I am putting Galciv2 aside

Have you tried the latest patch? It adds framerate throttling to keep things from getting out of control on super-high-end systems. Before that, many with big rigs were getting crashes due to overheating videocards--GC2 takes everything they can dish out and many of them just can't handle that stress with stock cooling. Whereas people with lesser machines have had no crashes at all--NONE.

Yes i did. I was very hopeful of this patch. Although it improved things, it still crashes...

Funny enough game is almost unplayable on standart 1024x768 res. 1280x 1024 seems to work best...

Just discovered a new ATI driver will give it a go. But it is not the crashes alone if you read above. In game issues like resurrected designs really do bug you in an epic game...

Also i repeat this is probably the best prepared/tested game i saw for a long time. Just not enough it seems.

If the throttling does not help, then your best option would be to use SmartException and get crash logs for the devs, so they can find and fix whatever problem is afflicting you specifcally (as I said, the majority of people are having few or no crashes at all--I haven't had any myself since the gamma).

The rest are considerably less vital issues (i.e., they don't stop you from playing) that should be fixed shortly.

You can delete ships manulally if that becomes anoying ingame at My Documents\My Games\GalCiv2\ships . Delete the .shipcfg and .shipclass files an you shouldnt see them ingame. And i have a pretty powerfull pc and game doesnt have ANY problem at all, and I recommend it to ANY 1 out there that likes 4X strategy games.


Peace Out


Monc34

How does your not having problems effect those who are having problems? I'm recommending the game myself, just with the caveat that it might not be a smooth experience (although these patches certainly seem to be helping).

Hmm.. interesting.. Running on a top of the line rig AMD FX57 with 7800 GTX's in SLI I have yet to run into any serious overheating issues or crashing. Hmm. I'm at 19?? by 1440 with the AA/Aniso maxed thru the driver (they don't go high enough using the in-game settings) but I doubt thats enough to affect the framerate too much (i.e. keep it from sky-rocketing). Is there any way to get a display of the framerate ?

The problem must be your system. I have an old crappy system from 2 1/2 years ago on old drivers and an old GeForce 5800 and win2K and the game STILL runs flawlessly for me. Havnt played on Gigantic maps, but I have finished 4 games on Large maps. No one crash or corruption.

PLus the game must be working great on most peoples big-rigs becasue of all of the screenshots of ships with zillions of polys, not to mention I would bet Frogboy and his freinds all play on pretty jazzzed-out systems as well, and the game is rock solid enough for them to post multiple AARs.

BTW have you considered your sound card/chipset? I keep a cheap 15 dollar Creative clone sound card to place in and override my motherboards on-board sound, and that fixes my problems with games about 90% of the time If I have any. However, I'd like to note that I have NOT had to do that with GalCiv2, as it works great on my MSI platinum chipset.

MG

I have the same identical problems as are outlined by the thread starter. I have documented them by snapping screenshots and I am also providing the save game. Note: I have the Collector's Edition, and I'm updated to 1.0X.009. No overclocking of CPU or GPU.

Savegame: http://def.qwplayers.org/galciv2/Masochist.sav

http://def.qwplayers.org/galciv2/bug1.png
"Build Ship" Bug: Every version of every ship design appears in the buildship dialogue popup on everyplanet (for example everytime you redesign your scoutship and upgrade it with newer technologies, every version of the scout appears under the same name)

http://def.qwplayers.org/galciv2/bug2.png
Two bugs here. First, the drop planet quality bug. Notice the planetquality, it says 15, despite the fact there are already 19 tiles of improvements. It was a planet quality 19 class prior to the crash. It seems that all planet qualities across the universe have dropped by a value of 4 for some reason (not just my planets).

http://def.qwplayers.org/galciv2/bug3.png
The second bug I want to point out, on the previous screenshot, is notice I have constructed the "Galactic Guide Book" wonder, which should reduce the cost of the survey module to 0. Yet in the shipyard, the survey module does not have its cost reduced to 0.

I have saved multiple versions of my progress into save game slots 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, etc. The odd thing is, after the crash occured, all of my save games are littered with these bugs, even though they were fine prior to that.

Debug.err: http://def.qwplayers.org/galciv2/debug.txt

-----------------------
(CPU 1) AMD Athlon™ XP 3200+ (512KB L2 Cache, Socket A)
(RAM module 1) 512MB, form factor: DIMM, type: DRAM (RAM module 2) 256MB, form factor: DIMM, type: DRAM (RAM module 3) 256MB, form factor: DIMM, type: DRAM
(Motherboard) ASUSTeK Computer INC. A7N8X-X, version REV 2.xx
(Video controller 1) NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT (Processor: GeForce 6800 GT), 256MB, 1024x768x32, 100Hz, driver version: 6.14.10.8198
(Sound card 1) Realtek AC'97 Audio, brand: Realtek
(Operating system) Microsoft Windows XP Professional (SP2), version 5.1.2600

There is one little suggestion i have for stardock though. Your beta testers, if you are paying them, fire them. If they got a free game, cancel/block their serials and blacklist them for any future beta testing. Some of the issues are so obvious and appearent it took me 10 min's into game to notice and recreate them. I fail to see how they would not have noticed those.

So are you saying that all the people who were part of the Stardock to TGN.net transfer should have thier game serials cancelled?! That is a real low comment to make.

I had the beta, but I did not do any testing because I know I am not good at bug reporting. So should I have my serial removed?

Fine then let Stardock take my FREE serial code, I'll gladly pay them for a full version.

This thread was started to vent off frustration for not being able to enjoy the game. And i am open to suggestions. All my crashes are related to my GPU overheating and nothing else. Textures disappearing, random lines on screen or a full bright yellow screen is a dead giveaway...

Nothing is overclocked, in fact my GPU is downclocked... I am running an ATI x1800 with 256MB of ram, you can look up it's technical specs on ati's site if you like.

The ComputerGeek, unless you are a SD employee, your case is exactly what i am talking about. I have seen it several times in my career also, a developer swears on their mother, father and house pets life that they have tested the SW extensively and seen no problems. Just because ppl testing it does not report or notice or lie about something does not mean it does not exist.

If you are no good at bug reporting, than you should not have been in beta test, a person like Darth Kryo would have been more suitable. But i have a feeling he already was in there.

Anyway, I have just updated my GFX drivers again and going to down clock my GPU further.

PS. What gets me is all the technical staff in the company i work for got the game, ad they are playing without any crashes! and their machines are a lot older and not up the spec as mine...

I agree with yout frustration. There are apparent and major glitches in the interface (I'll stick them in the new glitches thread once I'll remember them all) the game just crashes repeatedly when I try to save (and it ruins the savegame file) and it's really not the smooth experience I had with GalCiv1. I kept lurking a year ago in this forum, and reading everything the great Draginol was saying with great enjoyment. I wanted with all my heart to just get the game in sing in praise for Stardock for this amazing game, but this great gameplay experience is so marred by the bugs and glitches that I wonder why wasn't it mentioned in the reviews.

The problem is that if this was a bad game, I'd simply stop playing it. But since it's really everything I wanted from a Turn-Based-Strategy game (I find it ten times more fun than Civ4 ever was), I just have to endure the crashes, and this is a lesson in torture and patience, I must tell you. For the 20th time the game crashed in mid-save and ruined my game progress, while a glitch messed up my expending allocation, I cried to myself "why did they release this obviously buggy beta software to the public?!?!" and shut-down my PC in frustration.

I'm glad it works for the most of you guys, and I hope you're enjoying it. Stardock, this game simply rocks, to put it mildly, but please try to address our issues. Thank you.

I have the same identical problems as are outlined by the thread starter. I have documented them by snapping screenshots and I am also providing the save game. Note: I have the Collector's Edition, and I'm updated to 1.0X.009. No overclocking of CPU or GPU.

Have you e-mailed that stuff to stardock support?

Thankfully, I havn't had any noticable issues. To keep ships that you don't want off of the build screen, the only thing I've been doing is renaming upgrades. ie. Fighter Mk 2.

I just wanted to add that this is not an old GPU driver issue, and this is not GPU over-heating (I monitored it in-game with 3rd party software and regular GPU checks through the driver's menu), and it usually happens to me in mid-save every 3 or 4 saves. I'm a bit disappointed with Brad's comments on these forum. I know, the nagging nay-sayers are a bunch of ungrateful and spoiled jerks, but don't treat the rest of us like them and please try to help. Thanks again.

SD had a good system for finding beta testers- you pre-order, you got the BETA.

I'm sure they had more testers that way...

I know how irritated I get with BETAs, so I chose to wait for the full release.

The ComputerGeek, unless you are a SD employee, your case is exactly what i am talking about. I have seen it several times in my career also, a developer swears on their mother, father and house pets life that they have tested the SW extensively and seen no problems. Just because ppl testing it does not report or notice or lie about something does not mean it does not exist. If you are no good at bug reporting, than you should not have been in beta test, a person like Darth Kryo would have been more suitable. But i have a feeling he already was in there.

I had the beta, due to the fact of the TGN and Stardock merger. So I the end I got the game for free, as did a lot of other people. We had the option of being part of the beta.

But hell, if it make you feel any better I'll ask Frogboy to kill the serial code that I have, and I'll buy a copy.

This doesn't help anyone when I say this but it still needs to be said:

A product or service will always fail for some % of people.  Someone, somewhere will have a problem. The question is purely what %.

I've spent all day today working with different people who had crash problems. 

One person had their VM locked at 512MB. So eventually, in a largish sized galaxy, the game would run out of memory and crash. It would happen on any game that used quite a bit of memory.

Another person had NO VM.  They had a system with 512MB of RAM and no page file. Same as above.

I also worked with Def (in this thread) who was updating his ships and saving them as the same name but not upgrading the existing ships.  I'm not sure what the deal is. But his problems went away by simply giving his new ships a new name.  Is this a bug? I don't know, it dpeends on what the cause was.  We don't know yet.  But obviously not a common issue.

I worked with someone this evening who got random crashes and it turned out he had an ancient computer that he had upgraded the video card to some monster but his system was not set up to handle that card very well when it was stressed at all. His last game he played was COunterstrike (the original).

If you have enough of your game out there, these things will pop up.  And that's on top of the genuine bugs that are our fault.  But I don't see how we could have prevented these things. 

For example you write:

Industry on several planets crashes which makes it impossible ti build anything on them etc. etc.

That tells me little but more to the point, I have not seen a single report like this.

 I have a beta build up on https://www.galciv2.com/latestbuild

You can try that and run the debug parameter (c:/> galciv2.exe debug) and post the debug.err if you want to help try to find out what the problem is.

I realize it's tempting to just say "Well these guys rushed it out and hav ea buggy product." But I don't think that's a fair charge.  We had thousands of beta testers. Our gamma testers all felt it was ready to go.  We felt it was ready to go. And based on the reception, the game was ready to go.  You will always have some glitches or things that got missed along with compatibility problems.

All we can do is try our best to make as many people as we can happy.  But we also know that some %, some very small % but probably high in absolute numbers will simply not be able to run the game. 

And that's true of any product -- look closely at the Xbox 360 launch for instance.  Their first run at manufacturing problems that caused overheating in a small % of users.  Civ IV didn't work right on a significant % of ATI cards when it shipped.  I won't even touch on BF2 or its expansion.

It's not because people are lazy or greedy or stupid. It's simply a matter of numbers.