It's absolutely infuriating...

[vertical]

...how unstable this game is. The demo worked fine for me, and I threw down my $60 to buy the full version. And have not been able to complete a single battle since. This is by far the most unstable game I've ever had, and I play Battle of Britain. I have a four month old system and the game complains about it being too tough on my system (the game has given me the courtesy of an error 16 or 17, turn down the graphics settings once. the rest of the time it just CTDs). I've updated my drivers, deleted the dg.cfg and this does not help. I understand how much of a labor of love this is for the developers, and I really do thank them for putting this out there. It's not that I don't don't like the game, I love it. I just can't play it with a modern system. And I'm not trying to be mean spirited or derogatory, but that just means to me that the product was poorly executed/tested. I can play much more complex, more demanding games system wise without a problem. Yet I can't get through a minute of a Distant Guns battles without a crash. :mad:

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[Lempereur1]

You say the demo ran fine, but once you bought it it does not work...

Hmmmm.... Thats funny because they are identical.

Whay dont you post your customer id so I can get your account and give you a call to try and help you out?

[NormKoger]

vertical,

I have a suspicion that some of your issues will be solved tomorrow. A number of bugs have been fixed, and we may go ahead and post the first update to get those fixes out while we finish up on the hot list.

We are learning quite a bit from all the player input now that the game is running on a huge variety of systems. This will help us fine tune some of our system resource / performance tradeoffs. One thing we've learned that may help you in the short run: if you are experiencing seemingly random instabilities and you are running with your ocean surface animation on "full", you might want to slide that setting back to "medium". The memory throughput requirements for all that geometry are substantial, and seem to exceed the transfer capabilities of quite a few systems. When we get past the v1.0 bug-stompin' blues and can look forward to improvements, we plan to look into displacement shaders to replace the current frame based ocean surface geometry for users with advanced 3d hardware. The _appearance_ of the surface won't change, but the memory throughput requirements should decrease significantly.

[vertical]

Hey Jim, Norm,

Thanks for your replies. Sorry if I came off a bit harsh there, I can't expect the both of you to have the resources of a major game company. The flip side of that I suppose is I get quick customer support not from a nameless Joe, but the two chief developers. And customer service that offers to call you, at that.

Norm, you were right on with your assessment. I set the surface wave geometry (or something like that) to off and I've had no problems so far. Guess I'll how high I can crank it up without it crashing. Guess I'll have to see what the library has on the RJW tomorrow.

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[Jim Cobb]

Before going to the library, check out my article at the DG site here. It'll save you some bibliographical work.

[WallysWorld]

I haven't tried a campaign yet, but I have had no issues with the battles I have played. Other than really very minor things that I could complain about, I have thoroughly enjoyed the game.

Norm and Jim will fix whatever is wrong with the game. Some people have no problems, some people have many problems. These people have my sympathy, but to condemn the product as a whole is wrong. But you do have my sympathies.

[Lempereur1]

I also suggest reading Jim Cobb's article.