Quote:
Will said:
Ok, I was under the impression that the problem was people had DirectX 9.0b, and the game wanted 9.0c... ok, so the release dates for the two versions of the library are pretty distant, so it could be "old" in that sense... but 9.0b -> 9.0c was supposed to be a minor bugfix release, as evidenced by the internal version number going up by only two builds (i.e., compile all the fixes, "oops, there were a few typos", compile again, done). It wasn't something where there were only functions that required 9.0c.
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According to Graeme's link, "the" problem was people with 9.0c thinking they didn't need to upgrade to Firaxis's 9.0c (let's call it 9c'), and thus a problem with Microsoft's naming convention... or else, people with 9.0c being unable to upgrade to 9c' because the Direct X installer was broken.
I honestly don't believe that. First off, all this "the problem" crap implies that Civ IV had a single problem. Second, the game's graphics were only ~85% functional on my Radeon 9800 Pro, after the 1-month patch. Third, I had DX 9.0b, so I upgraded to Firaxis's 9.0c when prompted, and had major graphical corruption - and a host of other problems. Therefore, I conclude that while some earlier adopters were probably unable to play at all because Firaxis shipped a broken game with a broken DX 9c' installer, the game was
still broken
regardless of people's DX version, and a straight month of intense bug-fixing by a huge corporation - taking advantage of hundreds of thousands of unwilling reverse-salaried beta testers - was unable to remedy it.
In their defense, I heard of a major game once (forgot the name) that recursively deleted your entire harddrive when you uninstalled, if you had installed anywhere other than the default directory. Whereas Civ IV's uninstall went quite smoothly.
Re: Galactic Civilizations II impressions
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