CobraA1

Reply to Ability to schedule indexing? in TweakVista & 7 Stardock Forums

[quote]Sure. You'd need to schedule two tasks using Task Scheduler to do this, one to stop the indexing service and one to start it. The NET START and NET STOP commands will start and stop, respectively, any named service. Use the Help and Support tool in Vista for more details. [/quote] Thanks. That's something I can work with. However, it still remains that something in Vista will automatically start the service at inconvenient times. Do we know if CrawlStartPages is re

Ability to schedule indexing? in TweakVista & 7 Stardock Forums

The fast search tool is nice in Vista, but the indexing required is annoying. Does TweakVista include the ability to schedule indexing? This is something that Microsoft neglected to add. Is the CrawlStartPages task related to indexing? I'm a bit afraid to modify it because I'm unsure of what it does. It does appear, though, to be related. Unfortunately, the action is "Custom Handler" which tells me nothing. It would be nice if somebody did some in-depth research and figured out how

Reply to Piracy & PC Gaming in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

Onyx23: Could it be the CPU? I used to have an AMD CPU, and it hated running some applications in Vista. iTunes in particular crashed with the AMD + Vista combination, and it was a known problem.

Reply to Piracy & PC Gaming in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

Well, I have to say I agree with most of the stuff that Draginol is talking about. I understand profit is a basic requirement for running a business, but I'm much happier with businesses that put their heart and soul into their products rather than trying a million things and hoping something sticks. You can definitely tell when the people in the business actually like what they're doing: It shows in their products. Stardock's products are definitely made by a team that loves what they're doing.

Reply to Drengin Digest: February 2008 in GalCiv II News GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]In the next week or so, we'll be migrating to an updated forum back-end that should be (in theory) much faster than what we have today. It should also have a lot of cool new features. Naturally, everyone will hate it.[/quote] [joke]I HATE IT! I don't know why, but I hate it! I know, I'll blame the government! That always works![/joke] [quote]It uses a brand new engine we've been developing that allows players to zoom out and see the world as a cloth (Tolkien-esq) map or

Reply to Sins Preview Tonight on G4TV's X-Play in GalCiv II News GalCiv2 Forums

Nice :). Probably going to see it on my iPod - I've subscribed to X-Play's podcasts. I can't believe G4 canceled all of the other good shows when they took over Tech TV. Makes me wonder why they took it over in the first place. But now we have TWiT and WebbAlert :). Good to see they didn't give up when G4 canceled their shows. Sins looks pretty cool - I'm a big fan of GalCiv 2, the Command and Conquer series, the Civ series, and a bunch of other strategy games. I'm ver

Reply to Ten New Years Resolutions for the Game Industry in GalCiv II News GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]However, I also recognise the need to push the envelope every now and again. Lets just hope that the 'Crysis Syndrome' is a one off rather than becoming the norm.[/quote] Same here - I do think that [i]occasionally[/i] we need something to push the envelope and give a reason for pushing the technology further - but most games should strive to be compatible with most systems. [quote]Sadly, here in the UK at least, all games are now shipped in standard DVD cases instead of

Reply to Hydrogen Cars in Off-Topic GalCiv2 Forums

"An alternative idea so we can stop argueing about hydrogen." Well, as I've said, I prefer electric cars over hydrogen anyways. Compressed air is an interesting idea - although I do wonder it it'll suffer the same range limitations as the electric car. Also, these companies have GOT to get into the game with better designs. I'm sorry, but the Tesla Roadster is the only car I've seen so far that looks like something I wouldn't mind driving. The rest are ugly. I don't wa

Reply to Hydrogen Cars in Off-Topic GalCiv2 Forums

"no it isn't because you are burning hydrogen some of which is combining with oxygen forming new water." -Where do we get Oxygen and Hydrogen? Probably from water. Meaning we take out just as much as we produce. -Even if we are adding water - chances are we'll just be adding it to the oceans, because it doesn't stay in the air very long. It won't really contribute much to global warming, and any effects are much easier to reverse. It's nowhere near as permanent as the

Reply to Hydrogen Cars in Off-Topic GalCiv2 Forums

Sorry to come in a bit late, but . . . A few things to note: -Water vapor may be considered a "greenhouse gas," but it's very, VERY short lived - it has a tendency to form something called "rain" and exit the atmosphere very quickly. As others have said, this is just working with the existing water cycle: Overall, it's always the same amount of water. "Stored hydrogen can be an explosion hazard," As opposed to gasoline ;)? I think that to get from place to pla

Reply to Shaders and graphics? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

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Shaders and graphics? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I dunno what's the best way to discuss this - it seems like a not very frequently talked about topic, and it's certainly not something that affects my opinion of this great game very much. But - it does seem like the graphics could be improved a bit. For one thing, the lights, while they certainly "glow" by not getting darker when in shadows, don't seem to cast their light on the ship they're attached to. I think it would be nice to, say, make a light really bright and light up

Reply to Ten New Years Resolutions for the Game Industry in GalCiv II News GalCiv2 Forums

"Stop with the obnoxious DRM. If people are going to pirate your game, they're going to pirate it. Reward the people who buy your games. Make it more convenient to be a customer than to be a thief." Agreed. DRM inconveniences legit customers a lot more than pirates, especially when the DRM breaks because it's relying on some archaic, undocumented behavior that only some machines have, which in turn breaks the game for the user even though the user may have never copied a single byte of

Reply to ThinkPad as development machine in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

I've been using Vista for a while now, and here's my verdict: Do not, under any circumstance, use it on an older machine. There's just too many problems. Put it on when you build a new machine, or buy a machine that already has it installed. To be honest, I don't like running it on anything less than a Core 2. And oh, yeah - don't use it with less than 2 GB of memory, unless you love waiting for Windows to swap everything in/out of memory all the time. Quite f

Reply to Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor preview in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

VERY NICE. This is beyond anything I expected :). Now this is very much a priority. After I buy presents for family members, I know where the rest of my holiday bonus pay is going.

Reply to *FIXED* my CTD due to memory problems. in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

"Vista uses superfetch takes your free memory and puts it in cache." Yup, and because of how differently Vista's memory management works, memory managers for XP probably won't work as well in Vista. If you're on Vista, the best thing you can do is to simply add more memory. BTW, ReadyBoost is a part of SuperFetch - ReadyBoost essentially places some of the hard drive cache on a flash drive. So, yeah, Vista's caching works completely different from XP's. <b

Reply to But MY computer isn't slow...is it? in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

[quote](dual 250GB in a mirror)[/quote] Well, I don't trust mothererboard RAID yet: I tried it once, and the controller failed. Despite the dual harddrives, the controller is [b]still[/b] a single point of failure - and one that doesn't appear to be very reliable. Even worse, when a RAID controller fails it's a pain to get the data back because the hard drives are written in a special format an OS can't read. These days I stick with regular backups. Anyways, glad to he

Reply to But MY computer isn't slow...is it? in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

Just upgraded my own computer - to a *slightly* higher GHz, but with four cores, more memory, and a new motherboard. Yeah, it does seem like the GHz stuff is starting to sizzle because of the thermal limits, but computers haven't stopped: Now it seems to be about how fast is the motherboard and memory, as well as how many cores. I think you're going to start to see 8, 16, 32, etc cores in the future rather than faster clock speeds - until they start hitting more limits. After that, we m

Reply to Haven't Played This Game In A Long Time, Just Updated It; Not Much Has Been Fixed. in Dark Avatar GalCiv2 Forums

I think this game probably just isn't your cup of tea . . . I don't have any problems, and I think TA is going to improve the tech tree so you have a better idea what you'll be getting. If the AI isn't smart enough for you, crank up the difficulty, or get a better CPU - I think it's designed to scale with the processor. The structure of tech tree is also getting an overhaul in TA, with races getting their own custom improvements and stuff. Curious: What don't

Reply to Quick update for Dark Avatar - 1.8d in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

"and by if the planet is defended." [img]http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/1082/evilgrin0046em2.gif[/img] Thanks for the fixes .

Reply to NEW POLL: December or January release? in GalCiv II News GalCiv2 Forums

I vote later. Because then I'll have the money . And because I'd like a quality release rather than a rushed release.

Reply to Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor BETA 1 in GalCiv II News GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]The old ones are randomly generated (unique per planet if you let it) uncompressed raw bitmaps, with mipmaps to boot.[/quote] I was sorta wondering that also, as many games have used procedural generation in limited environments. There's a 96KB game made by some Germans that looks like it should be much larger, because they did everything procedurally. Thanks for the explanation. I take it the new ones are compressed, with less mipmaps? Of course, one shouldn't

Reply to Twilight of the Arnor Beta 1 in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Planet Textures no longer generated...use pre-made textures (only 5 textures for Beta 1)[/quote] Although this would undoubtedly allow a talented artist to make cool planets - I am concerned that it might lead to a lack of variety. Perhaps the most important planets can be textured manually, and less important planets use generated textures?

Reply to Hotseat and Linux support in Ideas GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]As I understand it, OpenGL is much more difficult for the dev than Direct3D.[/quote] Actually, OpenGL has been historically much easier to develop for. Microsoft closed the difficulty gap a lot in DirectX 9, so they're actually about the same. Usually it boils down to personal preference, company policy, or the experience of the devs. That doesn't change the fact that they'd have to learn a whole new API and implement it, though. It's still very difficult. I agr

Reply to lack of planets/ habitable planets v1.8 in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

"You do understand that Vista comes with a 64 bit version, don't you?" Yeah, I was so excited about it - I was finally going to get to use all the bits available to me on my AMD 64. But - I got the "wrong" version and now I'm stuck with 32 bits. I didn't realize Microsoft was only going to make it available if I got the "right" version, and that if I wanted 64 bits, I had to pay an arm, leg, and my first born. I feel like I've put a 4 cylinder engine into a Mustang. Ne