Hi all...

Been playing the beta pretty heavily since release, and waited to post until I felt familiar enough with it to make useful comments. If these are redundant- apologies.

This relates to beta 0.62b.010 in no particular order:

1. [Ambiguity] Does Sins actually send crash-dump this info off to the devs automatically? In looking down the file path specified by the crash dialog I can find nothing (not even the path).. So I may not be sending data that may be useful. Can this be clarified, or can the beta actually send the information automatically please?

2. [Annoying] Group jumping seems to work ok in this version but the "alignment time" is excessive with large fleets, even if the skills for speedy jumping are fully researched.

3. [Stability] Sins crashes regularly during the end game. I'm down to one other AI player, he's backed against the wall, I have a large fleet (40+ ships) closing on the last planet- and Boom... hard lock of the game. A dialog appears prompting me to send the dump info to the devs (see #1). *Note: I've never been able to actually win the game without a crash- the crash is always on the last couple of systems that need to be conquered.

4. [Sound] Sometimes when Sins starts the sound is all crackly. The technical term is "digital clipping". Quitting the game and restarting it solves the problem.

5. [System Resources] After making it half way through a game, performance starts to suffer. In tracking this down there seems to be a couple of reasons for this: First my page file grows to about 1.6GB on a machine with 2GB of RAM and no other programs running. The system still shows over 1GB of real RAM free on the machine. Second, there seems to be a lot of context switching on my dual core rig. Setting processor affinity to one core helps a little. Restarting the game from a saved game file brings it back to normal performance and resolves the page file/RAM issue.

6. [Technology] I hate to comment on this, but my observation is that SINS is not multi-threaded, or very minimally so. It would be nice if the code were taylored a bit to dual core machines since almost everyone is gaming on them now. Perhaps the interface can run in a separate thread, along with world maintenance issues like ship building, structure bulding, sound... ETC. I know this is a tall order, though I'm aware of greatly enhanced tools being available these days for multi-threaded programming.

7. [Technology] The game seems to play better in a non-SLI configuration. This may be an nVidia profile issue since the defaults aren't always the best for unknown games.

8. [Playability] The game in it's present form really draws me in and I enjoy it. Which is to say that the game has more to it from an enjoyability standpoint than most betas. Very helpful in this area is that the battles are fun to watch.

My System Specs:

Athlon 64 X2 4600
2GB matched Corsair RAM (NOT Value RAM)
Elitegroup KN1SLI Lite
x2 nVidia 7600 GT in SLI mode.
This machine has passed a burn in test in January.

Thanks for an open development process, dear devs, those of us in the technology business who play games do appreciate it.