Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar 1.6 Change Log

What's new in 1.6 over the release

Published on June 7, 2007 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

It's time for another update for Galactic Civilizations II and this time we've put our energy into not just adding new features, fixing various reported issues, and tweaking game balance. This time we integrated in a new graphics engine for the ship rendering that should result in a performance boost of 10X to 15X depending on your setup and what is happening on the screen.

This update should be available via Stardock Central by around 5PM EST on June 7, 2007.

Here's a complete list of what's been changed:

+ NEW: New Graphics Engine for ships which should result in a 10X to 15X performance improvement for most players

+ NEW: Computer AI updated to be better in diplomacy

+ NEW: AI ship design more optimized

+ NEW: More differentiation between alien races on what technologies they research

+ NEW: The popup for adding money to negotiations on the trade screen will now open with the value needed to make the AI accept the offer (or the total amount in your treasury if they won't accept it).

+ NEW: Graphs and mini-map rewritten using Direct3D instead of GDI

+ NEW: 3 New Custom Maps

+ NEW: Galaxies tend to have more stars and planets

+ NEW: Stacked ships will only show one ship in the tile

+ The ship that is displayed is chosen like so:

+ If a ship is the galaxy’s selected ship it is always shown

+ Otherwise, the toughest selected ship is shown

+ If no ship in the stack is selected, the toughest ship is shown

+ An icon appears next to ships that are in a stack

+ when you move a ship off of a stack, it will show the next ship in that stack

+ This significantly increases performance in my tests. I had a stack of about 50 ships and no major hit to frame rate.

+ NEW: Added code to save score data for non-metaverse games locally in the My Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar folder

+ NEW: You can now change the social project (if there is stuff in the queue) from the colony list in the civ manager

+ NEW: Some additional dialog (but no new trees) for computer players

+ NEW: Added Starbase module to repair the starbase with Tech Requirement Advanced Hulls. Will only show up if the starbase is missing HP, and can be 'installed' multiple times. This module should not count towards the total modules.

+ NEW: Option to use old graphics engine for users of video cards that don't support the DirectX features we're using

+ FIX: Fixed bug where non-optimal defenses were never decreased as the defenses absorbed damage during a battle round

+ FIX: Fixed end of turn crash that happened if you had the Force AI to use Max CPU option ON.

+ FIX: Made Build Menu update after a project is decomissioned. 1 per planet improvements like Orbital Terraformers will now show up in the build list again if you remove them from the queue or destroy an existing one. 1 per civ and 1

per galaxy improvements may not be destroyed and rebuilt - this is by design.

+ FIX: Fixed bug where if you changed the settings for a custom opponent's Natural Abilities and/or Financial Resources, the values would not remain the same after leaving the tab.

+ FIX: Fixed error where invalid information was being returned by the activation code in Win98 and Windows ME by adding alternate code if the first instance failed.

+ FIX: Fixed bug where save game was not saving the campaign file name and added code to fix save games currently exhibiting this bug (should fix problem with people continuing their campaigns)

+ FIX: Fixed crash bug where if the random event that creates a new minor race happened mulitple times, the minor races would end up with the same name and then delete each other's ship designs, causing a crash on the end of a turn

+ FIX: Fixed bug where the turn a ship was created was not saved/restored when loading a save game, which could cause a ship design to be deleted too early

+ FIX: Fixed bug with loading height maps for planet surfaces

+ FIX: Fixed bug where ending the game from the planet screen resulted in a crash because the planet screen was not hidden before the end game screen was unhidden

+ FIX: Added strings that were not being saved to scenario save game code

+ FIX: Made it so that your allies won't declare war on you in the mega event Allied War where the good races gang up on you.

+ FIX: Minimap and line graphs now uses Direct3D for drawing, which should show an increase in framerate.

+ FIX: Updated the QUICKSTART command line parameter code to work with DarkAvatar's settings

+ FIX: The minimap scrolling lag on Vista should be resolved, and scrolling in general should be smoother with better frame rates.

+ FIX: On Vista PCs, the debug.err will now be saved in the Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar folder. (This will not work if you run the exe in WInXP compatibility mode.)

+ FIX: Fixed a minor bug with the money popup in the tradewnd if you were in debt.

+ FIX: Fixed bug where the influence and morale bonuses did not show up correctly on the summary screen (from the planet screen) if there was a influence or morale bonus (respectively) on that tile.

+ FIX: Flushes resource manager’s resources when game exits

+ FIX: Fixed crash in invasion ground units

+ FIX: Fixed crash if memory does not allocate in ResourceGraphic

+ FIX: Fixed crash in ship design code if hardpoint data failed to load

+ FIX: Fixed bug where minimaps were not refreshing immediately when you started a new game

+ FIX: Added code to handle if you or your trading partner are in debt to fix flakiness with the money popup in the TradeWnd.

+ FIX: Fixed bug in the function that calculates the morale of a colony to fix a longtime bug where your morale could permanently drop to 1%

+ FIX: Made it so that ships on the Governor minimap should show up larger when they are affected by the switch. Also made starbases not show up on this minimap to reduce clutter.

+ FIX: Fixed typo in XML files that caused land and background textures in Invasion window to be black

+ FIX: Added code for the super hive to adjust the costs of factories in the queue when they take over another colony.

+ FIX: Fixed a lockup on Trade screen when you have a huge amount of money in the treasury and you try to offer money.

+ FIX: Fixed lockup on Governor screen when you click on the Starship rallypoint governor

+ FIX: Found a solution for the graphical glitches on AMD machines.

+ FIX: Optimized new batch renderer so that ship instances of the same type will share the same vertex and index buffers. This will save memory over the previous implementation where each instance had its own vert and index buffers.

This should also fix the where ship parts sometimes would not show textures in the designer.

+ FIX: Fixed some alt-tab crashes present in 1.6 beta 5.

+ FIX: Added code to remove AI ship designs from the graphics cache when they are no longer being used

+ FIX: Fixed bug where, in 1 on 1 battles, if both ships kill each other, the stronger surviving ship would have hp restored instead of receiving 1 hp.

+ FIX: Added support for mixed vertex processing which should help some people with older video cards who would normally be running in software vertex processing mode.

+ FIX: Changed the way that vertex and index buffers are created to help framerates for cards running in software or mixed vp mode.

+ FIX: Fixed bug with loading save games that could cause the cheater flag to be tripped

+ FIX: Fixed bug where you could change AI mining bases to send to your planet

+ FIX: Fixed bug where the repair starbase module was showing up as a bonus in the starbase details screen after it was applied

+ FIX: Fixed bug where the repair starbase module was being counted as one of the available modules even when the starbase didn't need repair, which threw off the total count by 1.

+ FIX: Memory leak in ship gfx when you alt-tab out of the game

+ FIX: Fixed the “Missing Mining Base Graphics” bug

+ TWEAK : Turned off some debug strings to try and improve loading time

+ TWEAK: Added dialog to warn you if you start/load a metaverse game with a cheater flag

+ TWEAK: Pirates event less common, somewhat less lethal

+ TWEAK: AI deals with Disease event better

+ TWEAK: Various tweaks to AI behavior

+ TWEAK: Extreme Colonization more expensive

+ TWEAK: Visual updates to some planetary improvements

+ TWEAK: AI more focused on what it builds on planets (long story)

+ TWEAK: AI tweaks to tech tree

+ TWEAK: In the Ship Designer, when using auto-place to place a component, the component will use the current scale and rotation settings

+ TWEAK: You are no longer permitted to change your capital to another world, and bonuses for the capital city have been increased.

+ TWEAK: The display of stars on the minimaps should now be more visible on large and gigantic galaxies.

+ TWEAK: Made a slight change to the code that starts the AI threads which may help with the AI seeming to get a free turn at the start of a new game or when loading a save game.

+ TWEAK: Planet Surface Variety Option now defaults to 50%

+ TWEAK: Converted star box to use vertex buffer for point sprites and optimized it for point sprites, and optimized it for software vp if running in software vp mode

+ TWEAK: Added option for “Enhanced Ship Rendering” - if you are running in software vp mode, turning this off may increase your performance

+ TWEAK: Added option to allow the game to start in mixed vp mode when it would normally start in software vp mode. Turn this off if you encounter problems in mixed vp mode to start in software vp mode.

Comments (Page 4)

kryo

on Jun 25, 2007

I have the latest video drivers from NVIDIA, Dell XPS-600 3.6gig CPU, 2gig RAM, GeForce 6800 x 2 running SLI mode, and I am stuck as to why this is happening now. It's just since this new update to DA.

Have you tried running in single-GPU mode?

Salaena1000

on Jun 26, 2007

It is such a joy to have such wonderful support on a game I enjoy so much.. you guys are wonderful;) thanks so much for all the updates;)the only other thing I would like to see for this game is to have the ships do auto upgrades of new tech when you upgrade research.. such as minizuration of something on the ship would auto upgrade it to the newest version. would save a lot of time in trying to make new ships with new tech all the time. I love the game, I look forward to any new games you release.

rockrapnroll

on Jun 26, 2007

Hi, I have downloaded the update from Stardock central but now it keeps crashing my game, whenever i try to play a game, i wait for it to load and eventually the game (during the music in the background) crashes on me. Also I noticed the ships look on the setup screen are showing as white for all races. Can anyone help.

Thanks.

kryo

on Jun 26, 2007

Turn off the 'use enhanced ship rendering' option in the options menu.

rockrapnroll

on Jun 27, 2007

Hi I have turned off the enhanced ship rendering option but still to no avail, the game just crashes music on the loading screen is endless go's on forever.

kryo

on Jun 27, 2007

Hi I have turned off the enhanced ship rendering option but still to no avail, the game just crashes music on the loading screen is endless go's on forever.

Are the ships still white though (it should at least solve that)?

If you're still having issues with the new rendering system off, please start a new thread and post your debug.err in it.

rockrapnroll

on Jun 27, 2007

The ships arnt showing white, how do I post debugging information for the game, im not very tech savy. Many thanks.

kryo

on Jun 28, 2007

Please go to C:\Program Files\Stardock\Totalgaming\GalCiv2 (or wherever you installed the game at), open the debug.err file you find there in notepad, and copy/paste the contents into a post here. If this is a DA report, you'll find the debug in C:\Program Files\Stardock\Totalgaming\GalCiv2\DarkAvatar instead. This will give us some technical information that can help troubleshoot your problem.

Be sure to copy the debug immediately after the error occurs; if you start the game again, the debug will be erased and recreated for the new session.

Note: If running on Vista with DA 1.6b2 or later, the debug.err is now located in My Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar.

GJDriessen

on Jul 18, 2007

TWEAK: Added option to allow the game to start in mixed vp mode when it would normally start in software vp mode. Turn this off if you encounter problems in mixed vp mode to start in software vp mode.

Question: What is a mixed vp mode? and what is a software vp mode? What's the difference? What's better?

Thanks in advance for answering.

kryo

on Jul 18, 2007

Question: What is a mixed vp mode? and what is a software vp mode? What's the difference? What's better?

Thanks in advance for answering.

Hardware > Mixed > Software. Mixed mode is just there so that if your system supports doing *some* things in hardware mode but not all, it can still do those things in hardware, and the rest in software, which is faster and better than doing it ALL in software. Some systems say they can do some things in hardware but actually can't though, so mixed mode can be disabled in such a case to force it to use software mode.

Purge

on Jul 18, 2007

Have these bugs been resolved in the final DA 1.6?
When your total number of ships > ~700, the following two problems occur:
(1) Most of your new ship pop-ups don't appear on the right side of the screen, until you click the Menu button.
(2) The ship list can only handle ~700 ships so when you exceed this point you won't be able to see all your ships.

1) Still happens for me. Plus I get the same issue for finished planetary queues some of the time and the Menu button does not make it appear. I think it might be a touch better though as I only saw this when lots of things were happening.

2) I suspect this is for all lists...I know I can't get all of my planets listed in an alphabetical sort on the pop-up window either w/915 planets.

jlchimera

on Jul 18, 2007

Why can't I find the download for this? I've been reading about this game all day, went straight to the store and bought it after work, and now I woul just like to play... I'm on Vista, so the sound (at least) is shoppy when I try to start without the update. And I get a blank screen when I follow the update links.

Purge

on Jul 18, 2007

You will need Stardock central installed to get the updates:

https://www.galciv2.com/Downloads.aspx

Also, I think there is some Vista specific stuff....Since I don't have Vista I haven't been reading those threads, but you should be able to find them in these forums.

recon007

on Jul 30, 2007

I get a blank screen too. I am not getting anywhere with this upgrade system!!! I have winxp and the game is regesterd through stardock but allI get is a blank

kryo

on Jul 31, 2007

I have winxp and the game is regesterd through stardock but allI get is a blank

Where are you getting a blank screen at? If SDC is trying to forward you to a website, then you haven't correctly/completely registered the game (both GC2 and DA need to be registered on the same account--if you have GC2 Gold, you'll use that serial for both).

If you completed the update but you're getting a blank screen when you run the game, then you've probably just got a resolution issue. If that's the case, go to C:\Program Files\Stardock\Totalgaming\GalCiv2\DarkAvatar (or wherever you installed the game at), open the debug.err file you find there in notepad, and copy/paste the contents into a post here. For Vista, the file may be in My Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar instead.

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