Ah. Yes, I get the “shimmering” - but I am running old Catalyst drivers (6.4 I think) which is lower than what they claim you need, so I figured I just needed to upgrade. Good to hear other people are seeing it.
Hey, Caesar IV ships with the .NET Framework 2.0 and Managed DirectX… and it’s using C# as its scenario scripting language! :D
Check out the *.cs files in the Data\Scenarios and Data\Scripts subdirectories in your demo installation folder. Now I’ll have to buy the game out of solidarity with my fellow C# users.
edit: …and send them a few books on proper C# usage. Looks like C++ programmers were at work here and brought their old preconceptions with them. Structs are not all-purpose data containers, they are so-called “value types” which differ from classes in their memory allocation semantics. You use static classes for const containers like sGameConstants and sWageConstants. And the horrible Hungarian notation just needs to go.
The demo seems to have trouble when installed to a non-default location. After the mandatory (why?) reboot, Windows tried to execute a file in the default installation location… which didn’t exist on my system since I had installed the demo to the D: partition. Didn’t seem to do anything other than leave some demo files in place, though. I’ve deleted them manually.
… To say the very least. I uninstalled this after only playing about 10 hours.
Does anyone know what Ceasar IV Online is supposed to be?
Hey all,
Tony Leier of Tilted Mill here. Glad to see the reaction to our Demo. I wanted to join in the chatting, so finally registered after lurking for so long (then I was lame about activating, thanks Tom). Brad sets a high bar for developer chatting, hopefully I’ll do as well (and hopefully I’ll have time in a month or so to get back to playing GalCiv 2.)
We really went for the ‘make an up to date sequel to Caesar 3’ direction, improving anything we could and trying to maintain the high level gameplay of Caesar 3 (and its sequels.) The 3d engine, ‘fetch’ distribution, and 3 social classes are some of the most notable new things. Feedback on the demo’s been good on that score so far, which is reassuring.
We put a lot of graphics settings in there. We started out with rather few specials, so it was pretty easy to just add a way to turn off or turn down stuff as we added effects to the engine. That gave us a really wide range of graphics/performance settings, which is great for a game you want to hang around for a while.
The ‘shimmering’ shadows sounds like a shadow buffer rounding thing. It’s probably in mid summer when the sun’s high. I inquire about it.
Yah, yah, it’s our first step with C#. We’re liking what it can do, and we’ve got a nice list of things to tighten up for our next project. I should probably get a book on it for myself, since my department does a lot of the scripting in it.
Welcome Tony. Any developer input is wonderful. If anyone gives you grief, I will happily give them a virtual bitch-slap.
Brad Wardell is OK and all, but we heap a little too much praise on him and Stardock here, so I think he is getting kind of a big head and needs to be taken down a notch.
They’re playing this one pretty close to the vest. Not sure anyone except the folks actively working on the game know.
Thanks for the heads up! I’m downloading now. Can’t wait!
The graphics on level 2 need tightening.
j/k
Good to see you here Tony. Caesar IV feels like an old friend, can’t wait to get a copy of it when it’s released (was that enough sucking up?).
The only thing that bothered me was the camera control. It was hard to zoom and rotate. Id end up getting the world to spin awkwardly while also changing the zoom or position at the same time.
Is there a way to rotate buildings before placing them? And a way to know which side needs to face a road?
Also, for the dev- I’m running the latest drivers on a 7800 GT. The “shimmering” definately looks worst at high noon when the shadows are covering the building geometry, causing a Z-sort issue.
The “R” key lets you rotate buildings.
I can tell (pretty much) which way the insulae, domae, and villas are supposed to face. Some of the other buildings are, too. But man, with the shrine, the bathhouse, and even a few of the farms and stuff, it’s tough to tell.
I think you drag while holding down the left-click to rotate. That’s going to be awful if there are non-square buildings.
Totally agreed that the camera controls seem quite hard to grapple with. I can’t find any way to unselect buildings without rotating the camera for example, unless I am very careful to stop moving the mouse while I right-click. I’m hoping this is customizable…
I had another problem. I created 2 goat pastures, then put a goat farm right next to it. When I click on the building, it says “no fields”. I demolished it and placed it at 3 different locations either directly next to the pasture or 1 square away, and it always said “no fields”.
I connected it to a road every time as well.
My wheat farm works fine, one square away from my two wheat fields.
Give the little dudes time. Sometimes it takes them a while to find their fields. I left the farms alone for a few minutes and they worked fine.
Troy
Really? I’ve noticed that as soon as I place a building, it immediately fills with workers.
I had the same problem with the sheep farms. They never found the farms and they were nearby. After a while (far longer then a few minutes), I destroyed the farm and put a new one down next to the old farm. After 2 minutes, the new sheep farmers started gathering wool.
Does anyone know if there are ranges on houses to businesses?
IE: How far will a pleb go from his home to work? How far will he go from his home to go shopping?
It’s not a matter of filling with workers, but of the workers working out the path to the field. I can’t precisely explain the mechanics but the message went away after waiting a little.
Troy
Tony,
Thanks for stopping by the QT3 forums. Just spent a few minutes with the game before heading off to work, and looks beautiful! The mechanics feel very similar to C3 (one of my all-time favorites), so I’ll definitely be picking this one up.
Quick question - does the maximum zoom out depend on the size of the city? I ask because one of my great frustrations with 3D RTS games (Dawn of War, I’m looking at you) is that they simply don’t allow you to zoom back far enough to get a clear sense of the overall picture. I’m getting the same sense from my few minutes in the C4 demo - it’s fine for a city the size of the demo, but with a larger city, it’ll be hard to pull back far enough to get an overall picture.
It’s a minor point, but one I hope that can be adjusted or modded. Otherwise, great job and looking forward to buying C4 when it arrives next month.
Cheers,
Chris