When is the patch coming out

I haven't had any trouble with flicker.
With some video cards and drivers, I've heard that the latest updates can cause as much video problems for some games as not having updated in a while.
It's not easy to make every program out there compatible with every piece of hardware and hardware driver out there.

As for the patch, I heard the next official patch might be v1.56 due to a few other things that needed to be resolved.
Since the latest Changelog/History thing is for 1.54, we still got a little bit of a wait.

About your flicker problem, on the SE V frontend, have you tried messing around with the settings under Setup? Such as Display Driver, Video Mode, 3D Device settings, etc?
Also, try DirectX Diagnostic Tool (or whatever it is called) to do a little troubleshooting.

I expected 1.55 beta today and was hoping for 1.56 public next Friday or monday.

This given the recent betas all coming out on fridays...

It has been a long time... It does seem like he's getting ready for some kind of expansion pack or 'ultimate' version to coincide with this upcoming public patch.

Javaslinger

There is literally nothing in the SE5 code that causes the flicker. Even when all graphics are disabled, with only a blank black screen and a few basic subsystems running (basically, a canvas refresh), the flicker remains on Vista Nvidia. What would you have MM do, exactly? He can't just up and rewrite the engine to be DX10, or even DX9, at this point...

Luckily, the next patch will let you change the size of windowed mode display, so you can work around the flicker...

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Well, when your on the newest OS out there you have to expect problems. The responsibility is on Nvidia, AMD, & Intel to optimize their drivers with Vista. It is gonna take time for this, so you have to be patient. So in summary, send these flicker reports to your cards manufacturer, not MM.

BTW, AMD and Intel drivers have similar issues on Vista.

-----
StarCraft 2, it's about damn time!

i am running vista ultimate 64-bit with nvidia video card. i do not have any flicker on my systeam when i play the game.

That's a completely different driver set from people running vista 32-bit.

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It might take months until manufacturers fix the bugs...

But really: Why switch to Vista? Gimme a feature that's worth switching to the new OS.

MS can say that their new OS is in the release phase, but until SP1 comes out it's in public beta test phase.

I only miss wide screen support of SE:V. It would be cool to have 22" wide screen supported with native resolution.

Best regards,
Pit Fiend

SE5 supports wide-screen resolutions just fine...

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gnoiss: TBH, it's rather silly to buy XP at this point for a new PC, when 90% of the Windows ecosystem is advancing forward to the latest OS with all the new changes under the hood progress can't be held back to cling to an OS released in 2001. I also won't go in to the lecture on the full list of changes and total rewrites for security that's gone on under the hood.

Also can't justify not building a new computer over just a single game. The world moves on. Eugene's just expressing a little frustration that a game he paid for doesn't work on an OS that's become standard issue for almost all new MS-equipped PC's and laptops. Most large developers would fix things on their side or work with Nvidia, ATI/AMD and Intel to get it fixed, but MM being a one man army, all a user can do is bug both the dev hoping for anything that may come out of that and bug nVidia as well.

But hey, car's in 1970 were just fine, why ever bother to get a new one? What's a little rust and a silly safety feature like an airbag?

Yeah, but Windows XP is more user-friendly, faster, and generally works better than Vista. My mom recently got a new laptop with Vista on it, and was (not sure if she still is, but was) considering getting a copy of XP to replace Vista. . . .

Maybe in a year or so Vista will be worth using, but. . . .

YMMV, but I've found the opposite to be true. Asides from the first month or twos worth of nVidia drivers, SE:V has, in fact, been my only issue of significance. If I didn't like SE so much I'd be doing great.

And the performance delta has also been made nil except on low-end hardware. Not to mention, again, a total rewrite of the OS for improved security.

Fact is, and it's undeniable, that Vista is largely here in the present (20 million consumer purchases in the first month alone!) and absolutely the future.

Yes, 20 million consumer purchases Vista in the first month... because if you want a XP copy, you would wait for months!
I've purchased my new computer on May, and I ask to my vendor:
«Can I have a copy of XP instead of Vista? Because I want to buy not the top-of-the-line PC...»
«Oh, yes, you can! If you choose Vista, your PC arrive in one week. If you want XP, it will arrive around august or september...»

And, over 20 million consumer that use Vista say:
«DON'T BUY VISTA!!!!»

That's all, for me.

Sorry for error... I'm Italian and with an Headache...

PS. In Italy we call Vista: Window Svista (not Windows Vista)... where Svista mean Mistake... hihihi

My girlfriend sold me her old desktop PC running XP because her workplace forced her to upgrade to a Vista-capable machine. She's a certified Network Analyst and absolutely despises Vista.

Vista is only the present; Microsoft is already working on its successor. An optimist might hope they've learned from their mistakes, but I'm not an optimist.

"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

Granted, Vista is the future (or present) of the microsoft product line. But unless someone (microsoft, game companies (DX10), software vendors, work environment) forces us to use it I can't really see a good reason to switch to it.

Perhaps in a year or so, when all the bugs in vista have been worked out, but even then it will be a switch for compatibility (software not working for xp) not because of new "features" all of which are marketing ploys and have no considerable real effect other than slowing your machine even more.

There are no airbags in vista, just new a nice looking paint job. And as far as security goes, no one is insane enough to fully expose a windows machine on the net (2k, xp, 03 server, or vista) believing that microsoft does a good job security wise.

There is wisdom in the saying "they don't make them as they used to.". Beyond the introduction of major new features which could be added into all of the old models, the design philosophy of cars evolved into making cars with considerably less user serviceability and lifespan. How will the company make money if you keep your car for 20 years and service it by yourself or a friend or a proffesional who knows about cars? ever wondered that? Today your will keep your car for 2-5? 2-8? years and you will always use the "authorized" service.

What's the design philosophy that microsoft has when creating their OS?

How much junk can we stuff in here to force people to buy a new computer?

And,

How much control can we exert over our users to force them to use our products?

Fully exposing any machine to the net, with any operating system, is bad practice.

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It's true that I haven't involved myself with vista, other than watching the news and reading some specs. However I really need to ask this: How can a company that designs software with architectural flaws, promote the fixes to those flaws as new products? Why do I have to pay them to fix their mistakes, when I already pay for premium support?

All vista has to offer should have been given out in the form of service packs. And if windows (and OSX) is converging with the *nixes then why bother with it at all? (SE:V for linux please?)

That is very true, But in windows I always had reservations about forwarding even a single port.

How much did you pay for your car then? Remember we're talking about the general population here. Granted, what I said doesn't hold true for expensive cars (Porche BMW...) They don't need frequent servicing and you don't have frequent problems with them. In my country taking your car to a non qualified technician will invalidate your product guarantee, and when you go to a non authorized service center they tell you that the manufacturer doesn't give them original spare parts (I have to install fakes). Of course this doesn't hold true for simple stuff like brake pads, oil changes etc, but you get the point.

Anyway, we're way off topic here. So it's Monday afternoon here and still no patch!

What we want? A public release! When do we want it? Soonish!

In the next couple of turns in my PBFTP game before I attack a ringed homeworld stacked to the brim with WPs, would be nice. Remember, only Aaron Hall can save the Terran Imperium from certain defeat by the evil ringed world bug! A battle vital to curb the chaotic influence of the evil motorhead society.

Aaron, do you want the blood of galactic peace on your hands?

Evil ring world bug?

I didn't know we had combat issues with ring worlds.

So should I go for Sphere worlds in my current game, which I would most probably drop once 1.57 comes out?

ringed worlds, not ring worlds. As in planets with rings.

Of course, Apple is no different; one had to pay to go from Mac OS 9 (a hopeless POS) to OS X (a tolerable BSD shell). Everyone but the free GPL guys makes you pay for fixing major architectural flaws.

Yes, it is true that Vista is not a huge, world-spanning upgrade from XP, like NT/2000 was from the 9x line. XP wasn't that big of an upgrade from 2000 either, other than some consumer-"friendly" dumbing down of the interface and. Does this mean all of its features should have been rolled out for free, as service packs? Probably not. There are too many drastic changes to parts of the kernel (eg: a totally new TCP/IP stack, a new graphics subsystem), making it not even a very good idea IMO to upgrade a XP install to Vista, much less a service pack. Should Vista have been released without the other big changes that were supposed to be in it (eg: database-like WinFS file system)? Hard to say, since we aren't the money people.

Quote:

Anyway, we're way off topic here. So it's Monday afternoon here and still no patch!

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It always boils down to money

Yes I know, but it's interesting that over time, those small changes point to the *nixes out there... I mean even ms-dos had similarities. At some point we should also expect microsoft to roll out a version of X-windows (if they haven't done already?). The point being that they are building an OS that already exists out there with our money! it's sick!

No worries there.. keep the druk happy.

I give up, I am going to another game and come back to this one in a couple months when I'm sure the patch will be out.

Supposedly by then end of the week , this coming from a pretty good source. The latest patch list was pretty short, and Captain Kwok is rarely wrong.....

Lol some ppl just can't wait. No patience! that's too bad

The druk informs me that the 1.58 change log addresses the recent issues uncovered.

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"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

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And what did the other developers copy from MS? The wonderful registry system? (voted one of the worst design choices of all time) The only thing that I know of is the flashy UI with the start button, and that was designed by psychologists and marketing ppl not software engineers.

Can you give me an example that is an original MS Software concept?

What's the point? Unless you are talking about what the original OS developers came up with 30 years ago, there is almost nothing actually new in software (just new ways of doing the same thing, or melding together old things into something new). Any example given, from any "side," will probably have a plethora of examples of prior implementation.

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Making the consumer pay for the same thing over and over ...

Groovy Baby Yeah!

"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

Of course, MS does do a lot of innovative things, in addition to the imitative...

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You are correct Fyron but the MS haters will never see it any other way...

Groovy Baby Yeah!

Well, can somebody please tell me what innovative things MS has done?

If I look back into the history of the company, MS used money to buyout innovative companies or copy the ideas of others:

MS Sql Server : it came from Sybase SQL Server. MS acquired knowledge and code from Sybase.
MS Word : it came from Bravo, the original GUI word processor developed at Xerox PARC (wikipedia)
MS Excel : rip off from Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus 1-2-3 was the leader for many years.
MS Powerpoint : New version of Presenter from Forethought, Inc, which they later renamed to
PowerPoint.
MS Access : Rip off from Filemaker. Filemaker has been going on since the times of Forethought Inc, and it goes way back to a program called "nutshell" (1982) (wikipedia)
MS Visio : Microsoft acquired Visio Corporation in 2000.
MS Outlook : rip off from Lotus organizer, lotus bought a company called Threadz and extended their product. MS had their own version but it was loosing the market, untill they copied lotus.
MS Project : rip off from some parts of Artemis. Artemis is a Project management solution created from 1976, 1983 saw the launch of Artemis 9000/EX. Microsoft Project for Windows v1.0, was started in 1987 on contract to a small external company. (wikipedia)
MS Publisher : MS tries to take over the market share of Quark that is around from 1987. (MS launched Publisher in 1991. (Wikipedia). This looks like a failure for MS.
MS Internet Explorer : Ah let's not talk about this. MS had no faith on the internet and they rushed their implementation.
MS Messenger : rip off from Mirabilis ICQ (1996) (MS launched messenger in 1999)
MS DirectX : One sentence: "Let's hack windows to access the H/W directly before we loose all the gamers" it took them so long to make DirectX stable, and it was always a hacked part of windows until they integrated it in the OS... Anyone remember trying to run the demo of Diablo I on their machine?

And all should know about the origins of the GUIs of our modern operating systems: Xerox.

I am not an MS hater at all, all of the above is real History. Where is the innovation? Unless you call innovation the act of filling the holes of smaller companies that didn't have the budget to finish their ideas, or doing face lifts on older products . The above list is not complete. there are other apps MS created that fill other roles in their platform that are not *so* important to the consumers. hell, the server side of products including the new business software is based around much older ideas and systems. MS even had a unix OS in their line of products once. Anyone know about Xenix? Xenix was a version of the Unix operating system, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T in the late 1970s (version 7).(wikipedia)

Reading the above one can see that MS doesn't innovate, it assimilates stuff like the Borg. (In fact I think there's a picture of a Borg bill gates somewhere around the net)

There are good ppl and good engineers in microsoft. But the things they are told to build or rebuild are not original and innovative ideas, regardless of how good or bad implementations they are making. It's just money and marketing.

Finally, all should be wary of monopolies. A monopoly is a very bad thing, socially, economically and technologically.

Anyway, sorry for the long post and for hijacking the thread again...

Michael.

http://www.ahajokes.com/crt202.html
http://www.gksoft.com/a/fun/borg-gates.html
http://www.gameplay.hr/modules/myalbum/photo.php?lid=12255

Enjoy!

Politics....

Religion....

Operating Systems......

.NET (especially the CLR)? Visual Studio (tons of little things that really add up)? GUI configurable servers (as opposed to mostly CLI Unix/Linux of the era)? Surface? That Origami thing, for ultra mobile PCs? Zune's attempted Wifi sharing (unfortunately crippled at the behest of the RIAA)? Xbox Live (sure the parts have been available for a while, but as of yet noone else has made such a seamless integrated system)? OpenXML (ODF wouldn't let them maintain the legacy file support necessary in the business world)? The list goes on, though tends to get more obscure...

Of course MS will buy other companies when it sees it can make money in an emerging market... Of course there are things they have developed mirroring other successful software... That's what the job of a corporation is afterall, to expand into new markets and increase revenues. MS is hardly alone (or in any way wrong) in doing this. The huge leap of logic from that to "they never innovate" is alarming, however.

For the record, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with monopolies. Its only when they abuse position in one market to force the flow of another market in their favor that issues arise...

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It's all about giving people choices, and if he gets a true monopoly then where do the choices go?

Glad to see that Linux support for my hardware is improving now but until it improves enough my games (and DVD's mostly) will still be run on windows, the biggest problem with windows is it's popularity.

MS is the first with a mousewheel, which does not "datter"

Umm...so when is the patch coming out?

I was wondering when someone would mention the patch again. At least Fyron now has one ally in Blubel, I'm not sure what you meant by 'datter', but hey whatever pushes your buttons.

I can handle Windows being Windows. It's not perfect, but (I hate to say this) it does work, most of the time. Vista has given me all sorts of problems, but I'll give them that it's a new operating system, and I'll wait for SP1. For some strange reason I really like Office, I don't know why, it is getting better, it still does what you don't want it to do, but I still like it.

If I were more of a programmer, I only dabble some times, I would really like Visual Studio, from the small sample of abilities I've used of it, it is pretty good. I'm also still finding cool little things that Excel can do. In high school I never really got why people used Excel. Even at uni one lecturer I had used it instead of Matlab. The more I look into Excel the more powerful I realise it is. I'm sure that the same is true for many Microsoft products.

I appologise to those who 'dislike' Microsoft, but I thought that the argument was getting a bit one sided. Have a good time on the forums everyone, no matter what OS/Programs you're using.

Yes there are tons of little things that ms has done that add up, and the integration of their products is first class like one would expect from a big company. But one should accept that they never created something that was a true leap ahead. .Net and Visual Studio? sure, the platform and the company needed the tools to build software. But versioning systems, UI builders, hypertext help/pages and code autocompletion were done in the past.

I really liked Surface, but there is a lot of work that's going on in UIs these days, and there is nothing in CS that you can't take to the next level.

Also can you say that they really didn't abuse their position in the market? Well I think they did (and they keep doing it..) and in the end, they are a multinational corporation, that's what multinational corps do. It's not that ppl pathologically hate MS while they love BP or ICI or other multinationals. And kudos to Bill gates, he became rich because he was at the right place at the right time and he could identify and snatch opportunities. I only wish I could have done the same if I was in his place.

But please let's not pat them on the back for their software, and open our arms to accept them with love. When a person uses any piece of software, he gives away some of his personal freedom to the developer of that software.

If my replies showed that I was a MS hater it was only because it seemed to me that ppl have started believing that MS is the future of Software and that they innovate Computing Science to the core, and I wanted to offset that.

Anyway, the patch day is approaching!

I must finish my game b4 that happens...

The awesome thing about .NET is the whole open standards certification thing MS did with it...

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"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

Sometimes I imagine that Gates is actually a time traveller whose mission was to retard our technological development.

"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

Speaking of the patch, this tangent is far more interesting than the OT.

"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

The patch has been posted in the Projects & Downloads section. It is also listed on the home page.

http://spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/4322

downloading now! Sweet.

Yeah! Now we just need the new BM 1.10.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Join PBW Emperor Of The Universe League Today. Follow the Link to EOTU
http://thewelloftakahlah.spaces.live.com/blog/

Uh, is anybody else having trouble getting BM to work with this new patch? When I try to run it I get a bunch of "Could not find . . ." errors. Does this patch bust BM 1.09?

For anybody else reading this - Kwok answered in the Patch is Out thread that 1.58 busts BM 1.09 so we will have to wait till he posts 1.10 tomorrow night if we want to play balance mod.

Ummm...really should change the name of this thread...let's see, "The Good, the Bad and the Microsoft", or "The Phantom Menace", or how about "Irreconcilable Differences".

Its out!

SE5 Files hosted on Filefront (Patches, Mods, Races, etc)

Lol who's gonna argue now that the patch is out?

Grab the goods and play...

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Nice

Groovy Baby Yeah!

This isn't a dinner table, so discuss away!

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The problem with all modern operating systems is that they aren't operating systems anymore, they're dressed up aplication suites that happen to be able to do some os stuff. All an os should do is act as a translation layer between hardware and software. Preferably it should do this transparently unless there's an error.

How big would a Windows install or a (mainstream) Linux distro be if all the non-os stuff were stripped out?

Unfortunately, the market is driven by the "average" user who either doesn't know that there are third-party aps that can do things better or just wants the convenience of having everything built-in.

With many distros of Linux, you can choose a "custom" install that installs just the OS and the bare minimum necessary bits of software (eg: c libraries, a shell, a text editor, a compiler, package management software, ssh). Most of the Debian-breed have such an option.. It starts out pretty fricken small, but is naturally useless. The idea is then to use apt to install exactly which packages you want to install. Its great to have, but horribly confusing for an inexperienced user.

Remember how the EU forced MS to try this with Windows XP N, sans Windows Media Player? Remember how noone bought it? It seems that even given the option, the vast majority of consumers simply don't want an OS without bundled software.

Personally, I think it would be a bad idea to strip all default OS installs down to the bare minimum (especially for consumer-level OSes, like Windows, OS X and Ubuntu). It would be nice to have more options for a custom install from the beginning with Windows and OS X though... You can always use something like XP Lite to strip out unwanted software, but that's kind of hackish.

With gigabytes of hdd space costing less than a quarter each, a bit more install size on a desktop/laptop isn't much of a concern anymore, is it?

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I'm a realist, I don't view MS as intrinsically evil nor do I believe that open source means a better product. I think the truth is more a shade of gray somewhere in between.

If Commodore hadn't been plundered by corporate sharks, I believe AmigaOS would have had a larger market share today than MacOS does.

"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

As someone pointed out, additional features should be optional, if i want to disable IE then let me. I won't try to defend all the Linux distro's either. However packaging with stuff is also favourable, hence I like to use OpenSUSE, which comes with a large array of bundled software, but this is almost all optional...Ubuntu on the other hand I didn't like, the installer was far too restricting.

I also won't claim that the Linux OS's are without bugs, just that I can usually figure out what action is causing the error...while with windows it's not always as obvious to me.

Can't say anything about Mac as i don't use it. Finally, as i said above, the worst thing about Windows is it's popularity, they have enough of the market share to set the standards, which the other OS's have to try to follow.
So the more other operating systems are used in preferance to windows the less issues people with have with the evil empire that is Microsoft.

ps.(Currently use Windows, Ubuntu (because it's a smaller download for my old pc) and openSuSE linux) Visual Studio is a nice piece of kit to use in terms of ease of use at least.

Note that you do not have to install ubuntu-desktop (or kubuntu-desktop) package, which contains all the gnome DE + extra Ubuntu software. You could, if you wanted to, just install gnome and the parts you want (or whatever other DE you want).

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"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

Do you feel unduly abused by your cable company (perhaps before the rise of Dish Network and DirectTV)? How about your power company? Your local government road-maintaining agency?

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So basically, yes to all of the above.

"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

Somehow it doesn't surprise me that you would respond negatively to everything... You seem to be the exception, rather than the rule.. Most people in general are satisfied with such natural monopolies (less so with certain cable companies that like raising rates every year, but still).

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Power company is a monopoly over wher eyou are? and I think I know of more than one cable provider...

Don't deal with the road maintainence people myself, that's the government's job, I think though that there's more than one of them, so none of the above are monopolies...especially power, there's at least 5 of those

I think you misunderstand... they are monopolies in a geographic region.

There is more than one cable company in the nation, but only one serves each region, typically. Routing 2 or 3 sets of cable lines to every home just isn't done. There are occasional exceptions with overlap, but for the most part, its one per area. A bit of competition for TV viewing has appeared in recent years via Dish Network and DirectTV, and a small percentage of the country has access to IPTV via telcos now too, but that is still in its infancy. There is still only one option for cable TV, though.

The same thing mostly applies with telcos, though there is some leasing of the lines by other companies at wholesale rates (which I think was recently deregulated and no longer required by FCC regulations).

With power, there is almost always just one option. Its just not practical to route two or three separate sets of power lines everywhere. Having multiple companies sharing power lines doesn't really make any sense, cause the power from different power plants all merges together in the grid.

Road building definitely falls under a monopoly. There is only one agency authorized to work on city/county roads, one for state highways, and two for interstate highways (via joint ventures between the state and federal transportation agencies). They tend to contract out building of roads to private companies, but none of those companies can just go build roads wherever they like.

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