Sycraft

Reply to Is it possible to increase the Start 11 rendering rate? in Start Menu Products Stardock Forums

In particular what I notice is when I click on the menu button to have it pop up. It looks choppy compared to the native start menu which looks really smooth. I haven't done a video capture or anything so I don't know for sure the actual rates of both. However the Start 11 menu looks like it is moving more at 60 fps, where the Windows 11 native menu is very smooth as things tend to look at 240 fps (monitor native). It's not a big deal, but something I do enjoy about Win

Is it possible to increase the Start 11 rendering rate? in Start Menu Products Stardock Forums

It looks like Start 11 renders at 60fps, which is not surprising. However this causes it to look a little jerky on high refresh rate monitors at opposed to other Windows animations which run at the native frame rate. Is there any way to increase the rate it renders at? If not, this is something you may wish to consider adding as high refresh rate monitors continue to become a more popular item for people.

Reply to What engine is GalCiv 3 going to use? in Galactic Civilizations Series Stardock Forums

Cool. Glad to hear you aren't jumping on the Unity bandwagon. I've kickstarted a number of games, many of which have been on Unity and they all seem to have an above normal amount of non-gameplay bugs (sound/graphics glitches, crashes, etc). So I'm glad to hear you aren't in a rush to jump on what seems to be a popular bandwagon.

What engine is GalCiv 3 going to use? in Galactic Civilizations Series Stardock Forums

Just curious.

This is amazing in ModernMix Stardock Forums

When 8 first came out, this was one of the things I said they did wrong: Metro should be on the desktop but subservient to the desktop, not trying to take everything over. And now, here it is :). Stardock must just be delighted with Windows 8. MS did a great job of making UI mistakes that they now get to sell software to fix. At any rate I'm really pleased with this, it makes Metro not completely worthless now :).

Reply to The PC Gamer review of Fallen Enchantress: 85! in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

MoM also had serious, serious balance issues. Now actually I found it somewhat fun and endearing, you could go and do OP strategies and completely crush the computer players. However it was not something with a lot of good play testing and balancing. There were things that just WTFpwned in that game. People always tend to remember the past with rose coloured glasses. They remember the good moments of gaming, forget the bad ones. As an example I remember FF2 (the US version, FF4 i

Reply to Fallen Enchantress Review from Pixel Perfect Gaming in Elemental News Elemental Forums

I dunno, to some extent it depends on how much you like the stylization they did. I am actually a real big fan, I like the way the game looks like a watercolour painting. I don't know why that appeals to me so much but it really does. The graphics are not high poly/texture and so if photorealism is the thing that you like they aren't great, but if you are in to the particular stylization they chose, then they are quite cool. I'm certainly not going to claim that

Reply to Fallen Enchantress 1.02 Update Now Available in Elemental News Elemental Forums

[quote who="Asmodean_dk" reply="18" id="3278171"]Did you at all read the responses you got in the thread you started on this subject? There were no less than 2 responses from Stardock clearly saying that your silly request was not going to be fulfilled. Come off it already![/quote] He probably won't stop until he gets banned. Some people are just zealots about silly things, this seems to be his silly thing to be a zealot about.

Reply to Please change salted pork to salted fish or meat in Fallen Enchantress Elemental Forums

[quote who="Emperor_Nero" reply="125" id="3268025"] Quoting taltamir, reply 124 Quoting jwdR1, reply 95Don't leave out Stalin, Mao, and other 'atheists' which have as much or more blood on their hands. They weren't atheist they were religious zealots who believe very very strongly in communism. Which is a religion that does not tolerate other religions PS. Still waiting on an answer to "how can you be both jewish and muslim at the same time" sin

Reply to [1.0] Cannot Launch in Windows 8 in FE Support Elemental Forums

Launched on my Windows 8 test system just fine, i7-860, 12GB RAM, GeForce 560Ti, release nVidia drivers, Stardock version. One thing is to maybe try rolling back the beta drivers. I know the AMD drivers have some known bugs (not with Elemental just in general) and who knows maybe the nVidia ones do to. I'd give the release drivers a shot and see what happens.

Reply to Game got slow with release [1.00] in FE Support Elemental Forums

[quote who="SwiftXShadow" reply="8" id="3259700"]i dunno what optimus is[/quote] Switchable video. Your laptop has an integrated and discrete video card and uses both, depending on the program. Not all laptops have it, but the laptop you listed could have it, it has the right kind of hardware. In that case, with an unknown program like FE (unknown since it is newer than the nVidia drivers) you might have to manually tell it to use the discrete card.<

Reply to Reading Player Reviews in Fallen Enchantress Elemental Forums

I think player reviews are worthless, as I've said many times in many places. People tend to be drama queens or fan boys. So you see tons and tons of exceedingly high and low reviews on games. Very little actually reviewing for content, mostly either gushing over something because they think it should be great or hating on it because it wasn't precisely what they wanted in every way. Also people will often hand out a negative review based on something tha

Reply to Metacritics - User Score of 8 and going down ? in Fallen Enchantress Elemental Forums

User scores are just this side of totally useless on Metacritic. The problem is people tend to be drama queens. So reviews are usually great or terrible. You'll see a game that'll have almost nothing but 9-10 and 0-3 reviews from users. They either OMGLOVE or OMGHATE the game. Any actual moderate reviews get drown out.

Reply to Downloads appear to be broken in Fallen Enchantress Elemental Forums

I got it to download via simply retrying on SDCentral multiple times. Each time went a little farther and eventually that all finished. I just wanted to make you aware of the details of the problem with the specific errors, rather than random angry rants I've seen in a couple other threads. The reason I suspect a cache engine problem is that the HTTP download actually worked fine, it completed and didn't time out, but the file was corrupt and would not install. The SDC

Reply to Downloads appear to be broken in Fallen Enchantress Elemental Forums

In particular, the error with Stardock Central (I gave it another shot) is "There was a problem downloading the install file for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress: Error retrieving the file due to IOException". This happened at 8% and 30% this time around (I blew away the temporary download file from earlier in case it was the problem).

Downloads appear to be broken in Fallen Enchantress Elemental Forums

Thus far, I've been unable to get Fallen Enchantress downloaded. I first decided to try Stardock Central, which downloaded to around 47% then gave an IO exception error. Restarting the download process got a bit farther, then the same error and so on. I then went to the website and downloaded it there. It downloaded completely without error but when I try to install it it says "File is corrupt." So I think somewhere you've a bug in the process. Since it would appear

Something to consider adding in Start8 Stardock Forums

It would be nice to be able to drag icons from the Start 8 menu to the desktop. In Windows 7, that's how I populate my desktop with the icons I wish to run frequently. Would be nice to be able to do it with Start 8 as well.

I'd say take it a step further in Start8 Stardock Forums

Release a "Windows 8 de-uglyifier" kit or the like. Whatever combo of your programs are needed to make Windows 8 look and feel more like older Windows releases. Having used Windows 8 some for testing I have to say it is a technically great OS that is stunted by it's horrible UI. I'm sure at work we are going to have a lot of requests along the lines of "I want it to look like Windows," or "I want it to b pretty." If you guys have a package that does that, that'll be what I buy to

Reply to The state of Steam in 2012 in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

I like Steam, and DD services in general. I have three that I use regularly: Steam, Gamestop (which I liked better when you owned it) and Gamefly. My only problem with Steam is its threat to become The One Service to Rule Them All. Between the Steam fanboys who won't buy anything if it isn't on Steam, the fact that Steamworks games REQUIRE Steam to run and are becoming more common, and the fact that Valve won't let you sell DLC off Steam if you sell on Steam it is really threateni

Geez Frogboy in Fallen Enchantress Elemental Forums

We just wanted to know when Fallen Enchantress would be released. No need to get all uppity. :D I think you should make this your new forum avatar :D.

Reply to Update on memory use in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

[quote quoting="post"] 2 Gigs Now, a quick thing about that. No matter how much memory is on your computer, a PC game will only be able to see 2 gigabytes of it unless the game itself is 64-bit which, to my knowledge, there are no major games that fit that yet. This is something pretty high on our priority list for the future but with most people still running 32-bit Windows, we have to focus on the here and now. [/quote] Not at all trying to discourage y

Reply to Reviewers vs. Users in PC Gaming Elemental Forums

Part of it is just legacy/expectations. Reviewers fall victim to this in a big, big way. If a game is from a company that is beloved for producing great games, and the game is highly anticipated, then it gets stellar reviews no matter what the case. The most recent example of this is Civ 5. It is not a bad game, don't get me wrong, it got my $50. However it is not the 10/10 that most sites gave it. Compared to Civ 4 it is lacking in some key ways. It needs some work to be as good. However it

Reply to Drama Cleansing Thread in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

[quote who="OMG_blackmage" reply="28" id="2759026"]i wont bother with getting elemental until the surgery is seen as a success.[/quote] That is a pretty sensible position to take, and what I'll tell any of my friends that don't have it. Don't write it off, that would be foolish, it has a good foundation, but don't get it yet. Wait and see.

Reply to Drama Cleansing Thread in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

Well, I have to say I think you are on the right track, taking the right approach with this. I agree with a number of reviews I've read in that I don't feel Elemental is all that good a game. However I feel it has the seeds of greatness. It does feel, to me, unfinished. However that is something that can be worked with. If a game is just bad, a bad idea and all that, then nothing can be done. However fundamentally Elemental is very strong, but the devil is in the details and the implementatio

Reply to Elemental Game Review(s) Thread in War of Magic Elemental Forums

[quote who="surlybob" reply="172" id="2751529"]MOO3 was judged on the basis of what came in the box and Elemental is being judged on how people imagine it will be in 6 months.[/quote] Reviewers aren't unbaised, even if they pretend to be. They let other things get in the way of their reviews. In particular, Stardock has three things going for them 1) A lot of good will. People like underdogs and Stardock qualifies. They are an indy developer, they run the underdog online game