I love digital updates. That's one advantage that PCs tend to have over consoles -- PC games can be updated.
Of course, this is also a downside as developers seem to often release games before their time. Hopefully our customers don't feel that way about Galactic Civilizations II.
On our non-game products such as Object Desktop, we do weekly updates year in and out and that's just how we do business. So to us, it's natural to keep putting updates on a regular basis for as long as possible. Because when we play the game, we're in the debugger or have a graphics package handy. So like many gamers, we'll see something we don't like and we'll make a tweak or a change.
Tomorrow, Friday, we're going to put up our first update. Part of this is to thank people who stuck it out and bought the game at a store (which in turn helps keep us on shelves -- PC game shelf space is really getting hard to get and we're hoping to change that). The other reason is to provide fixes to people who have run into issues. What you see below is what we've done in the past 48 hours (game was released February 21st digitally).
Bold items are new features, italic are "bug fixes". And normal print is, well misc.
Version 1.01 will have:
+ Fix for bug where save games with a version <= 24 didn’t properly set the cached commonly-used tech IDs. This bug manifests itself by making the "Speak To" button do nothing or not acknowledging a technology victory.
+ Research Wnd: When listing ships that a tech will unlock, the other techs required will be listed as well.
+ Support for a mods directory where people can dump things in (we'll document this as soon as we get a breather)
+ Fix for when a starbase is destroyed and being unable to build another star base on it
+ More debug messages for saved games to provide more user info on what's being saved
+ Custom maps with support for fewer players won't allow too many players to be on them.
+ Fixed "No Image" png that would show up then prompting to harvest a resource
+ Easier to get higher approval on planets with low tax rates
+ Fixed bug in surrender code that caused the Defection victory popup message to pop up.
+ Fixed bug where improvements that were supposed to change the player’s miniaturization ability were actually changing their logistics ability. This affects exactly one improvement type: the Hyperion Shrinker.
+ When a starport is destroyed, classColony::OnDestroyImprovement() now sets its planet’s bNeedToUpdateOverlayIcons member to TRUE so that the planet will have its starport overlay removed in the main game screen.
+ If you are running in 16bit color, the game will warn you.
+ CTD on exiting game fixed. (only came up in very specific circumstances)
+ If you're running too low a resolution, the game will warn you.
+ Fixed invasion escape exploit (you know who you are)
+ Morale ability nerfed a bit it now is to the .80 power to balance.
+ Sensor range capped at 15 tiles. Significant performance issues if it gets much bigger than that (> 1 sector)
+ Tweaked farm improvements. Farm improvements provide 4,6,8,10,12 units of food as you go up the tech tree. This prevents players from accidentally ending up with ridiculously large populations that are impossible to keep happy.
+ Sensors are a bit more expensive in terms of space
+ Fix for the elusive "social project never completing" bug. The key to finally finding this bug was learning that it only happens from the quick build window: improvements built from the quick build window were being built upon whatever planet was last viewed in the colony management screen, not the planet selected in the quick build window.
+ Starport Details: List now shows number of installed modules / available modules so players know what starbases to send ships to.
+ Trade Wnd: Alliances made in trade window more fool-proof...old code open to allowning one race to consider another race an ally, but not the other way around (fixes Ashberrys Treaties Window Bug).
+ Memory optimization on ship graphics, game should use less memory, especially in larger galaxies
+ Alt-Tabbing should be faster to come back from. Note: The game does not crash when you alt-tab back in, it just takes time to regenerate the textures from the seed nodes.
+ Performance (frame rate) improved on larger maps.
+ Fixed an ALT tab problem reported in forum where fleet units would leave ghost fleets after attacking after an alt-tab
+ Hitting Cancel when placing a new rally point will now destroy the rally point
+ Fixed bug where battles would skip if the planet had orbital fleet manager
+ Destination in context area no longer tells you the anomaly type. Now it will display the anomaly name. i.e. "Anomaly 20 15"
+ Tightened the spacing of ships in fleet battles
+ Fixed bug where some fleets would fail to fire because their lead ship’s graphic did not have the right weapon
+ Cosmetic: Fixed bug where some fleets would fail to fire after an alt-tab
+ Ship Context Window: "Set destination" button is removed for starbases and disabled for AI ships
+ Fixed size limit for .shipcfg files. This will fix the disappearing jewelry problem
+ Fixed the GNN/Shipyard popup problems. Basically the popups are forced to the front.
+ Added debug information to ship intelligence report and ship details screen when running in DEBUG mode
+ Saved games should load faster
+ Added ‘.’ to the set of legal characters for metaverse character names.
+ Fixed crash when selecting a component if no hull is selected
+ Made scanner modules work for any starbase type, not just military starbases
+ Fix for crash in EntryField that can occur when the backspace key is pressed in an empty entry field.
+ Fixed classCivilization::TransferAllTech() so that it works for all techs. It was calling IsTechKnown() with the tech’s display name, but IsTechKnown() expects the type name. Therefore, some techs wouldn’t get transferred because their display name was not the same as the type name. Also, this wouldn’t work at all with non-English data (i.e., TransferAllTech() would transfer no techs in non-English games).
So that's what we've done in the past 24 hours and thanks to the power of digital distribution, you will be able to get it tomorrow. Today and tomorrow afternoon we'll run it through final QA to make sure everything's good.
This should take care of most of the remotely significant issues we are currently aware of.
We are still looking at other things people have reported. There is a 0 byte saved game issue that some people have run into, we are still trying to reproduce that. It's very rare but that doesn't help the people who run into that. There is also a known issue with some nVidia cards losing their mouse cursor, we've not been able to reproduce that (and we've got a lot of nVidia cards here). Apparently the mouse issue isn't specific to GalCiv II so I'll probably shoot an email over to our friends at Firaxis to see what they've seen on this.
There's a missing planetary improvement that we need to put in (Neutrality Learning Centers) and a couple of other similar things. Plus we have a list of all kinds of other things too.
