Antares

Holy smhmoley. Darn good idea about the halt/tow through fluxfield method. Too bad i'm practically to Polaris already taking the long way around. Still.. I think there is a flux in the area that would cut the trip short. Mmmm.

I have a Ti series Geforce card as well.. though I have only seen this flicker effect in UC. My other games don't show it.. ms flightsim gothic 2 tron 2 deus ex2 prince of persia sands of time I can tolerate the flicker for the most part... so far the only thing i've seen flicker are the jump gates. Bases, stations and such are perfectly fine. Of course, I do have the wacky cloud sky affects that have been discussed as of late. I like Nvidia, but these goofy problems are making me consider ATI when I decide to upgrade sometime down the line. UC works and it still look good, so I'll tolerate the goofy nvidia glitches for now. I'm now playing RC7, the fixes since release are coming along quite well!

I lost 2 hours of game time last night cuz I accidentally hit the windows key while trying to hit ALT-G. I screamed, shut down the computer and went to bed. I'll just have to redo it again tonight

I have to admit.. i'm rather boring. I fly my BC MK3 loaded up with ATS missiles (having 50 in the hold is plenty). Between them and the main gun, the base becomes toast rather quick Also no need for the /i option. I should try SC's method though, sounds like a blast.

I mentioned this before.. but I took it a bit further. I upgraded RC1 to RC3 and my save games no longer worked. I initially restarted a career with RC3, but was in such a fun situation with RC1 that I wiped out my install, reinstalled, patched to RC1, and started playing my RC1 save game again. Out of curiosity, I backed up my game dir and repatched to RC3 to see if my savegames would work (again). They didn't. I reverted to RC1 yet again, and plan to stay there until the full patch is released. If the savegames don't work on the full patch, then so be it. I'll restart when the time comes. Just a word of warning to those upgrading to RC3 that have their hearts set on their savegame

Cool Thanks man. I'll check the book and site out!

Resnig pulled a nice one on me last night. I put all but two marines on search duty. The other two were in SC1 and SC2 respectively for Cargosweeping missions and such. Suddenly my ship was boarded by bad guys. Resnig in his glorious smartness decided to tell the marines to flee. Well, thats my impression anyway. Most of my marines somehow found their way into various shuttles. Only a few remained on search duty, greatly outnumbered by the enemy. I immediately reassigned the marines to search duty, leaned over to the resnig and slapped him in the back of the head. I should have sent him to the brig and park his rear end next to the prisoners.

So, I see I can buy/sell ODS (orbital defense stations) in Tradcom. So is there any way to actually deploy an ODS unit in orbit? In once instance, I took over an enemy station, blowing up their ODS in process. I wanted to put my own near the station to help protect the region while the station repaired. Is this implemented?

Possible RC3 related savegame problem (can't restore). Actually can't see any saves in the save list when try to restore and fails with resume (brings to empty load selection screen. According to a post in the forums, all I need are a SGD file and SGX file from the appropriate profile (e.g. profile0 save0). Is this still true for UC? Installed UC, upgraded to RC1. Played game until next update came out. Unzipped RC3 upgrade into UC game folder. Unable to see save games. Nothing else was done to the game. Does unzipping into the UC install folder wipe out anything in the save folder? I didn't notice any difference, nor did I see anything in the zip file that would indicate that. Uninstalled UC completely. Reapplied all patches on fresh install. Copied contents of SAVE folder back. Still no dice. Contents of Save DIR: (no other files besides...) player0.sg(0-9) player0.sgd Attempted creating a new career in profile 0. Created a save game. Exited game, restarted. Copied all old save games back, including SGD file, couldn't see my saves in the Restore list. Created new career in Profile 9. Both profile 0 and 9 files in the save folder. Start game.. can only see profile 9 saves. Profile 0 is empty. So I restarted the game. At least it gave me a reason to restart in campaign mode rather than roam. Now that I have a good grasp on the game Too bad I lost a number of days (in-game)playing time, a newly captured base, and a fully decked out BCMK3 (no artifacts of course). Waah! I think i'll go orbit Majora for a while and pretend i'm obiting Earth -Back to blowing aliens up.

Mmmm Beer. I tend to favor non-US beers. Mass produced US beers are just plain sodapop with hops added. As far as a fave, thats a tough call. My basic standby is Guiness, though I tend to look for obscure Belgian, German (and regional) beers at various distributors in my area. I often try to get something different.. I get bored with the same thing over and over again. Sometimes i'll pick up a Watchusett Ale or something else from their line. Watchusett Brewery is a small local brewery. Practically up the street from where I live. I avoid the Buds, Millers, Coors and such beers. Speaking of self-breweing. I hope to give it a shot this spring/summer. Should be fun. Anyone know an excellent homebrew recipe for me to try?!

Ya know, I have no idea what I got for the Zenstar. 1000EP? 1250EP? I forget. After patching up UC the other day I got lucky again! Parked the BCruiserMK3 at GalcomHQ. Hopped into the shuttle and made my way to Wraith. To make a long story short, it was a rather hectic ride. Lots of red bogeys on the way, but thankfully a lot of Ter/Mil and such ships took care of them. I just swept up Cargo pods. Ya know.. can't let them litter our beautiful environment. Arrived at Wraith, sold my gear. 12mil creds in the bank. I didn't even finish a single round trip! After that, a couple more trade runs netted me about 15 mil creds. Upgraded my BCruiser and began my trip towards more hostile waters. I'm in Majoris now.. plan to make my way in deeper, and hop over to Gammulan space once my crew gains some more experience.

When this happens.. I usually just shut off A/P, rotate the ship into the 'forward' direction, and resume. Yeah it looks strange, but I got the impression that it works as designed. Hyperjump engines are different than conventional engines, so my thought was that if you're leaving 'real' space, maybe it doesn't matter what direction you are facing Still gives me a feeling of 'running backwards' at full speed. Not very natural, but it can be done.

Wraith has 29% inflation still. Selling stuff like hull repair units or whatever between Galcom and Wraith can be profitable. Then again, I tried to do that and made over 12 million creds by the time I arrived at Wraith the FIRST time. Lots of good Cargo pods. Oh.. I was flying a Shuttlecraft from the Bcruiser MK3.. left that parked in Galcom. Nice haul! A few hours and my MK3 was geared up and ready to rip some bad guys to shreds.

Damn good game.. I couldn't sleep well last night as I kept dreaming of hyperjumps and blasting incoming bogeys. Pre-RC1 patch : painful. Post-RC1 patch : wonderful. Jumped out of my BCruiserMK3 in a MK1 Shuttle, headed to Wraith and found myself with 12million creds in goods to sell by the time I got there. Gotta love all them cargo pods! Great haul for a ship with no guns eh? Graphics(General): Quite impressive. Plenty of eye candy to keep me happy. Music: Improved, nice mix of Star Wars, 2001, and other scifi flavors. Less techno feel, which is good. Interface:Changes are welcome, still complex, but its more intuitive now. HUD looks great. Planets: I like, I like. I'm eager to see what hidden tidbits are in the game.

Earth looks like Earth to me! GalcomHQ is hovering over the Pacific ocean. Thats why it looks blue. I was confused myself when I first saw it. I then hyperjumped away from the planet, and 'Observed' the planet through Tacops and it looked fine to me. They must have one hell of a weather control network in place. No clouds! Oh BTW, for some odd reason, the planet Majoris in the Majoris system looks exactly like Earth. Either the mechanoids build a replica of Earth because they thought it looked cool, or someone put the wrong texture on the wrong planet. Ooops!

I sometimes use VNC at the office.. VNC is a real resource hog for such a small program. When checking up on some servers it can peg the CPU (hard on screen refreshes apparently). I've since switched over to NetOp (ya pay for it though). Much less CPU hog. Maybe VNC is strangling UC Server? VNC is a great little program, don't get me wrong. Just letting you know that its caused me resource probs in the past. Might be interesting to use perfmon and track how it affects the server.

Thanks Derek, appreciate all the efforts and getting a patch out so soon after release. I'll hold and wait for the patch.

Apologies if I posted in the wrong forum. I wrongly assumed that game bugs/problems/glitches should go in there. I guess its just for problems with individual computers rather than game related quirks. I'm going to try the Tradcom patch tonight.. i'm hoping it'll allow me to continue without restarting (cross fingers). Ya know Scarlek. You might have hit it on the head. I may have just been 'lucky' with my shots on that carrier. Sometimes I think I forget how this game works.. ship's systems are modelled to such precision that a lucky shot to the reactor can blow a beast of a ship up. About the AI and letting me tow. I thought as you did. The commander of that ship must be pretty smart.. play dead, repair as you get dragged back to home base, and let loose in a surprise attack. Boy was I surprised when a bunch of fighters got launched and I found myself suddenly in a fray with shields down. Still, the base knocked the fighters and killed my tractored prize before I could dock and take credit. BAH! The flashy textures isn't bad.. just slightly annoying. I have all my drivers and such up to snuff. I can get by with it. Maybe the latest nvidia drivers are a tad glithchy in that instance. I can easily hang out and try the next new patch.

I ran into a few possible bugs/problems. Wanted to report. If you need more info, please ask. -Majoris : Is the planet suppose to look like Earth? Same texture as Earth. A bit of a drag when trying to get away from Earth to find another planet that looks exactly like it. -Space Combat Balancing: It seems easier for my MK3 to knock out enemy ships, especially carriers, when compared to combat in BCMG. Main guns seem more powerful now. -When a carrier is disabled and being towed back to home base, are they suppose to be able to launch fighters to attack the base we're flying to? Its just odd that if the carrier has fighters, why didn't it launch them against me while I had shields down with a tractor on their hull? -Sometimes I see graphic glitches. e.g. Jump Gate textures appear to 'flash' as I approach them. I also saw a starstation do this once, but tends to happen frequently with gates. I have all the latest nvidia drivers/dx and all that. UC looks great, a few tweaks and we'll be ready to roll! I love the graphical improvements. Keep up the great work.

Ahah, makes sense. Guess I won't be charging to the nearest station with intruders onboard anymore. Hope I can get around this Tradcom CTD problem tonight. Otherwise i'm going to have to start over and hope it doesn't happen again.

I got my copy of UC yesterday as well.. preordered. I've been playing BCM Gold hardcore for the past few weeks. Even though I wanted to play UC, I was reluctant to ditch my commander in BCMG! Anyway, first impressions: -Graphics are GREAT:love the planets -Keyboard Command changes are more intuitive, but painful to UN-learn the old commands. -Hit a few bugs that may hose my game. E.g. I can no longer use TradCom apparently in any station. I get a CTD every time I'm running low on Radium, sooner or later i'm toast. -Had multiple CTD scenarios, forgot my notes at home so I can't report them now. I had zero problems with BCMG. -I docked at GALCOM with prisoners and intruders on board. After launching, I had NEGative Experience points. Eh? -Had problems deploying Mining Drones from shuttles on planets. I could do it fine in BCMG. Lost a shuttle while it was deploying, no idea why(crash into the ground?). Tonight i'll try to deploy manually (as myself). -I keep wanting to hear the BCMG music.. got use to it. ...more to come.

Some background.. I played bc3000ad a long while back, picked up BCM when it came out, but for various reasons (work and a strong addiction to another online game) I didn't dig in like I should have. Anyway, I picked up BCMGold less than a week ago at Gamestop (LAST ONE!).. mostly in anticipation of UC. I had a slightly rough start, but after updating drivers and tweaking, I was up and running. I did encounter a slowdown/stutter a couple of times, but that was around a base with a large number of enemies and even more missiles flying around. It was so slow in fact that I maybe got 1 or 2 FPS for a number of minutes until things settled down. The story: (Commander, BC MK3, Galcom Mil) Boy what a great start it was! I kicked off a Roam Campaign. I figure its easier for me to do roam and re-learn the game before attempting one of the scripted campaigns. Here's a quick rundown. I ran trades between Galcom and Wraith to pick up some cash and upgrade. The very first trade run, I ran across multiple cargo containers around Wraith. Bogies were being blasted by the locals. After selling what I had found, I had 3.5 MILLION credits! What a lucky haul. There was some high value gear in there. I then started running trades Galcom and Wraith. In a rather short span of time, all my systems were upgraded. I was ready to roll. I had a chunk of change left over, so I picked up a few mining drones and sent them off on their business. I then hauled one load of ore from the mining drones, geared the ship up with some spare parts, missiles, and grabbed equipment for my marines. My first major combat encounter was quite a haul. I was jumping for joy. Suddenly around jupiter I saw two Zenstar and a Aerosomething (a carrier class). I freaking forgot its name. Anyway, After hyperspacing in, one Zenstar was already dead. I set my FATAL and upon arrival, missiles were flying. Instantly the remaining Zenstar was disabled. I was drooling in anticipation of hauling that sucker back to base. I then went head-on towards the carrier. He launched missiles, I hit ECM and swerved.. I came up close, and the opposing commander made a mistake. He turned and I had a clear shot at his broadside and gave me a chance to get on his six. At first I focused all of my firepower to blast his shield and armor down, but I took care from that point onward. I swear.. I thought I saw a body bounce off my bridgeviewer screen, and another guy float by frozen in a death scream on a toilet. Ok maybe that was my imagination. So.. I tuned my cannon's power down to a measly 10% and did short single bursts on the hull to make him give up. There it was. The SOS. I flew up from his six to just over his topside, popped on tractors, and pulled him to base. I launced a shuttle to haul in the Zenstar. Now that was a great start to a career. Ship geared up, a nice haul of enemy ships, and some 8 mil creds free and clear in the bank. Next I guess i'll prep and start exploring and hunting bad guys. By the way.. I was playing X2 The Threat before. Not bad mind you, killer graphics, but its just not the true space simulator like BCMG. X2 is on the shelf, BCMG is in my CD drive.