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.

I suspected it was a bit snappier than it was before. The really amazing improvement is the fact that a Giant Galaxy now takes only marginally longer to render than the Small galaxy in the demo. Remember how long it took in Galactic Supremacy, Mattress?

Yes, the planet renderings get reconstructed each time you hit turn, which (depending on your hardware) could cause a perceivable lag.

sry cant test got flu

Mind you don't lose your head ridges to that flu, Skeeter!

Get well soon.

...



God yes! There has been a definite improvement in this respect. The game is coming along in leaps and bounds, and i'm expecting great things now...so no pressure.

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 .

I thought the new version runs quite nice, better than the Galaxy Demo on my machine.
But with the music I can now hear that it is too much for my machine, a short hangover every few seconds, I don't know if I trigger it with clicking or changing view or if it would also happen without my interaction.
Without music I would not have noticed the performance issues.
So, speakers out and enjoy

Interesting, so the music is cutting in and out? I'm streaming ogg vorbis using FMOD (256kbps VBR, I believe). If you have WinAmp or some other player installed that is capable of playing ogg vorbis files, you might try loading some of the music up and see what kind of CPU usage you get during playback. You can find the music in the 'Resources\Music' folder.

I just played the music with vlc and I have an average cpu usage of 2-5%, so the music is not the problem, it just shows me the performance issues with the game I would not have noticed otherwise.

@ TheWhiteRaven

Do you have old gfx card drivers or old direct x? Or maybe them errors are caused by forced AA within ur gfx card drivers control panel?

--

Thx moe for the get well soon. Doesn't seem anyone else was bothered i had the flu tho.

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?

Sounds like a legit error, so I doubt it's anything you're doing. Are you running the version from November 13? Can you send me a screenshot of the error you get?

Hey skeet. I remember you telling me you thought you were getting a cold.

But hey I figure your a Klingon You will DEFEAT this Threat to your person! No warrior will allow any sickness to bring them down! Buck up there mate!
I know you can give it the whoopin it deserves!

Mstrobel, From the first test game till this one I was impressed with teh speed of how it moved along. I also saw those streaky lines but they were off and on type deal. I was thinking it was just me being overtired. lol

I'm not techinal so i can not tell you what the rest did. I can say I was so busy playing that I did not notice many things that have been mentioned above.

We trust in your ability to get this in A + shape!

On the next release I'll be a bit more careful to what I see.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Winterhawk . Testing this game on various system configurations be a long and tedious process, but we'll get it worked out...eventually.

Have you changed anything regarding the performance in your last release, because I have no music problems today.
Or is the reason for this once again the very effective Windows-rand() function.

Regrading the UI, I miss the button for end turn in the systems view.

I think between the Nov 12 and Nov 13 releases, I changed it so that, instead of loading all of the music into memory (big memory hog), it streams from disk. I don't recall if I made any other performance changes.

I didn't think there was a Turn button in the BotF system screen. I'll think about adding one.

@ Skeeter and mstrobel

I'm using Catalyst 6.10 and I think I may still have forced AA on (I play Oblivion and use the HDR + AA "hack" with 6.10) I'll try disabling forced AA and see if I get a difference.

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

Mabus, thanks for the screenshot. It definitely helps to see the exact error, though in this case it's a bit puzzling. It seems to be having trouble loading the game's icon. The icon is embedded in the game, so it can't be a missing file issue. I'm also confused by the fact that the entry in the taskbar clearly shows the correct icon. I can't think of any reason why you'd be getting that problem. Out of curiosity, are you running the 64-bit edition of Windows XP? If so, are you also running the 64-bit version of the .NET Framework 3.0?

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 have not yet tried it, but will there be any possable problem with the new editon of MS Windows 7? I have heard form friends outside of here that they do run into some problems here and there.

If you are referring to Windows Vista, then no, you should not run into any problems. In fact, the game is built on Vista technologies. I run the game fine under the Windows Vista RTM on my workstation, though the performance is a bit sluggish compared to my laptop running Windows XP. I'm not sure what the deal is, though I'm looking into it.

Another small thing that you could consider adding. In BotF, when you clicked the fleet icons on the galaxy map, you would immediately select the fleet. It might be a good idea to add that as well.

Furthermore, I like the music

I'm willing to bet that it's a problem with the Vista beta rather than Supremacy. It is, afterall, a beta.

No, it's not a beta. It's the Release to Manufacturers (RTM). I've heard a few developers complaining about WPF performance on Vista relative to XP, so you're probably partially right in that it's not just Supremacy. There's a couple factors that I suspect. First, Vista automatically sets my video card to use not only its onboard 256mb of VRAM, but 256mb of shared system memory as well (which is slower). There's also the factor that my overall system memory usage is higher, and the game may be having to do more more disk swapping. Lastly, I run a 1920x1200 resolution on that workstation, but that really shouldn't make a difference, as things like the galaxy grid have the same extent size regardless of the screen resolution (only the viewport size varies).

Weird. On a few accounts. I figured Vista was still in beta as that's the last version I've seen from MSDN. Then again, I haven't really gone looking for Vista as I have nothing to put it on.

Vista seems to have a great deal of fundamental changes in relation to video cards and graphics in general. Plus, Vista tends to use a ton of eye-candy which could likely account for the performance decrease... unless you've turned it all off like I bet you have.

At this point... I'm just typing so that I don't have to do work. Heh.

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