FreeOrion

hello, i am new here

there were a few things i noticed within a couple hours playing
1: (this is a bug rather than a suggestion) i am running win7 64 bit and when i first ran the game it couldnt quite place itself as the front window and i couldnt click on it without some screen flickering followed by the taskbar popping up in front of the game, i solved this by setting the shortcut to run in compatibility mode for xp service pack 2 and ran it as an administrator (not quite sure if the admin part helped since i tried it before the compatibility mode but i usually do it anyway as a precaution for all games)
2: once i got into the game i browsed the options menu as usual and changed my preferences, i noticed that there was quite a lot on pixel spacing and coloring and file choosing for sounds, i assumed this was part of the open source idea, i was just curious if you had plans to simplify this menu for a more casual audience later on
3: i started a singleplayer game and immediately started an initial browse through the overlays menus and controls to get an idea of how the game works and something i almost instantly notice was the immense size and complexity of the technology menu, this is the most complicated tech web i have ever seen in a strategy game, i read the descriptions for about 10 before i got sick of it and got on with the game, there sure are plenty of interesting descriptions to read, but they dont really say if they have any effects other than allowing construction of certain buildings, i strongly believe that the combination and removal of quite a few of those technologies would make this menu much better, simpler, and easier to wrap ones head around
4: (another bug) on the 5th or 6th turn i had scouted out another system, i wanted to see what was inside of course, so i clicked on the star but during the loading sequence everything just stopped, frozen, but luckily i have plenty of experience with programs that are "not responding" and knew how to use the task manager , im sorry this isnt very descriptive but i just have no idea what could have caused this crash
i have a few more ideas of things that could be improved but i will think on those some more and refine my suggestions to be more useful

sorry for the extensive comments, i hope this was at least a bit helpful and not just wasted spam

Was that your first system containing an asteroid belt (or three)? If sometimes takes a few seconds to load the necessary image frames to animate the asteroids, but it hasn't necessarily crashed if it hangs while loading. How long did you wait before killing the process?

no i havent seen any asteroids yet...
i waited at least 20 seconds before ending it

Could you give it another 15 seconds? There might be 3 asteroid belts in the system you're looking at (which seems to make it take longer in my experience), and your system might be particularly slow at loading the images for some reason...

You can also run FreeOrion in a window, so it's a bit less awkward to switch out to kill the process when so inclined, and to avoid the taskbar issues.

Running in Administrator mode shouldn't be necessary.

hey, just tried it again to see if anything changed but it did the same thing except i waited longer this time, after about a minute it unfroze and was working fine again, and as a matter of fact there were a couple asteroid belts in it

oh, my computer shouldnt be slow, its very new and has high quality hardware, but for some reason almost everything runs slower than it should, i cant think of why it would since i have a quad core processor, a 9100 geforce and 6 gb of ram....

and one thing i noticed in fullscreen is that when i try to alt + tab the taskbar comes up as if it had worked but the game stays in front of anything i try to switch to

Asteroids cache for me in about a second, sometimes it's not even noticable.

I've noticed the flickering in fullscreen mode as well and have since then changed to windowed mode, which is more useful to me anyway. Could you try to not use xp compatibility mode and see if the lag remains?

yep lags still there in normal mode, but good news is i dont need that compatability for windowed mode :P

I wouldn't have expected XP compatibility mode to make any difference to the texture loading delay.

You might try updating your graphics drivers, though.

The fullscreen issues are, as far as I know, an issue related to the OGRE library that handles the windows and rendering stuff. It may not be something we can easily fix. This is similar to some of the keyboard and mouse input issues that also occur.

there are no more graphics drivers updates for me and i dont expect any new ones to ever be released....

Hmm. Well, maybe it's a Windows 64-bit issue then. As pd noted, the asteroids loading normally takes much less than a minute. On my two-year-old laptop with an onboard graphics chip, it sometimes takes a few seconds. I'm using 32-bit Vista, though.


No specific plans, although we probably will remove some of these options from the GUI eventually. For now it's useful to have them for tweaking to see what looks best, or to enable / disable incomplete features.

i have an onboard graphics card too, but i have been exploring more systems and a the ones with asteroid belts only take a couple seconds to load now, maybe once its loaded the first time it doesnt need to do as much to load the asteroids...

yea tweaking...not for me lol, but i see your point :P
what was your opinion on the research tree?

That's my experience as well. For some reason, it seems to be loading multiple copies of the asteroid images in cases where there is more than one asteroid belt in a system, but as long as you only look at systems with equal or fewer belts, there shouldn't be any additional loading time after the first (set of) asteroids are viewed during a game.


Yes, the tech tree is too big and complicated, particularly since most of it is actually empty and has no gameplay value right now. Redesigning all the game content is needs to be done eventually, but not very high priority for me personally, at least until more of the game systems are implemented. Consider the current tree as a test set of content for development purposes. Efforts are underway to make FreeOrion more playable with the currently implemented features, but it's not the top priority for development yet.

sounds good :P
i also dont really understand the +rp for techs and +pp for buildings/ships under the progress bar when your researching/building them...

That's the amount of RP or PP that are going towards researching or producing that tech or building/ship that turn. You enqueue as much as you want, and each item on the queue receive up to its per-turn limit, or up to whatever RP or PP you haven't yet allocated to something on the queue. The production and research systems go down the queues in order, giving each item up to its per-turn limit.