Fighting tons of bugs in Dark Avatar 1.08g

I have run into the following issues that really have started to annoy me. I only bought this game 2 weeks ago and would hate to write it off as too buggy to play.

1. Reloading save games doesn't always work as expected. Most of the time the loaded game is corrupted in some way.
I have seen alot of wierd behavior after loading saved games. These problems are more likely to happen if you reload save games many times in a row.
Restarting the game and *then* laoding the saved game fixes all those issues.

1a. Ships that were en route when you saved the game may now have "set course" to the northernmost tile of the galaxy.

1b. Ships outside your area of influence (scouts, surveys, etc) may refuse to move, instead warn you that they are "outside your supply range". However you can't move them anymore, even trying to set course to your home planet or to any of your planets won't be accepted.
1c. The game may crash after loading a saved game (see next post for the lengthy debug.err file)

2. The interface is extremely sluggish. On several occasions, the game moves the camera or opens screens on you. However this happens with quite some delay, and when you are possibly in the middle of moving a fleet or setting your espionage level etc.
Most of these annoyances root in the fun fact that the game seems to move the camera long after an event has taken started or taken place.
Before reading this, please keep in mind that I have all auto-camera resets *off*.
Sluggish behavior I have seen so far can happen when ...

2a. A research project finishes. Suggestion: Include an option to turn that stupid robot movie off. When research finishes, drop an icon down the right side of the screen instead. This would be similar to what is currently done with social projects, military projects and other events would be way less obtrusive.
2b. After placing a planetary improvement, the focus moves on to the next empty tile and the cursor will reset to the list of planetary improvements. However this reset happens with a *considerable* delay. Personally, I have already moved the cursor back onto the planetary tile map before it resets the mouse cursor on me. The game never seems to select the tile I want to build upon so this is very annoying.
Suggestion: Reset the cursor instantly, *after* the player has placed a planetary improvement, or don't do this at all.
2c. Erratic behavior when enemy ships are present, ship combat completes, friendly ships complete their move, etc.
This is also very annoying for me. For some reason, the game seems to be keen on reseting the camera to that battle thats playing out somewhere over and over. I have realized a battle is going on. I want to move the camera away to do something else while the *quick* battle is playing out over 2 seconds. By the way, quick battles should really only move the camera and then last half a second or so, not 5 seconds. I could select instant battles but that doesn't move the camera at all and I want to get a quick alert at least.
When enemy ships move into my territory the camera keeps resetting over and over (possibly because they keep moving?). Maybe put something in so there is really only 1 camera auto-move per enemy ship? And possibly be able to turn camera-move off for enemy ships?

3. In campaigns, having allies really can suck. They do like to place spies on my planets. Sometimes you have 3 or more allies. Which means you can get 3 spies every 3 turns or so. Removing those is a total annoyance. While I am fighting the dread lords my allies happily cripple my industrial planets and research centers. Just because I am ahead in research or whatever? The downside here is that I can't choose my allies, I am stuck with them, I can't conquer them to get some peace. Suggestion: Make it so that allies can't use spies on each other in campaign games, except in that one Dark Avatar campaign where you are spying on the Korath.

Locked Post

Advanced Search

Watch this post

Do not email me updates for this post Email me updates for this post