no! i'd have to start playing on tiny maps!

to echo my own pervious words and many others', the mod looks utterly fantastic. saturn looks, well, like saturn! at least when the rings are roughtly correct in size.

i recall you saying at some point that you wanted to hear about bugs. well, i had a small one. one of the layers of clouds seemed to not load properly, and it appeared very pixelated over my planets. it was the 'thinner' upper layer of clouds that's translucent and moves faster.

of course i failed to document it even by taking a screen shot. the game was set on a huge galaxy: uncommon stars, common planets, average habitables. it could have simply been a memory/hardward issue, and it hasn't seemed to happen again. i may chose to only use this mod on smaller maps until i can afford an upgrade to my graphics card.

only other observations: the games take a lot longer to load, and my FPS sputters on me when i mouse around the map. certainly not a major complaint, and GC2 has always seemed to tax my system regardless.

Actually that's not a bug . It has nothing to do with the mod either actually. It's how GC2 draws the clouds on planets. It takes one cloud image and draws it, and takes a second, layers it over the first, and makes it more transparent. That's just how the clouds are drawn. You just notice it more with the new cloud textures.

hey logic!

Sorry for not posting quicker - traveling. Thanks for the info about the Raceconfig and Startypes files.

I can confirm 100% that race config willwork in the mods/data folder. However, if there are race files in the Mydocuments\galciv2\darkavatar such as customrace (i belive that's what its called - sorry I'm in a library right now. I know it doesn't end in .xml, but it really is an xml file) those files will over write the raceconfig in the mods\data folder. Essentially, from what I can tell, the game is trying to be "helpful" by remembering your last race picks, custom races, etc, in the MyDocuments directory, thus ignoring any changes you make in the mods\data\raceconfig.xml. Deleting these files will "reset" the game, forcing DA to look for raceconfig in the mods\data folder. From what I can tell, anytime you change the race config file, you need to clean out the My Documents\Galciv2\Dark avatar folder. Unfortunately, you lose your custom races everytime you do this.

I hope that isn't too confusing. I know Raceconfig will work in the mod directory, however, its not as easy as simply placing it there. Hopefully, when they release a patch, updating the raceconfig will be more elegant. I know a lot of people don't want to hack around thier directories for good reason too.

Will this mod work w/o the DA expansion?

No, i'm afraid the mod is made for Dark Avatar.

Thxs for the reply Logic.

This is a must-have for anyone with a decent graphic card. I experienced no slowdowns with my X800XL, and the planets are now a visual delight.

I am not sure though wether red stars actually radiate red light and etc. Maybe the effect is not very noticeable, at least it doesn't seem to have any effect on nearby ships.

And as someone said earlier, the new star background is really too colorful for my tastes. To be realistic, there should be color variation, but with very high luminosity, therefore every star should be pretty much white: some red-white, some blue-white, but not red-red or blue-blue. Stars of such low luminosity that they would actually glow red-red would be invisible from the distance the star background seems to be.

I know that with a powerful telescope you can create a very colorful image like this, but that's with a telescope and is not natural to the human eye.

I should have benched my latest game... Large galaxy with 11 opponents (9 major and 2 minor), and later in the game my frame rate took a pretty massive hit. I think part of it is because I do not have a dual-core processor and I max out all the cpu settings - and the extra texture swapping was too much. So I had to remove it temporarily... but it is odd. My VC has 512 Meg of RAM, and I think the game has a TOTAL of only that with all graphics totalled up (which I don't think would ever be fully running in texture memory), and the mod is 100 Meg. I don't program though, so maybe somsone can add some insight. Seems with 512 fast RAM the nicer graphics shouldn't affect it much it all? Note: I'm only using the them as replacement maps - not with the RAW's as a mod.

AMD FX-57
ATI Radeon X1900XTX
2 Gig RAM

They do, but stars only light their own planets. Ships are lit globally and are not affected by stars' light.

hey logic,
it rained today in san diego, and by our standards it was 'cold'. i realized that, now with your mod more than ever, my computer is doubling as a space heater.
cheers!
nik

Hehe. Between this and Croc's ships it's apparent I need a lot more power. I never thought anything GC related could bring my system to it's knees.

Sure do love this mod though.

Would this work with Dread Lords? I've been playing a game for the past week and just got a Tech victory, so I was hoping to install this and up the AI skill a few notches for my next game. I'll get to DA in a few months or so, once I get bored of the original and want to freshen things up more. But at this point is it possible to install this eye candy or do I have to wait for then?

I was going to try installing it, but all the questions about whether its compatible with DA and the fact it says DA all over the installer have made me nervous.

Thanks,
Peter

To make it work with DL you'd pretty much have to backport all the changes yourself into the DL files, since all the files are based on their DA versions (many of which are different from DL).

i just saw your reply to this -- the bug wasn't the second layer of clouds. i hadn't known that that's how they work, but i assumed it wasn't a bug. the bug seemed to be that the resolution of the second layer was pitiful - worse than in normal graphics. i looked like a checkers board. but maybe that is how it works.

but i had another question. i noticed that there are only 10 random planet skins for PQ-0 planets (named C00 - C09). will the map only make use of 10? if so, that kind of sucks (not that it's your doing). i'd really like to use some of the additional skins you made for random zero-quality planets, for more variety.

GC2 can only select from 10 images for the Class 0 planets at this time. I have requested that number be upgraded in the future, but there are no promises as to whether or not that will happen. As for now, there is no way to have more than 10.