crash on "waiting", also some feedback

from GalCiv3 Forums

Hello all,

I really like this game. A lot. I was a big fan of GalCiv2 and haven't touched the series for some time. Jumping into GalCiv3 knowing full well it's a beta - it looks great. I found a few minor things that took me a bit to get used to, and if it's not too late in the process below is my feedback for the UI:

- In the bottom corner where it says "Idle Ship", at first I thought that meant for a ship to pass its turn. Took me a little bit to figure out that is how you rotate through ships/stuff needing orders. Works great now that I now. For the full version, I'm sure this will be covered in a tutorial.

- I noticed one of the AI factions power level rising dramatically late game. I took this to mean a military build up, yet I didn't have vision in their territory so could not confirm. I was the leader of that council thing, and I enforced galactic peace so it was a moot point. AI was on beginner, so on harder levels I imagine they would drop from the council and attack anyway.

- In the colony view on the right corner, it would be nice to be able to click on what's being produced currently and make alterations via drop down menu. This would be problematic for location specific buildings, but would work great for the catch-all cultural celebration, research, etc.

- This may just be me, but when I saw all the tiles light up for soil enhancement I assumed I could spam that item and build on all of them. Not so. One UI improvement for me would be to make it a bit more clear that the terrain tile opener-upers are one shot wonders. 

- Tool tips look great generally, but the text runs outside the tool tip window when hovering over certain research items. 

- The game seems very responsive regardless of how much stuff is going on. Great work on this! 

- I am unclear on what function the black hole is other than a dead area. I'm sure the tutorial or docs in the full game will cover this though.

 

The crash:

 Right around turn 440-ish, it said "waiting" and never continued. I saved my game and reloaded to be greeted with a CTD. I relaunched and tried to load, also CTD. I will gladly provide this save file (just tell me where to find it and where to send it).

 

Can't wait to see the next release! If there are nightly builds I can opt into through Steam, let me know. 

5,431 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I've have the same "waiting" bug in two different games now. 

Black holes provide anti-matter that you can mine and a navigational obstacle.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

A Civ's power is not just war ships. It seems to include other variables like industry and... well... I'm not really sure. It seems to be built to take into account that while having a large military is nice and all, but one shouldn't forget about civs that could rapidly build up a military and would be a tough nut to crack. It seems to be the overall power assessment of a civilization, with warships being considered highly valued.

In GalCiv 2, if you didn't have a military, you were a nobody. You could have 5 times the number of planets of the next largest civ, and you would be considered a push over. That can be very wrong. I have made sure that many opposing civs have regretted making that assessment.

Start11 - Customize the Start Menu and Taskbar in Windows 10/11.
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top


Where do I upload stuck on wait saved games? I want to help in any way I can to resolve this issue... Please Advise....


I just put approx 20 hrs into a game with 480 turns building a bad ass empire only to have it get stuck on a turn. The Idea, art, and game play are awesome, it needs many things finished and polished hence "beta" status (technically this game is alpha, as it is not content complete). If I cant finish a game I've started because of this glitch, there is no point to have even played and I have wasted however much time I put into that game.

SITUATION: You played chess and ask someone to play with you and 3/4 of the way through a long well thought out two day match, your opponent throw the chess board to the floor and ruined the game.

QUERY: Do you think you would want to play with that person again?

I am glad and appreciative to be able to buy and play the "Beta", but please, please make sure that this "Forever wait" glitch/issue is 100% resolved. As stated above it would be a game stopper, and that would be a shame for such a potentially freaking awesome game.

Haven't lost faith yet, keep up the good work, and I hope you do read this, and take it seriously.

 

Thank You.

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Then there is the kid who comes up to see you playing chess with someone else and gets jealous and kicks your game all over the yard.

However, Stardock does provide excellent support and has provided a bit of assistance at "GalCiv III Support FAQ". They also have a very good track record of giving assistance.

Some of things we users have run into have been:

The prefs.ini file gets out of sync with the latest update to the game (shouldn't be your problem)

The game doesn't quite download correctly, some file gets corrupted (in steam, delete local content and re-install the game. Sometimes it is possible to find the specific file and delete only it, then run Steam's "verify integrity of game cache" function. Afterwards, Steam downloads the missing file.)

The OS has some corrupted System files (run the System File Checker (SFC) program included with Windows).

The system goes into severe page swapping, due to the mismatch between RAM needed to back up the virtual memory used by the game and the RAM available to the OS (The minimum requirement for GC3 is 4GB and the recommendation for GC3 is 6GB).

GPU drivers can be back level to the point that the game tries to use a feature the GPU doesn't support (Some PCs will insist that the drivers are up to date, even when the Display card manufacturer has provided many newer drivers. This appears to be a problem with the computer manufacturer refusing to recognize the newer drivers). 

and many more, as can be seen by browsing the much too large number of other threads and posts on this forum. I do not recommend attempting this, but the forum does have a search option that might, sometimes, be useful. Posting here and asking for help as you have done seems to be more useful.

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Good to know about the "power" metric. After some cursory searching, I didn't spot a wiki outlining how everything works. This is expected though, as the game is still in a bit of flux. As to the waiting bug, I'm OK with it. It's pretty rare for me to actually post feedback about a game, and this is the game I'm most excited to play! If the save game would be useful to the dev's, I'd be happy to upload it. Sounds like this is a known issue though, and I'm sure they're on it. As the game is multithreaded, my best guess is a race condition of some kind. 

Not sure if the dev's need/want this, but I'd be happy to run any type of profiler you'd like while playing the game to capture stuff like the waiting error in an effort to catch whatever thread is deadlocked (or whatever the issue may be).

After poking around the game files, almost everything is in XML which is great! Once we hit the release version, it should be pretty easy to whip up some modding tools. If the dev's could post the headers for the classes, it would make things easier instead of reading all the XML and creating stuff on the fly in C# :P

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

 

LMAO, that party pooper, should get the smack down!

Haven't had an update so I also doubt its the pref file.

uninstalled and wiped steam directory and doc and reinstalled twice. (replaced saves after)

My windows is not corrupted I assure you (rebuild my OS two weeks ago, and I take very good care of her)

PC is self Built, its what I do for a living. Sadly this is what I can afford at the moment......

i5 2.8 OC to 3.2 (Very Very Stable, torture tested with prime95 for 48 hrs+)

8 GB DDR3 Ram Corsair 4 x 2 chips @ 1600mhz (Stock)

Nvidia GTX 750 Ti OC (stock & up to date)

Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB

Win 7 Pro 64 Bit

Using 8192 MB of HDD for virtual Memory.

Again, GPU is updated and using 344.48 Nvidia Driver

Will dive into the forums this weekend.

Thank you for your response, and any other suggestions would be very welcome.