AI War Beta 3.800, "The Refinery," Released!

[Epsilon Plus]

I've played this beta and the last release, no sound in either. I've run the game without Winamp running, no results. This seems to be the culprit:

FMOD failed to initialize ... A call to a standard soundcard driver failed, which could possibly mean a bug in the driver or resources were missing or exhausted.
 
(Filename: ..\..\Runtime\Audio\AudioManager.cpp Line: 398)

I have an ASUS Xonar U1 USB and this isn't the first time it hasn't played well with something, although it IS the first time it hasn't played well in XP (getting sound in Slackware was... hit and miss). The rest of the log looks useless but I'll attach it anyways - if you need any more information, I'll let you know.

(worth noting: the Xonar U1 USB runs the same drivers as the PCI-E one, IIRC, so it's not entirely a case of a USB sound card being weird - hopefully)

[x4000]

I've played this beta and the last release, no sound in either. I've run the game without Winamp running, no results. This seems to be the culprit:

FMOD failed to initialize ... A call to a standard soundcard driver failed, which could possibly mean a bug in the driver or resources were missing or exhausted.
 
(Filename: ..\..\Runtime\Audio\AudioManager.cpp Line: 398)

I have an ASUS Xonar U1 USB and this isn't the first time it hasn't played well with something, although it IS the first time it hasn't played well in XP (getting sound in Slackware was... hit and miss). The rest of the log looks useless but I'll attach it anyways - if you need any more information, I'll let you know.

(worth noting: the Xonar U1 USB runs the same drivers as the PCI-E one, IIRC, so it's not entirely a case of a USB sound card being weird - hopefully)

Looks like an issue with your driver, then.  Unfortunately, all that sort of thing is well below the level of something we can fix in this engine -- we can't even interact with FMOD directly, it's all wrappered.  But in this case it's a driver that's probably at fault, as it says.

[Shardz]

I'm starting to get that assured feeling that this Unity version is going to leave the SlimDX version in the dust. This update really compliments the last large update nicely. The Message Log button = win. The Stats/Control windows and all that data to behold is amazing. This is exactly what I like about the flexibility of the programming we get - lots of options. You can always choose to ignore them if you like, but can also delve as deep as you wish. I don't care if the Options menu is 15 pages long...I love all that.

The background/starfield debate - Ahhh, yes. We will look back on this one in about a year and chuckle, I promise. I like the changes made very much...and I'm also a convert to the reasoning Chris offers with different environments exhibiting adverse characteristics. I did a little test with this by starting a new game and quickly exiting to the landing page. I did this 15 times in a row and got quite a vast array of diverse looking settings - one of those 15 was the 'Hubble Effect' (posted below). That mystery noise map that some people are seeing can be seen here at large. But...then I got to thinking...1/15 of the maps - that is a fair compromise between programmer and audience. So, I'm much happier about this in general now.

In a brand new game (v3.800 ---> Concentric map/20 planets/AI x2 6/6  both Random Easier Moderate / Shield Bearer bonus ship), it just feels solid over here. I'm not having much lag or jerking around, no audio artifacts or dropouts (albeit, a bit heavy on the low end - need to check my Xonar DX EQ settings), and basically a really smooth experience. The game exits as fast as normal for me and I'm not having any showstopper moments. All balance issues, tweaks, minor glitches aside...it's getting there quickly.

Now if I could just get Civ V to include half the options in this game and some robust diplomacy menus, I'd bump up my score on that game a couple notches.  

[x4000]

Awesome!

[Invelios]

So, am I the only one that has the music skip every 5 seconds in game? Maybe I should try a complete reinstall. I remember the very 1st in-game update gave me a weird error, but every update after that one worked perfectly so I thought is was just a little bug or something.

EDIT: Just started up the game again. Same map and everything. Both problems went away. The in-game music skipping is back to every 22 seconds or so and the game exited immediately. Must have been something else wrong with my computer I guess.

[x4000]

So, am I the only one that has the music skip every 5 seconds in game? Maybe I should try a complete reinstall. I remember the very 1st in-game update gave me a weird error, but every update after that one worked perfectly so I thought is was just a little bug or something.

EDIT: Just started up the game again. Same map and everything. Both problems went away. The in-game music skipping is back to every 22 seconds or so and the game exited immediately. Must have been something else wrong with my computer I guess.

Probably it was a temporary low-RAM situation.

[Lancefighter]

I like the pretty lines everything arranges itself in now..

[x4000]

Me too.  I think that a lot of people who like strategy games have at least mild OCD tendencies.   I know I do (with some things, and not with others).

[Epsilon Plus]

Looks like an issue with your driver, then.  Unfortunately, all that sort of thing is well below the level of something we can fix in this engine -- we can't even interact with FMOD directly, it's all wrappered.  But in this case it's a driver that's probably at fault, as it says.

Strange... I did have the most recent XP driver, but I did some uninstalls/reinstalls/rollbacks/voodoo dances to the current/same driver and it worked. Hooray, completely inexplicable success!

[x4000]

Looks like an issue with your driver, then.  Unfortunately, all that sort of thing is well below the level of something we can fix in this engine -- we can't even interact with FMOD directly, it's all wrappered.  But in this case it's a driver that's probably at fault, as it says.

Strange... I did have the most recent XP driver, but I did some uninstalls/reinstalls/rollbacks/voodoo dances to the current/same driver and it worked. Hooray, completely inexplicable success!

Lol.  I've had that exact same experience SO many times.  I used to be a sysadmin, and workstations would randomly get that.  Windows keeps a lot of "cache" copies of the drivers, and so sometimes a reinstall of the same one will cause a cache driver to be updated (and fixed if it had been corrupted).  That was REALLY common back in the Win9X days, and somewhat in the Win2000 days, but on WinVista/7 I hadn't seen that.  Of course, I'm not a sysadmin any longer, and haven't been for 7 years, so that doesn't help the current-ness of my knowledge.

[x4000]

New one already: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,7354.0.html

[keith.lamothe]

I'm starting to get that assured feeling that this Unity version is going to leave the SlimDX version in the dust. This update really compliments the last large update nicely. The Message Log button = win. The Stats/Control windows and all that data to behold is amazing. This is exactly what I like about the flexibility of the programming we get - lots of options. You can always choose to ignore them if you like, but can also delve as deep as you wish. I don't care if the Options menu is 15 pages long...I love all that.

Yea, one area where Unity makes things much easier is the GUI.  Unity itself only provides a relatively small set of primitives (and the window z-ordering is REALLY primitive) but we were able to build our own layer on top of that and produce pretty intense windows with code that makes sense.  In GDI+ or SlimDX it was much harder.  Let's just say that there's no way I would have done that reference tab in the old version