No Update Today?

As usual the failed developing house of Stardock has abandoned their product to pursue "something else." The bug-ridden and unplayable product is now completely useless, and honest, hard-working customers like myself have no recourse but to kiss another 50 dollars goodbye.

*sigh*

I had such hopes for this game.

M

I do hope you're being sarcastic =P

A whole day has passed without a patch?!? I can't believe it! StarDock sucks! GalCiv is nothing more than abandonware!

(This MOO3 moment was brought to you by a satisfied GalCiv customer)

heh.

He was; but I think Stardock, Frogboy et al are going to soon hit the wall of diminishing returns for such excellent customer service.

Like when the irresistable force meets the unmoveable object; excellent, above and beyond the call customer support might be about to be crashed into by unrealistic and unrelenting customer expectations.

I hope Stardock wins.

Elrikk

PS. Nobody has yet explained to my satisfaction why it is that I can't name all my individual planetary citizens, give them a birthdate and have a party for each one when his/hers comes around. (the strains of "Happy Birthday to You" playing merrily in the background available as a bonus multimedia pak). Surely this wold be an excellant morale modifier.

~SDC~

I agree Elrikk.

I have 2 major concerns with the way things are going:

1) Stardock will continue their commitment to tweaking things, overtweak core systems that are great for some but detrimental to others, causing a set of people to be dissatisfied and leave the community. While it would be obvious that they not patch up to the point they think is "too far," it's fairly common for folks to equate "progress" with "satisfaction."

2) Core gameplay issues, like end-of-game tedium, can never be alleviated since they are a core gameplay feature, and folks will interpret this as Stardock "ignoring the customer" and "not patching what's broken."

I do worry about this stuff, really.

M

The last patch or two seemed to include a new bug (the "string not found" bug in the diplomacy screens). Perhaps fewer or less frequent updates that give SD time to check for unintended effects would be better...

~SDC~

I'm working in the software industry and having even weekly patches on production software is quite some task for development. Having one patch every fortnight would satisfy me more than getting patches like the diplomacy patch that seemed rather buggy.
serge

Diplomacy patch is working great. I don't what you are talking about?

.40 had a bug with a missing string. .41 fixes it.

Regarding updates, actually we have a BUNCH of updates internally but we can't release them until the stand alone 1.02 patch goes out.

Stand alone patches have to go through Strategy First's QA after leaving our QA (which is one of the reasons why stand alone patches are less common).

There's been a bunch of AI stuff including having the AI become more aware when it's cause is hopeless so that the end game portion the AI will just surrender more often. Plus more intelligent tactical generaliship. The diplomacy internals have been rewritten which is where most of the non-sound driver related crashes come from (though in fairness, 95% of crash reports are, unfortunately, due to the sound driver incompatibility).

But we have also rewritten our internal MP3 player so that it will work even when it's not Microsoft's MP3 player codec.

So the next update is going to be a pretty big deal.

But we're also working on getting the demo finished and believe me...what a pain in the..rear. We want the demo to be around 50 megabytes tops which is making us have to pick and choose which pieces of the game to include and which ones not to.

Plus if you look in the mods forum, we released the starship builder.

Rock on, brother.

Yeehaa! Starships are coming

Keep it up Stardockians, great job.

"Plus more intelligent tactical generaliship"

sweeeeet. i look forward to the possibility of actually losing a war.

"But we have also rewritten our internal MP3 player so that it will work even when it's not Microsoft's MP3 player codec"

i guess that's why it wasn't working. alt-tabbing wasn't that big a deal though.

keep up the great work.

cheers

h