Cantata

My bad! In all my excitment over new tech toys, I forget myself sometimes... as well as important details. S'cuse the slipup, and thanks.

Has anyone looked into the new FX 6800 Ultra from nVidia yet? This card is amazing, and appears to be poised to shine up nVidia's tarnished reputation. I read the review on Tom's Hardware and he seemed impressed, and rightly so. It has amazing benchmark numbers at phenomenal resolutions, you should have a look-see. View the article here and see what I'm talking about. Of course, I can't afford one of these bad boys myself, but I can certainly dream and drool over it. If only I were independently wealthy...

A couple of comments on RC7: I notice the shuttle problem mentioned earlier, where a shuttle seems to wander aimlessly around after being given an order to tow, collect cargo, and sometimes even RTB. Sending them to a navigation point or moon, and then repeating the original order takes care of the problem most of the time. I was on Hadar9 goofing off until my drones filled up and decided to check out FP mode. When I exited the ship, my view kept skewing to the upper-left, and I couldn't seem to get it to stop. I use mouse controls in UC, no joystick at all. All other FP controls appeared to work correctly. [ 03-26-2004, 09:42 AM: Message edited by: Cantata ]

I play both BCMG and UC, at the same time. It seems you can never stop learning something new while playing, so play more!

Getting most artifacts earlier than the current time limit for them to spawn would seem to be a useless endeavor. Your RO has to have an AI of at least 75% to even start proper research on an artifact, and if it's the R.A.N.D.O.M. your after, the RO has to be at 100% AI to get anywhere at all. So what's the hurry? Unless you use playmod to get the artifacts AND give your crew 100% AI levels, you aren't gaining much, other than maybe the shield and reactor upgrades, which are not dependent on your crew's AI level to function properly anyway. ???

You need to keep a close eye on your flight engineers, however. When they go off duty, nobody assigns them to go back to on-duty status unless a fighter has to be recharged/repaired. This means they will spend a lot of time NOT gaining experience. And even with the FO at a high AI level, the engineers are not given orders to go back on-duty when FF gets to zero, at least not in my experience. I'm about 6 days into my current ROAM game(commanding BC-Mk 3, the WarHawk), have already upgraded all my systems to the highest level of standard items available, and have begun to collect artifacts, although my RO still needs 1% to reach 75% AI level. You can still upgrade to the T.A. Shield and K. Reactor without the RO researching first, so get those as soon as you can. Of course, you have to be nearing your fourth day in-game to even think about looking for artifacts, so leap that hurdle first. I try to find a nice quiet corner of the universe to park my ship while the mining drones work and I go off to the RW and play my other role(s). The crew can handle most situations adequately by this time, so I just leave them in charge and come back later to see how things are going. I take charge from time to time to make trading runs, fight enemy ships, capture a station or raid enemy bases on planet surfaces, whatever suits my fancy at the moment. Meanwhile, my crew gets smarter, and the mining drones make me richer... [ 03-25-2004, 05:35 PM: Message edited by: Cantata ]

Bah! Just buy enough minerals to leave the ship running at full power for several days and you don't have to worry about it. If you get all your upgrades installed, your mineral stores go much further... I leave my BCM/G ROAM campaign running for days on end, literally, putting in a couple of hours here and there, but leaving my crew to run things for the most part. Set the auto-pilot and give SAD orders, and I'm off... NOTE: I can still get something done this way without making the girlfriend angry. When she gets mad she threatens to dump me for Resnig. I just turn the monitor off and dutifully follow her... she is none the wiser, heh heh. [ 03-25-2004, 05:35 PM: Message edited by: Cantata ]

I like the BC-Mk3 and the Megaron for Carrier-class ships. I have a killer BC-Mk3 in my BCM/G ROAM campaign, and have both a Megaron and BC-Mk3 in ROAM campaigns running in UC, and I think I'm beginning to like the larger Megaron more. When upgraded, it's one bad mother-... SHUT YOUR MOUTH! I'm just talking 'bout Megaron! [ 03-24-2004, 10:42 AM: Message edited by: Cantata ]

OK, so I just need to be more carfeul where I place my wapoints. I have not been zooming into the terrain real close when setting waypoints, but that is a habit easily changed. Thanks for the tips!

Last night, while I was in the Tyrus2 system, I tried to deploy mining drones to moon-02. 3 of 4 shuttles made planetfall and deployed their drones, returning to my ship as per normal. However, after several minutes I noticed that my 2nd shuttle had not returned to the ship, so I monitored it for a few moments. The altitude indicator read -180,000 upon first inspection. The shuttle had the second "Deploy Drone" waypoint as it's target, but it was moving very slowly. When I went into TacOps to view the shuttle, I realized it was deep in the planet, and moving towards the second WP, but it would take it days to travel that far at normal speed. Giving it any command changed nothing about it's disposition underground, but it would respond to each change, and then continue its slow egress from underground. I suppose this has something to do with previously mentioned CALS use by the AI, and a possible miscalculation or some such, don't know for sure. [ 03-16-2004, 04:59 PM: Message edited by: Supreme Cmdr ]

First time poster, so I would like to say hello to everyone, and to SC, excellent work on UC, I have been spending far too many long nights since picking it up... I love it! I am also a BCMG fan and player, and have been skulking around the shadows of these forums for quite awhile. I would just like to add to SC's comment regarding incorrect placement of HUD elements, or rather inquire as to the progress regarding this issue. I run the game in 1280x1024 and see the alignment problems as relates to the Reactor level, Shield level, etc. The status bar is slightly above the title bar, causing some minor confusion when quickly glancing at these indicators. Does this occur in particular resolutions, or is it one of those pesky "across-the-board" kind of occurences? I have a couple of screen-shots that display the problem if they would be of any help. Again, nice piece of work, SC... keep it up!