its maximum range. At that point, it will expend 1 unit of dilithium per sector moved. If it does not enter fueling range before the reserves are depleted, it will become stranded. If this happens, you have two options:

(1) Extend the fuel range by building additional shipyards

(2) If you're lucky enough to be stranded in a system with a Gas Giant (non-Crystalline), you can instruct the fleet to collect deuterium. It will then harvest deuterium to replenish its reserves at a rate of 1 unit every 2 turns.

(3) You can send another ship out to the same sector, and order it to "Tow" the stranded ship back to your space. Be careful, for if the rescue fleet goes out of range, you could end up with two ships stranded. While towing, both ships will be limited to a speed of one sector per turn. Note: In order to issue a "Tow" order, the towing ship and the stranded ship must both be deployed individually. That is, neither the towing ship nor the ship being towed may be in a fleet with any other ships.

I also added an "Escort" order, which will instruct one fleet to follow another. It's kind of pointless at the moment, since there are no alien fleets to escort. You can escort your own fleets, but you could just as easily combine the fleets together. Note: you cannot escort a fleet with a higher speed rating. It is a known bug that ships performing escort duties do not expend fuel. I noticed this after I started uploading the new revision, and I didn't want to cancel the upload.

Feel free to test these new features to see if they work as advertised. Please let me know if you find anything that doesn't work right.

Cheers,
Mike