Beta 2 Dev Journal

Published on June 14, 2005 By CariElf In GalCiv Journals

Like my teammates, I took some time to look back at what we've done since the last beta, and we have accomplished a lot. There are a ton of fixes, and a lot of screens. And the Gal Civ team is moved into the new office! It's beautiful, and very comfortable. We have a few technical difficulties created by having most of the equipment and people still at the old office, but we managed to get the beta up today anyway.

We particularly put a lot of effort into the Custom Race screen and the other setup screens. The custom race alone was like working on 6-7 screens: 5 tabs, the color picker window, and the save race dialog.

One of the cooler things that I worked on was making the interface minimize. When you click on the little button above the minimap, everything above the button bar hides, giving you a bigger view of the star map. Part of the work was already done for me because Joe had put in the code that makes just the button bar show up when fullscreen windows like the Planet Management screen is up, but I had to add in code to make the starmap bigger, and made the edges of the screen stretch so they weren't just hanging halfway up the screen.

We try to make sure that the interface is as useful as possible. I'm really excited about how Gal Civ can run at multiple resolutions and actually use the extra space, and the ability to minimize the interface goes along with that. If we have time we may even add things that only show up in the interface if the resolution is high enough. I'm really glad that we made the 3D engine. Direct3D is so much more flexible than DirectDraw, which is what we used for GalCiv/AP.

I'd like to invite the beta testers to come hang out in #galciv on irc.stardock.com. If you've never used IRC chat before, there's a built in client in Stardock Central. Just click on the chat tab, then settings and fill in your nick. After you've hit ok, click connect, and type /join #galciv in the entry field.

That's all for now. Have fun with the beta!

Comments

PJ_

on Jun 14, 2005

we may even add things that only show up in the interface if the resolution is high enough.

Just promise me you'll make for people with lower resolutions to make those things appear, too. i used an application once that had certain very useful interface elements dissapear if you started it in 800x600. you could go into the options and bring them back, but they dissapeared again the next time you started in 800x600.

AzColt62

on Jun 14, 2005

One problem. After install of BETA 2 the Mouse refuses to budge from the upper edge of teh screen. The cursor moves
left to right, and back, but not down to the game interface.

ScottTykoski

on Jun 15, 2005

AZ: Can you try switching to the hardware mouse and see if that fixes the issue? (you can set this in the C:\Program Files\Stardock\TotalGaming.net\GalCiv2\GCConfig\GCConfig.exe application)

Frogboy

on Jun 15, 2005

One thing to be aware of: 1024x768 is the minimum screen resolution for the game.

PJ_

on Jun 17, 2005

That's no problem, as long as 1600x900 isn't the minimum for the special rally point interface.

Frogboy

on Jun 20, 2005

haha. Everything should be available at 1024x768.

FuzzyMatrix

on Jun 27, 2005

Wouhou! [How come replying to "space is big" ended up here?...]

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