ugh sick of dark avatar

oh ic, your using windows vista.

Yeah, Vista is trouble.

PC Gamer had an article on how to run XP and Vista on the same computer

you could always F disk and install xp! (thats what i would do)

Cry some more?

For a company that had "how vista is good for gameing" on the front page not long ago they could of made the game some what useable on it how long was the vista open beta's going for?.



When you pay for a game you expect that after 2-3 months you could maybe play it.

Until nVidia gets their driver situation resolved on Vista it's going to be really hard for us to do much to help you.

I'm much in the same boat and I designed the game.  As much as I hate finger pointing, it's really not our bug. Our game is pretty much a text book DirectX 9c game.

and thats that

Yea, "ME II" aka Vista is becoming quite the disappointment.

I think Microsoft should have waited until May to release Windows Vista. I mentioned this almost a year ago on PowerUser.TV that Vista really would need until May 2007 to get the driver difficulties set up.

We are working with nVidia on this stuff. I have a mega QUAD-SLI 7950GTX setup that I can't play games reliabily on Vista.  It's very discouraging.  The crashes we get are almost always (okay ALWAYS) inside the video driver itself.  nVidia is trying its best but the Vista drivers are really complicated apparently.

It's really quite a bummer to see users blaming us on this and saying how they won't ever buy a product of ours again. I am not sure what they would have us do. 

Vista is good for gaming. But the nVidia drivers are not.

And tell me, how long do you think the Vista open beta was?  Vista wasn't even usable in Beta until October of 2006 -- 3 months before it shipped and the nVidia drivers weren't capable of running most games we had in our test bed until after it shipped.

You should be talking to nVidia.

Clearly the game works. Runs on Vista fine on ATI drivers. Runs on XP. Runs on 2000. Runs on ME. Runs on Windows 98. 

There isn't a if(VideoCard == nVIDIA && OS == VISTA)Crash() line for us to fix.

Perhaps Vista is just another skip over operating system like windows millenium.

Perhaps Nvidia are just waiting for the real operating system to be released? and who could blame them if they were??

Probably gamers like us. I had noticed that most of the people reporting spikey graphics were using Nvidia cards, including myself. That's where I generally place the brunt of the blame for my graphical glitches. Side note, I just installed the new patch that was attempting to resolve that issue, but failed. I'll get around to sending my debug and savegame file after I get back from work tonight.

I'm not angry at Stardock as such, mostly at myself for failing to check the "auto archive" option in SDC before patching to beta4. As it stands I'll have to shelve my use of DA for a while because my greatest joy was making custom ships, which is really hard to do when you get random light sabers and such jutting out of the hull. I suppose on the plus side it allows me to get back to tinkering with NWN1. And I never really believed that Vista would be good for anything, which is why I'm sooper-happy that I got my new computer *before* vendors started forcing down people's throats.

Good advice.  

Dont be getting pissed about something Stardock has no control over. Rant to nVidia and Microsoft, cause its their fault.

I seem to have pissed off the head dev first time ever for that one..

Anyway tbh ill take back the little rant at the end i was just very annoyed at the time of writing after having my game crash for the 10th time. I loved gal civ 2 on my older pc it took over from civilization as my favorite empire builder and seeming that iv played that serise from civ 1 thats saying something i also own gal civ 1 and its expansion pack so perhapes i was hasty assigning blame to a company i know well enough and who release a large number of patches and improvement's If you say its Nvidia ill take your word on it and i apologize.

Still only two games currently don't play on my pc Dark avatar and vampire the masquerade bloodlines i came to blame you because the dev team of bloodlines are no longer in business and so clearly incapable of releasing patches to fix the issue's.......its a weak bit of logic but i didn't have much more to go on.

Perhapes its time to buy an ati card

Believe me, I know your frustration. 

I mean, I have the source, trying to play the game and it'll LOCK hard on me on Vista with the nVidia drivers. It seems to happen randomly. Mouse pointer freezes and all.

I wish it was something in our code because then I could fix it.  Did I mention I have QUAD SLI Geforce 7950GTX's?  I have two GIGS of video RAM and can't play my own game on Vista.

How's that for irony?

Dont suppose i could have a lone of that pc for when quake war's comes out .

Well i guess at the end of the day its either buy an ati card wait some more for nvidia to sort its crap out or revert to xp which is the lest likely of the three i do quite like vista all said and done...

Anyway sorry for the rant

Aren't MS planning to discontinue support for XP soon? Nvidia had better get their thumb out.

That said, my own early issues with GalCiv/Vista seem to have mostly been resolved.

hehehe yea.

I don't wan't vista because of the recources it uses - that carn't be good?

I bought a nice Dell laptop for my wife with windows vista, and the first thing i tried to do was connect it to my network of 3 computers at home. I was amazed to discover there is no option to find other computers on the network!! but at least it lets her access the internet.

Wow - now that the pan/zoom feature was fixed, I have had zero problems running it under 32 Bit Vista, though I do have a different card (not a quad/SLI system but a GeForce 7600 GS).

I know there are more than a few Vista haters out there, but I have had the exact opposite experience so far (and this coming from a sys admin that managed close to 6 different operating systems including Unix and Linux). My rig running Vista is way more stable than a prior optimized XP.

But this is the price of non-stable non-console software development: busted drivers. I have to give major kudos to the folks at Stardock to have provided so much Vista support post release (esp. when Vista wasn't really in the cards when the original was being developed). Now if Nvidia could just get their asses in gear...

is it faster though?

Vista is in the same boat as win 95 and ME it seems. Win 3.1 was ok, 95 sucked, 98 was good and fairly stable, ME blew chunks, XP is stable for the most part but hoggish, and now Vista is even more hoggish but really sucks... Microsloth strikes again!

Wonder how well this game would run under linux...

I have Vista and XP pro duel boot and GC2 DA is the only game I have that craps out anymore. Even Supreme Commander runs well with all its glitz turned on and im on an outdated high end machine lol 64bit AMD 3200, 1g ram, nForce 3 mobo, SB Audigy 2 plat, and a 6800 w/ 128mb ram.

I know many of the problems on vista may be driver related but I don't think they all are, and I know on XP not many should be. A lot has to do with the software design. DA shouldn't consume double or triple the system resources of DL. The only other game I ever had this many problems with was Rome Total War.

Granted some chipsets/hardware combinations will screw things up, but a lot of time its the code base, some dumb bug that for one reason or another cannot be nailed down. I have been running nvidia hardware exclusively since the riva 128 and have never had a problem with it (till now?). All in all, if you stripped out all the DX code and used OpenGL etc. instead some of the game stoppers (especially on Vista) would probably disappear.

I really hope the memory issues can be fixed as I would hate to think I wasted my money on DA. I love the game, but so far DA is rather unplayable unlike DL

Frogboy,

For what it is worth, has any reliable source given DL/DA a thorough test on A Vista rig equipped and configured for DX10 (i.e. Nvidia 8800/8600)? Does it make a difference in the driver stability?

(BTW, not intended as a defense for not having stable Vista+DX9 drivers, just curiosity from someone who is currently building a rig and still considering OS version and G-card version.)

drrider

Am I just insanely lucky?
Or is it just Vista64 that’s the problem?

I’ve had zero problems with Galciv2 or DA and vista.
I’m running the game on a x2-4400 and a 8800GTX, 2 gigs of corsair ram and creative X-fi. (basically a recipe for disaster with Vista)
I’ve run trough numerous games over the past month and had zero crashes.

I’m currently using the 158.24 drivers and have also used 101.70 and 100.64(?), 97.64 drivers extensively. None of these drivers have given me serious problems, with the exception of the 101(?).30 drivers. Overal windows vista has been a big improvement over XP in matters of stability. I haven’t had a crash since the beginning of February. This might be because bits and pieces of various drivers haven’t cluttered up the system, but it’s been highly enjoyable so far.
I do miss a full screen command window. ( I have to run xcom-apoc in dosbox now. )

memory bug?
i've checked with my last game and it still used up 1.45G of memory, i have 1.5G
i'm using beta 4 1.6. is 1.45G of memory using normal?