What is Dominions II?

[magnate]

Pickles said:
Dominion2 is a turn based 4x strategy game in a fantasy milieu with magic research replacing the usual technological research. It has a simple core system with massive emergent complexity & depth. The races are strongly characterised & draw from mythology & mythologised history rather than the usual fantasy stereotypes. While it is a very good game it is poor software.

Why is it poor software? Apart from the message interface, which needs improving, the software is easy to use and nice to look at. It also does what it says on the tin. What more do you want?

CC

[Pickles]

magnate said:

Why is it poor software? Apart from the message interface, which needs improving, the software is easy to use and nice to look at. It also does what it says on the tin. What more do you want?

CC

The whole message thing is very poor. The graphics are indifferent I do not find them nice to look at but they are not offensive. The layout is pretty clear & good in that respect. I am perfectly happy with them but they are also massively demanding on hardware - which for graphics of that quality makes it bad software.
The interface in general is not very good. It is not consistent & it can be hard to find units or provinces sometimes. Micro could probably be reduced too though is somewhat a game issue rather than an interface one.
Similary spell use in battles.

Pickles

[Gandalf Parker]

Pickles said:
The whole message thing is very poor. The graphics are indifferent I do not find them nice to look at but they are not offensive. The layout is pretty clear & good in that respect. I am perfectly happy with them but they are also massively demanding on hardware - which for graphics of that quality makes it bad software.
The interface in general is not very good. It is not consistent & it can be hard to find units or provinces sometimes. Micro could probably be reduced too though is somewhat a game issue rather than an interface one.
Similary spell use in battles.

Well the game is good.

As to things like graphics and interface its not too different than any game which runs on so many platforms.

And the devs are here so if you have specific suggestions feel free to mention them. If they arent quick fixes then it might wait for Dom3 or something like that. But thats OK. The patches tend to be pretty full. Im not sure that anything is in need of Johan spending full time so that only 1 major change is made in one patch. Id rather see all the little tweaks and surprises.

[Pickles]

Gandalf Parker said:

(snipped)

Well the game is good.

As to things like graphics and interface its not too different than any game which runs on so many platforms.

I do not know - I only play on one platform & it is far worse than any other interface from recent times. This is the problem really - I am far less a computer geek than most people here (I reserve my geekiness exclusively for games) & I am used to good windows interfaces. I would rather the game was produced slickly for one platform only (& penetrated the mass market) but this seems unlikely...

Gandalf Parker said:
And the devs are here so if you have specific suggestions feel free to mention them. If they arent quick fixes then it might wait for Dom3 or something like that. But thats OK. The patches tend to be pretty full. Im not sure that anything is in need of Johan spending full time so that only 1 major change is made in one patch. Id rather see all the little tweaks and surprises.

I think most of my issues are unpatchable eg why is the thing so resource intensive? Also everyone knows how poor the in game message system is both as a relay of ingame info & as a inter player messager.

It would be nice if dom3, if there is one, was rebuilt from the bottom up somewhat to address this sort of issue.

This is not really a criticism of the developers BTW. They are only 2 and do most of the truly important stuff well meanwhile the whole thing has an amateurish feel to it.

Pickles

[Gandalf Parker]

Pickles said:
I do not know - I only play on one platform & it is far worse than any other interface from recent times. This is the problem really - I am far less a computer geek than most people here (I reserve my geekiness exclusively for games) & I am used to good windows interfaces.

There are slick interfaces available for any system. Unfortunately if its for 4 different systems then its hard to find common ground. Not much good to have buttons doing things on one that cant be done on the others.

I would rather the game was produced slickly for one platform only (& penetrated the mass market) but this seems unlikely...

No not too likely. But isnt it nice that they compiled a Windows Version? (it was made on linux)

I think most of my issues are unpatchable eg why is the thing so resource intensive?

The same thing I think. Less resource intensive games on Windows let the windows dll's take care of alot of the overhead. That way each program isnt loading and using modules for common things like how to draw the screens or how to display fonts. But everything has its pros and cons. Not going that route allows it to make the best use of linux abilities for things like hosting games.

Also everyone knows how poor the in game message system is both as a relay of ingame info & as a inter player messager.

Thats kindof standard for a PbEM game. Its easier for people doing blitz games to use voip, or irc, or emails than to have the game put something like that into it. Thats kindof the other side of the resource thing.

This is not really a criticism of the developers BTW. They are only 2 and do most of the truly important stuff well meanwhile the whole thing has an amateurish feel to it.

Most of the best strategy games do. No game will cover everyones preferences. Arguers on the other side of "has an amateurish feel to it" might word it as "will not appeal to the xbox set"

Its definetly a niche market. Whether or not they would do better continuing up the path of "deep and well balanced strategy play" or do better trying to jump in the pool with all of the shelfware stuff is a debate between them and their publisher.

I dont want to seem too defensive. Its just that Ive already gotten used to the interface. Except for little fast improvements to make it easier for new players, I tend to be against alot of time spent on the UI. Id rather time was spent on the AI but its in the same boat as the UI. Not really prime target for the game.

[Sheap]

Gandalf Parker said:
There are slick interfaces available for any system. Unfortunately if its for 4 different systems then its hard to find common ground. Not much good to have buttons doing things on one that cant be done on the others.

No one is complaining that the window borders look funny. None of the UI issues that are being brought up have anything to do with what platform the game is running on. I could give a list but I don't want to turn this thread into a rant session

The same thing I think. Less resource intensive games on Windows let the windows dll's take care of alot of the overhead. That way each program isnt loading and using modules for common things like how to draw the screens or how to display fonts.

Whatever is going on to make Dom2 more resource intensive than usual doesn't have anything to do with module loading overhead. But whatever the reason, it hardly matters. Do I really need my fire darts to run at 60 FPS?

[Gandalf Parker]

Sheap said:

No one is complaining that the window borders look funny. None of the UI issues that are being brought up have anything to do with what platform the game is running on. I could give a list but I don't want to turn this thread into a rant session

Well he mentioned keypresses. I think that the keypresses used originally were the ones that would work standard across windows, mac, linux and solaris. As it is they are already sliding into ones which dont carry over well into all of the platforms which slows down getting patches and new demos done.

Whatever is going on to make Dom2 more resource intensive than usual doesn't have anything to do with module loading overhead. But whatever the reason, it hardly matters. Do I really need my fire darts to run at 60 FPS?

Its that Dominions does not load modules. They do everything themselves rather than use things already loaded such as screen-write API's or optimized for windows such as DirectX. Most FPS problems are graphic card problems. I think from not making best use of drivers for the cards.

[Chazar]

Pickles said:
...why is the thing so resource intensive?

I dont think it is: I am running it on a 600Mhz Athlon machine with a GeForce2MX under Windows, which is considered pretty old and unusable for contemporary games by most of my friends, yet I am comfortably running Dom2 with high-quality graphic settings (not highest, but high)...

I guess the problem lies that most systems are not equipped with sensible OpenGL drivers. The game was unplayable-slow on my 1,8GHz Intel Laptop with ATI Radeon graphics, until I installed some freeware-third-party-drivers which were mentioned in this forum somewhere. Now it runs smoothly under the highest settings under windows! I really just changed the driver...

Unfortunately, I didnt manage to install any suitable drivers under Linux to play Dom2, so I need to reboot all the time: I am doing my work with Linux and only use Windows on the Laptop for games, not that I am currently playing anything else than Dom2...this is really odd considering that the game was written under/for Linux!!!

[Alneyan]

I can concur with you Chazar: my old computer worked very well with Dominions II (I had virtually the same configuration, although it was a Duron 700mhz rather than a 600 mhz Athlon; your CPU was likely a tad bit quicker, but not by much), and my newer computer hated Dominions II with a passion until the drivers were seriously updated. My graphic card was also an ATI Radeon, so the problem seems to be here.

Now with adequate drivers the game runs very well, but there was no real problem with my previous configuration either (even with other programmes running in the background). So I would be more willing to put the blame on drivers and a lack of optimisation in this field rather than on Illwinter.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

Gandalf Parker said:As to things like graphics and interface its not too different than any game which runs on so many platforms.

Have you seen Unreal Tournament 2004? (Linux, Mac, and windows). Also thing Worldforge puts out. Anyway, in these openGL days, cross platform and cool graphics are no longer impossible. However, cool graphics takes lots, lots and lots of time, which a 2 x 0.5 man team does not have. And anyways, I would rather have more game play than graphics for something like this. E.g, one obvious thing that is missing is terrain, instead of the X x Y battlefield.

Don't get me wrong --- Dominions is one of the best closed-source games out there. A tremendous effort for two people --- I am very impressed