Alpha 1
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First off, Alpha 1 does suck. Make no mistake. If it didn't suck, we'd be calling it gold and partying. Our job is to make it not suck and we hope you will help us to make it not suck.
A few basics about the technical aspects of Galactic Civilizations:
1) GalCiv is the first Stardock strategy game to make use of our Pear 3 technology (underlying game library which is as cutting edge as anything found in say DesktopX or WindowBlinds). So that means we'll want to make sure the thing even WORKS on your machine at all.
2) In your Galactic Civilizations directory you will find a file called debug.err. There will be various assert errors in there. But if the game crashes, look for things at the very end of relaly scarey messages like "library not found!". Debug.err is quite powerful and can help us a lot. We will also be providing copies of SmartException as soon as we can (it's an upcoming Object Desktop component).
3) There are 4 sub-directories: Data, Fonts, Gfx, and Sfx. Hopefully they're pretty self explanatory. What will be useful for you as a beta tester is the Data directory. Since Stardock is better known for things like Object Desktop where we create the engine and the users create the content, we're bringing this sort of design to you in game form - GalCiv may be the first open ended engine of its kind.
Open up the data directory and you'll find things like English.str. Want a Spanish version? Change the strings to Spanish. Voila. Want to have more ships? Create a new file with a .SHIP extension and copy a ship from Coreships.ship into it and give it its own stats and you have a new ship. Same for Improvements (.imp) and (.tech) for technologies. We have purposely limited the number we include in the game (we have dozens of ships already completed here) so that you have the freedom to play around with this and have great impact.
4) About the library. See the library button above? Eventually you'll be able to click on library and SUBMIT your own technologies and ships and improvements and wonders to the game. If they are accepted, then they become officially part of the game and you can use them. The Metaverse button will eventually allow you to have your own empire in the overall persistent gaming uinverse. ONLY configurations with approved ships and improvements and techs will get their scores counted (i.e. if you create a super ship on your own system, that's cool but your scores won't get counted in the metaverse unless we happen to approve the super ship in our library).
Have fun. The first alpha isn't very good but hopefully it's not blow up or crash. The oddsd of it formatting yoru computer are low (30% tops). And we have reduced the number of times it will set your computer on fire so that it only happens out of of 4 times you play the game. So we're definitely moving up. And the hard drive crashing bug has nearly been eliminated (1 out of 7 times of loading the game tops!).
A few basics about the technical aspects of Galactic Civilizations:
1) GalCiv is the first Stardock strategy game to make use of our Pear 3 technology (underlying game library which is as cutting edge as anything found in say DesktopX or WindowBlinds). So that means we'll want to make sure the thing even WORKS on your machine at all.
2) In your Galactic Civilizations directory you will find a file called debug.err. There will be various assert errors in there. But if the game crashes, look for things at the very end of relaly scarey messages like "library not found!". Debug.err is quite powerful and can help us a lot. We will also be providing copies of SmartException as soon as we can (it's an upcoming Object Desktop component).
3) There are 4 sub-directories: Data, Fonts, Gfx, and Sfx. Hopefully they're pretty self explanatory. What will be useful for you as a beta tester is the Data directory. Since Stardock is better known for things like Object Desktop where we create the engine and the users create the content, we're bringing this sort of design to you in game form - GalCiv may be the first open ended engine of its kind.
Open up the data directory and you'll find things like English.str. Want a Spanish version? Change the strings to Spanish. Voila. Want to have more ships? Create a new file with a .SHIP extension and copy a ship from Coreships.ship into it and give it its own stats and you have a new ship. Same for Improvements (.imp) and (.tech) for technologies. We have purposely limited the number we include in the game (we have dozens of ships already completed here) so that you have the freedom to play around with this and have great impact.
4) About the library. See the library button above? Eventually you'll be able to click on library and SUBMIT your own technologies and ships and improvements and wonders to the game. If they are accepted, then they become officially part of the game and you can use them. The Metaverse button will eventually allow you to have your own empire in the overall persistent gaming uinverse. ONLY configurations with approved ships and improvements and techs will get their scores counted (i.e. if you create a super ship on your own system, that's cool but your scores won't get counted in the metaverse unless we happen to approve the super ship in our library).
Have fun. The first alpha isn't very good but hopefully it's not blow up or crash. The oddsd of it formatting yoru computer are low (30% tops). And we have reduced the number of times it will set your computer on fire so that it only happens out of of 4 times you play the game. So we're definitely moving up. And the hard drive crashing bug has nearly been eliminated (1 out of 7 times of loading the game tops!).
