GETTING HELP for GalCiv II / Dark Avatar
GalCiv2 Forums
1) IF you plan to switch between the game and something else a lot, run it in a window. You can do this via an option in the game's video settings.
(2) The game will run in any high resolution your system will support.
(3) User created data files and preferences are in the my documents\my games\galciv2 folder
(3a) The Dark Avatar preferences are in the gc2darkavatar folder in the same place.
(4) IF you run into some problem please let us know the following things:
- What OS you running?
- Is it English or a particular language (Swedish, German, Japanese, etc.)
- What video card do you have?
- What kind of CPU do you have?
- How much memory you have
- Your Debug.err (located in the GalCiv II directory).
- If you're running Dark Avatar it's in the galciv2\darkavatar directory
(5) If you run into a serious problem (i.e. game won't start, crashes, etc.) there is a debug.err file in your GalCiv II directory (galciv2 or galciv2\darkavatar depending on which you're playing). Post the contents of it here.
(6) UPDATE YOUR VIDEO DRIVERS. We're serious about this. If someone responds to this post with a "Game occasionally CTDs, here's my debug.err" and there's a video driver from 2004 in it, we'll find you. 
90% of the "bug" reports we get on serious issues end up being some guy who insisted he had the "latest drivers" and those "latest drivers" turned out to be 2 years ago.
(7) The game should run on pretty much any system that supports DirectX 9C. YOU MUST HAVE DIRECTX 9C or later installed.
(8) There are some first generation Intel Extreme adapters that don't work with the game. We're talking very old ones (i.e. <2003). They don't work because they don't support True Type fonts in games. Nothing we can do. There's no work around other than to get another card. Based on the beta, this shouldn't be an issue as nobody ran into it.
(9) DO NOT use this thread to ask whether the game will work on your system. If you have doubts, wait for the demo. If you can play any other recently released game, then you can run this. (last time we put a thread like this up we had people with monster machines asking if they could run the game on it).
(10) IF THE GAME CRASHES ON YOU we want to know why. In Stardock Central in the "free stuff" area there's a program called Smart Exception. Install that, run it, and if the game crashes, it will create a log that will tell us literally what line of code it crashed on. Email [email protected] or [email protected] the file and we will take a look. Don't forget to tell us what you were doing when it crashed to help us figure it out.
(11) IF the game is crashing when it saves (i.e. corrupted save game): Check your virtual memory settings. You can do that by right-clicking on my computer, go to properties, click on the advanced tab, click on the performance settings, ciick on advanced, click on the change button in virtual memory. Make sure your virtual memory is set to at least 2 Gigs. The game won't use all that of course or anywhere near but we have found that those who run into this almost always have either no page file or very low memory.
(12) IF YOU ARE RUNNING ON WINDOWS VISTA. Be aware that the graphics drivers are still in a state of flux. Particularly the nVidia drivers (I wouldn't even consider using Windows Vista on an nVidia based machine until the driver situation gets better which I expect it to be by the end March 2007).
(13) NVIDIA 79xx series video card users, particularly those in SLI may experience freezing. If you do, turn on the hardware mouse cursor in the options. If that doesn't solve it, run the video card in single GPU mode. Keep an eye on the nVidia drivers being updated and report any problems to nVidia. I should know, I'm running two 7950's in Quad-SLI mode on my main machine.
(14) AMD DualCore. Make sure you have the latest bios for this if you run into any problems.
(15) The minimum resolution is 1024x768. If you aren't running at least that, the game won't work.
Good luck! We'll be checking this thread regularly.
PLEASE only post if you're having a problem of some kind. Thanks!
ALSO:
Galactic Civilizations II Knowledgebase: Click Here
General Stardock Knowledgebase: Click Here
Submit A Trouble Ticket: Click Here
Stardock Forums