Tridus

The title doesn't match the content. :P If he really wanted to use Steamworks, he would be. I don't think Valve would mind. The point here is that he's not a raving mad Steam hater. He sees that Steamworks is simply the best solution for problems that developers and publishers are having (which it is). So he's going to provide an alternative solution. Pretty much everybody should hope that succeeds. Competition is good for everybody, including Steam fans, because it'll force S

[quote who="Raven X" reply="22" id="2712911"] Wimpy goblin workers are awaiting your orders to create your next diabolical dungeon masterpiece Hmm, I can see the hero classes being kinda limited. There's only so many different types of heroes anyway, but only 15 Monster Types? That seems pretty limited. Not a good sign. 50 Different objects to be used might spice it up, but damn, I can think of way over 15 monster types when I'm half asleep. Still, it's a Dungeon Keeper remake/clone

With the beta over, there isn't a lot you can do right now. The release version should be faster, but nobody knows how much yet.

Yeah I really hope Ironclad does a sequel that supports 64 bit and dual/quad core.

[quote who="Zorbane" reply="133" id="2712863"]I'd think that the reason blizzard split the servers in two was for latency issues[/quote] They split them for latency and load reasons, but that was done years ago. Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 1 let you change which area you want to log in to. Starcraft 2 doesn't.

[quote who="dragoaskani" reply="29" id="2712641"] yes I know that, I just now preordered this very minute, I am just surprised they haven't actually started running them already like they did when I preordered the expansions for Sins before. *shrug* doesn't matter really was just surprised that it didn't charge immediately.[/quote] You only get charged immediately if the beta is open, which it was with the Sins expansions IIRC. Beta's closed right now, so it's a normal preo

Nice info Brad, thanks. :) Also, congratulations to you and the team! [e digicons]:beer:[/e]

[quote who="TheProgress" reply="1" id="2712564"]I'm curious / interested in the physical publishing aspect of the game. Since it's due in roughly 7 days, how does that work with producing the packaging / manuals / dvds and shipping them?[/quote] The manual would have already been printed most likely, along with things like the boxes (in fact they showed a box in an earlier dev journal). The DVDs will come from the press and everything packed and sent out.

[quote who="polobo" reply="82" id="2712549"]I agree on the value of the binary cache. I guess the indexing of the XML "solves" a related issue in that you do not have to load everything into memory but divide your data into chucks that can be loaded separately and only to the (broad) level of detail required. It would likely require a larger effort at this point to retrofit something like this in as opposed to simply loading all the XML into one massive DOM (from r

Based on this post , it looks like the day 0 version will be ready late next week. They could stage that for pre-load a day or two before release (since it's ready on a friday, might not be up until monday).

[quote who="shafk" reply="11" id="2712514"]I think to get GFW Certification the Install and User Files must be in the default location.[/quote] User files must be. Install files need to default there, but letting the user install it somewhere else if they choose is just proper installer design.

[quote who="Oranisagu" reply="80" id="2712452"] thats why I immediately thought of parsing the xml and caching the data binary until the xml changes. the code within the game doesn't have to change, and it gives a great performance boost without much cost. there surely are even faster methods, but those probably would require a major overhaul which at this late stage of development probably wouldn't make much sense.[/quote] Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too. The game is ultimately go

[quote who="Polynomial" reply="24" id="2712210"]I'm beginning to wonder if anyone on these forums even likes video games. First no one likes Bioware games, now people slam one of gaming's landmark games.[/quote] You think it's bad now, wait and see what'll happen if it turns out to use Steamworks. :P (There's a seperate Steam-free Civ 5 thread for that reason.)

[quote who="ZehDon" reply="19" id="2711945"] And people wonder why Games are never taken seriously as an art form! Every time we come close to something amazing, something that could be - one day - considered the medium's 'Citizen Kane', we get thrown sequel after sequel after spin off after re-hash until no one can cares and the original's memory is long since dead, buried, dug up, assaulted, re-buried, burnt, pissed on and then resurrected via&n

[quote who="Starfighter08" reply="41" id="2712052"]All this talk about PC requirements makes me doubt if my computer can handle this game. Sorry if the answer is obvious, it certainly isn't to me. Windows XP Home SP3 Intel Core 2 CPU 6700 @ 2.66GHz 3GB RAM NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT Should I wait for the demo?[/quote] That's going to run the game just fine.

[quote who="Vaul_Darkhour" reply="142" id="2711896"]CIV IV = Not a very good game compared to the previous games.. CIV V looks to be much much better however and i am thoroughly looking forward to it.... except for steam.. if i can find a way around not installing steam, then i'll play it..[/quote] Since it uses Steamworks, not happening in any legit way.

[quote who="niteshade6" reply="106" id="2711683"] I'm not sure that the reasons for only testing this internally are as obvious as implied. In fact the most obvious and common reasons why companies do this are negative ones (they don't want the bad PR of people seeing it). Perhaps, as said, if I had been following Sins in the beta stage it would make more sense, however I'm guessing most people on these forums did not.[/quote] Yeah. I mean League of Legends wa

[quote who="Zorbane" reply="19" id="2711666"]Don't forget America took Justin Bieber too[/quote] Yeah, we owe you one for that. [e digicons]:thumbsup:[/e]

[quote who="Raven X" reply="15" id="2711578"] I hope they release it, but, I'm not too thrilled about Gearbox pixking it up. Borderlands was decent as far as shooters go, but the thing that killed that game for me was the Extreme lack of environmental effects. I was let down within the first 10 minutes of playing it. I got off the buss at the beginning of the game and I saw a bottle sitting on top of a box. I figured I might as well test out my starting guns so I took aim on the bottle a

[quote who="RagingSquirrel" reply="17" id="2707681"]Drop in a new GPU, hmm. That's a thought. I looked at upgrading my CPU, but the whole form factor has changed. I can't even get upgrade CPUs for my MOBO. I can get a new GPU, you're right, but won't my CPU bottleneck my system anyway? Thoughts? If keeping my Opteron 165 and pairing that with a mightier GPU will really give me a big performance boost, I may do it instead of building a

Even if it doesn't force you to do a reinstall, you will probably want to anyway. Any number of dramatic things can change between beta and release, including the installer (and new installer scripts don't always run on updates, as I learned with the games explorer going from beta 3 to beta 4). It's best to start fresh with a release copy of the game.

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="99" id="2711577"] There was a beta 5. It just wasn't public (for, I think, obvious reasons but clearly not obvious to some). This is such dejavu. Anyone here remember the Sins of a Solar Empire beta? Same conversations.[/quote] There's no doubt quite a few people here (like me) who didn't buy Sins until after release based on good word of mouth (or for me the demo). So I don't remember that beta. I do remember the Entrenchment beta, wh

[quote who="Annatar11" reply="15" id="2711632"] Quoting Tridus, reply 14The reason why Americans like to make Canadian jokes is that they're still bitter after taking Celine Dion off our hands. Yeah, but we also took Sarah McLachlan which greatly overcompensates for *that* fail [/quote] Not true. We loaned her to you for a while, but she still lives and performs up here. :)

The reason why Americans like to make Canadian jokes is that they're still bitter after taking Celine Dion off our hands. [e digicons]^_^[/e]

[quote who="Raven X" reply="75" id="2711141"] I agree with you're whole reply Except the last sentence. I'm not trying to sound sexist, but sex Does have Something to do with it. I've ran into more female employees in video game stores that didn't know what they were doing than I have male employees who didn't know what they were doing. It's a simple Statistical Fact. There are female gamers, sure, but not as many as there are male gamers. When you take the entire gaming population, whic