Oh boy, I'm not sure if it's the Christmas update or what, but there are bugs galore. Here are ones I noticed:

1. To say that the Cardassians are bugged just doesn't say it. Matress, your update didn't seem to do well with them, as I can upgrade their shipyard as soon as the game begins. Also, I colonized a system with them and, well, the system had zero population. In fact, it read just like an uninhabited system, though it said it was inhabitated by Cardassains <save file included>.

2. When I hit retire and then try to load another game, Supremacy crashes. Isn't that the point of the retire button? So we can load a new game without restarting the program?

3. I downloaded the combat demo, and it doesn't run right. Whenever I hit 'run demo' it crases. I have that one DLL it says in the readme in the right folder, so why won't it run?

MK

I'll assume you have the latest .Net 3.5 considering you can run supremacy, but the combat demo does not run on Vista, by chance do you have that?

How far can you get? can you get the the graphical user interface / menu part?

Can you select ships, groups and then get to loading the combat engine or does it just completely crash before hand when you click the exe shortcut?

Do you happen to have a description of the error that come up?

Regards Wolfe

Damn, that's not the sort of thing I wanted to hear. I thought there would be a few things that slipped through in my update but for the the Cardies to be totally messed up isn't a good thing. It's easily fixable in the editor though, so I'll get right on it. I've just fixed a problem with the Utopia Planitia fleetyards as well. Thanks for letting me know, mknote.

And as for the retiring bug, it's a known bug - I mentioned it to Mike about a month ago. He either forgot about it or hasn't come up with a solution yet.

With regard to the demo, no, I have XP, so that isn't it. I run the executable, get to a screen with five buttons: Start Demo, Options, Credits, Exit, and <the last one is blank>. I click on Start Demo wait about four seconds, and the standard Microsoft error box comes up (BOTFII Demo v2 has encountered a problem and needs to close blah blah blah). It doesn't give me any more info than that.

MK

try options load from game state. I had an issue with the GUI of one of the older versions too and it crashed the same way. I do not know however how I solved it back then..

How odd, i assume you have it in c:\demo ?

Regards Wolfe

Ah i've found the problem with the Cardies. It was a simple mistake. Their shipyards don't have any tech requirements set, so the game allows you to build them all straight away. I've fixed the problem now, and i'll send the updated files to Mike so he can put them on the update server.

The update also fixes the problem I mentioned earlier with Utopia Planitia (It's set simply as a building instead of an actual shipyard, so can't actually build anything. It is now also an upgrade for a medium shipyard instead of a large shipyard; previously it was constructable at tech 5, but required the presence of a large shipyard - which is tech 9 - before it could be built, so you couldn't actually build it until 4 tech levels after it was available anyways. Since medium shipyards are tech 5, it is buildable at the correct level now. It also has a smaller shipbuilding bonus to reflect its reduced position in tech requirements) The update also contains several new images that Zeleni has kindly made for us.

...

The last box is blank for me as well, mknote, and nothing happens when I click it. It certainly doesn't crash, so it may be you've got a corrupted download or something. Try redownloading the demo.

What is the last box supposed to say, Wolfe?

I was going to ask you about these five buttons in the combat system anyways; when you mouseover them, the image is replaced by a big red rectangular box, instead of the oval shape of the original button. This is then replaced by a horrible white box when you click the button. Could you change this so the mouseover is instead the shame shape as the original button, and somehow get rid of the white box? I tried poking through the files to see if I could make some buttons for you, but I couldn't find the image files for them; I assume they're somehow generated isntead?

I've also been thinking about the bug where it doesn't close properly. The demo opens several screens whilst it loads; there's one when you load the five buttons, another with empire and ship selection, and a third for the actual combay. Perhaps not all of these screens are closing correctly?

Annoyingly the GUI looks and acts fine within the Visual C# debug mode when i'am coding it. It is only when i compile it that you get the annoying borders on the buttons.

I have added the code which should switch off the borders but it seems to not want to work when compiled. Also it looks differant to when you run it in XP and when you run it in Vista lol. I'll have to bug MStrobel one day for an answer .

If it is any concilation it works perfectly on my computer .

With regards to the exe hanging in the background it is most likely due to the fact that it runs on a seperate thread and it is never closed properly when you exit the demo.

I would need to investigate.

Regards Wolfe

Curiouser and curiouser... No, wolfe, I did not have it in C:/demo, I had it in C:/Program Files/Star Trek Supremacy/Supremacy Combat Engine. I moved it to C:/demo and... it worked. I wasn't using the shortcut to launch the program, so why would the pathname matter? Interesting... Well, as I said, it works, so now I'll test it.

MK

Sadly at the moment, the code has within in it hard-coded links to the file path c:\Demo\, which means it will always look there for the asset files it needs at the moment. It s a bit archaic i know but is due to a old implementation which has just immigrated along as i have coded. I'am sure there is aneasy way to change it to check for the current folder it is installed in as Supremacy does, but i will once again have to ask MStrobel or scroll the internet for a solution.

As MOE has pointed out just double check after exiting the program that it does actually close "Use ctrl alt del" and check if the botfi.exe file is still running, is so get rid of it.

Regards Wolfe

System.Environment.CurrentDirectory path of entry assembly
System.IO.Path.Combine use this method to build paths like so: Path.Combine(Environment.CurrentDirectory, "Assets") returns "(exe path)\Assets".