Looking for testers - Galaxy Empire

**In this version it has been setup more like FL. F2 is go to, F3 is dock, j is jump (will be switched to dock later).

Once docked you can hit ‘t’ for trader, ‘e’ for equipment dealer or ‘w’ for walking on the surface. Since Earth has had the most work done on it, I would suggest jumping to Sol and docking with Earth. To relaunch, hit ‘d’ to go to the docking bay, then ‘L’ to launch (lowercase L). You can dock on the transparent planet in Spawn, but the clouds are completely messed up.

Hehe, I barely missed u when u logged in, I am in the middle of testing the NPC stuff so I was logging in and out.**

Yes, it has a full speed handler that eats up quite a few CPU cycles. Most of it is doing background tasks between frames. I am running it on an AMD 3000+ at the moment and it doesn’t significantly slow my system down at all. It is running in a tight loop is why it shows the high cpu usage. It does pass any unused messages to Windows every frame so the Windows message handler does have time to process stuff it is doing. It is similar to the idle tasks that show almost complete cpu usage.

**Ok, there should be a standard window pop up when you start it up. Then a second window will be created that the actual rendering is done in. The title of the second window is DB3D. Before that window shows it is loading the scripts.

What processor r u using?
How much video mem do u have?
How much regular mem do u have?
Are u using a laptop or a desktop computer?
What video card do u have?
Do you have the latest DX installed?
Can you hit the ESC key and exit the program?
Are you running Vista or XP?
If it’s Vista, r u the administrator?
Do you have any firewalls or virus checkers running?**

One thing I have noticed is Vista path naming, the (x86) in the file path. Try creating a new folder in drive named GE then install it there, or simply copy your current installation to that folder. Just remember to change the path in the autoupdater to point to the new folder. The (x86) in the ‘Program Files’ filename screws with my path routine and causes the game to lock up since it can’t find any data.

**For your desktop system, you have plenty of resources available to run the game. The current system I am using (since my dual core MB went kaput) is much less powerful than what you have. I am going to add a bunch of pop-up boxes to show if anything fails during startup. This way you can see without a log file of what isn’t initializing. The screenshot you posted is the base window for the game, it isn’t used, it is part of the MFC view classes. I create a custom window for rendering so it takes over the entire screen. If I used that window, it has alot of problems with cursor positioning, which I had in older DX programs I had written.

The laptop, not surprised it fails, it won’t work on my laptop either. Once I get the startup popup windows installed, maybe it will point out what is causing the crash. If that doesn’t work I will put the code on it and compile it in debug mode and see exactly what is causing the crash.

BTW, does Avira cause problems with FL?**

**A new version is online that includes full failure checking. It should now exit gracefully if anything during the startup fails. I also added a 1/2 second pause after the render window is created, this is so you can see that it is actually being created. It will show a failure if it isn’t created anyways.

I am still unable to get it to work on my laptop but then again, FL won’t run on it either. FL says I don’t have a 3D card installed even though I did a full check using the control panel’s DX app. It says I do and dxdiag works fine on the D3D Device test.

Thanks FF for letting me know about Avira.**

**@ Viper - don’t have any other ideas as to why it isn’t working. If you did an update in the last 12 hours you should have the version that has full error checking on everything from the startup till the 3D window appears. Are you able to hit ESC to exit the program, if not, click on the window of that screenshot you posted above, hit ALT then F then X, this should make it exit and save a log. Look thru it for any failures, ignore the ‘unknown commands’ entries, there will be quite a few of those (due to many scripting changes over the past year). If you simply want to send it to me just PM me on here and put the entire log in it.

@ Xarian - I saw where you had logged into the server, I only missed u by a couple of minutes last night. I was testing the NPC code and trying to get the friggin targetting reticles to show up on them. I did finally manage to get it working, turned out I had simply left out 1 single line of code for the nickname hash.

Hehehe, now it’s time to see if it will work on my old 1.8ghz pentium with an ATI 9200 on it…**

**The latest version is available, just the autoupdater is not. If you have the GE Autoupdater, just run it, it will update to the latest version. Im not at home right now so I can’t post a link atm…

It is also why I am updating the CMP editor also so it can be used for GE, I need a more complete mesh format.**

**Yes, I will be using a variation of it for GE.

Oh yeah, the pathing routines hate the (x86) in the Vista pathing, stick it in a root folder if possible…**