Brilliant Design, Stabilitity Issues, Minor Font Issue

[zukhov]

Impressions after 8 Hours Play
===============================
Wow! What a great design and good implementation. The game is totally engrossing, the game play challenging, and the AI (friendly assisting AI automation) plays very well and is a great thing to have. I'm still figuring out the best economic and expansion strategy in basically sandbox mode as well as learning my way around the GUI. In general, my high hopes for this game have been exceeded. It's likely to have too high a learning curve for some people who are not really 4X/RTS/wargamer types, but the excellent GUI and help system mitigates this. I'm looking forward to playing this game for years. While a little less accessible to some newbie gamers, I think this is a worthy successor to the Master of Orion (MOO) games 1 and 2.

I'm playing on a powerful quad-core system, 4 GB of memory, smoking video card, and 32 inch Sony HD monitor, on MS Windows 7. I get an exception fault in the game about once an hour or so. About half of the time when I do, I'm able to save my game before restarting the program. Because of this, I save often, about every 15 minutes or so. I'm going to shut down some of the other programs (Steam/Impulse) on my PC to see if they could be the cause and test. Likely, with so much going on in this game the bugs will be hard to find.

As a turn-based kind of guy, I found the game was so easy to pause and slow down, that the continuous play was a good thing and absolutely not problem. Whew!

I have one minor font issue with "Empire Statistics" screen where you can see your money statistic and cash flow. The fonts are too small for a large monitor like mine. Especially, the ones in the red shaded regions are complete illegible. If the numbers were just a bit bigger, I'd know where I'm spending too much on ships and stations.

Overall, I'd say I'm very happy with what I've seen so far, but very much hope the stability issues can be fixed.

[&o]

[sanderz]

ORIGINAL: Lord Karg

I have one minor font issue with "Empire Statistics" screen where you can see your money statistic and cash flow. The fonts are too small for a large monitor like mine. Especially, the ones in the red shaded regions are complete illegible. If the numbers were just a bit bigger, I'd know where I'm spending too much on ships and stations.

Hi
Have only played the tutorials so far but have to agree with the comments on the font - whilst i can see they need to be small they seem (to me) to lack density/clarity and be a bit hard to read. I'm playing in 1680*1050.

Other than that all looking really good so far.

[Erik Rutins]

Hi Lord Karg,

Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you are enjoying it! Regarding the stability issues you are seeing, I believe there is a system specific component to these as (for example) I've run the 1.01 build in a test game for about 12 hours without a crash. It would be helpful if you could post in the support forum with any crash messages you get from those crashes, even if they are fairly generic. It could help us get an idea what's going on as in some cases the systems folks are playing DW on are beyond the specs we tested with.

Regards,

- Erik

[impact]

First of all: Awesome game. It takes some getting used to and if you try disabling even one AI-Helper during one of your first games, the learning curve can easily make your head hurt, but it is SO worth it
I just wish you could get rid of the jittering when scrolling with keyboard (not a performance issue, as scrolling with mouse works fine).

I have about the same hard- and software as you, Lord Karg. And yes, DW crashes too over here, though not quite as often. When I come back from work, I will try to run it in compatibility mode (XP) and see what happens.
I have tried it this morning for a while, and it seemed to work for the 90 minutes I was able to test it.
However, I have quite severe performance issues.
I have an Intel DualCore with 4 GB RAM and the NVIDIA Gefore 9800 GTX+, so running Crysis and even up-to-date games in 1440x900 with ultra-high detail and 2x-4x antialiasing is really no problem for me. DW however makes my system suffer a bit in galaxies > the normal size.
And yes, all my drivers are up-to-date. I updated my NVIDIA driver a few hours ago when I encountered said issues, but it didn't change a thing.
If you need logs or anything, just tell me. I can send them over once I am home.

[Erik Rutins]

Hi Impact,

Have you taken a look at the performance suggestions in the Tech Support FAQs thread in the Tech Support forum? We're not sure yet why a few systems are having performance issues while other lower end systems are not, but we'll continue to investigate and in the meantime those suggestions should help.

Regards,

- Erik

[impact]

Hey Erik,
My drivers are up to date, my Anti-Virus is forbidden to scan my games-directory, nebulae are turned off, star density set to lowest, framerate fixed at 75 (with VSync and 75Hz refresh rate I thought this might be the best option, but I will try lowering it once I get back home and let you know what happens).

[Yskonyn]

Great to read that the game scales nicely in pace for us accustomed to TBS games. This was one of my concerns as well as I tend to hate the clickfest many realtime systems end up in.
I've installed the game on my laptop yesterday, but I am afraid the old thing doesn't hold its own anymore. Granted it is a tad under min. spec. memory wise I was still going to try anyway. [:'(] It turns out I will have to play it on my gaming desktop pc afterall instead of on my laptop in bed or on the couch. [:D] Merely a luxury problem, but it has resulted in me unable to play the game properly still...

Tonight we get visitors, so the earliest I can play is tomorrow... [X(]

[lomyrin]

I agree that the fonts are a bit hard to see clearly in many places. I use a 26 inch 1980 x 1200 monitor but am considering setting it at 1650 x 1050 when using this game.

Is there any possiblity that the fonts can be enlarge a bit in a patch ?

[Gargantou]

I'd like to see the fonts made less blurry, especially the font used for the text in the lower left-side of the UI when zapping around starsystems etc, the text on that looks very blurry, as if using a ClearType font intended only for LCD users(I'm still on a CRT as far as my PC is concerned.)

[Sarissofoi]

I agree with G. Especially red is completly blurry and hard to read.

[PJL1973]

I agree with the fonts issues, especially the small empire financial summary screen - can't that be made a big bigger in general as well?

[Tormodino]

Yeah. Readability is a definite issue.

The presentation could do with being less blurry.

[zukhov]

Ok, I patched up Windows 7 (I was missing a lot of the patches!) and my video card (which was a minor update). The game is now stable, so I apologize for bringing up the issue. There is a minor "Exception" message from the Operating System that pops up occasionally associated with sorting the ships and stations detail:

System.Argument.Exception

then a long stack dump with "Data.Grid.View.Sort" and "Object must be of type double".

It does NOT cause the game the game to crash and I can click it away and keep playing. This is a minor issue, so I only bring it up in case it's useful to Eliot. It does not negatively impact playing the game in any way. As I programmer, I actually understand the pop-up, but of course not why it's happening. In case it helps Eliot, I'm running on Windows 7 Home Edition fully patched on an AMD Phenom II x4 995 processor, with no development tools installed. No mods to the game.

Thank you again for the awesome game -- I'm not getting any sleep!

[PDiFolco]

About the fonts ...I have 2 systems : an old desktop (but the game still runs) with a 1280*1024 19" monitor, and a new hi-end laptop with a 1600*900 17" screen. Note that due to the format (16/9 vs 5/4) the 17" is largely smaller than the 19", more than "just" the 2" difference could indicate.
Well, on the 1280*1024 it's readable but blurry, then on the 1600*900 it's not blurry but too small ! [:(] Seems like the font is "designed"  for widescreens, but so small that 1440*900 on a big screen is a maximum !

[Erik Rutins]

Bump.

[Mysterius]

I registered in order to give the same feedback concerning fonts : it's too blurry [:)].
In fact, when Distant World is running, EVERYTHING is blurry. If you alt-tab the game, you will see that your icons, your start menu and so on are all suddenly "blurry".
There's something to look at here ^^.

Fonts ingame are generally tiring for the eyes in my opinion.
The rest of the game is good as far as i can tell, i bought it yesterday [;)].

[Gertjan]

I have no problem with the font on 1600x1050 22 inch monitor. I do have the performance issues on large galaxies. Where are the tips to improve performance?