Hi, I am the designer of Aurora. Someone drew my attention to this thread so I thought I would put in a quick post. I've glanced through and the two main issues seem to be resolution and install. I'll answer what I can generally and then answer a couple of posts specifically. Your best option though if you have problems is to post on the Aurora forum. There are a lot of experienced players and you will generally get an informed answer fairly quickly. Often within a few minutes. Also read the tutorial as that will help a lot.
http://aurora.pentarch.org/index.phpThe installation program I use was written by Microsoft and is the standard installer included with Visual Studio, so it shouldn't be doing anything strange to Windows. My only input to the installer is the list of program files, which comprises an exe, a database and some graphic files. Microsoft's installer decides which DLLs are included. Many of the DLLs in the installer will be out of date because I am using an old language, which is why the installer recommends keeping the newer version. If anyone deletes the latest version of a DLL in favour of an out of date one then I imagine there is a good chance they are going to have problems elsewhere in their system. If you think the way Microsoft asks the question about DLLs isn't clear, by all means contact them and complain. This isn't Aurora-specific though as I encounter the "Keep Latest DLL?" question in many install programs. For step 3, I am not sure why unzipping a specified file into a specified directory and answering yes to two questions would be overly tricky.
With regard to install issues on Vista and Windows7. I don't use those operating systems and I hope I won't be held responsible if Microsoft doesn't make it's operating systems more backwardly compatible. However, the common issues and solutions with those operating systems have been posted on the Aurora boards by very helpful members of the forum so I would recommend reading those.
Resolution issues: Aurora is a game I developed for my own use to aid me in writing fiction. I make it available for free for others to use if they wish to. This helps me because some of the game's best features have come from player suggestions and having a lot of players means any bugs are found and fixed very quickly. The players get a game for free and often their own ideas are included in the game, often going from idea to inclusion in a new release within a few hours. My own PC is a triple screen system and each monitor is 1900x1200. Part of the reason for getting this particular setup was so I could have a lot of Aurora screens open at once and also have the System Map and Galactic Maps on separate monitors. I have kept the resolution down to 1280x1024 for the last two years for the benefit of those players with smaller monitors, although I think even that is pushing it and a higher resolution would be better. However, there is just no way you are going to play this game on a laptop with a small screen. This isn't a commercial game so I don't try to cater for every resolution out there. I could spend weeks trying to get every screen with scrollbars or re-sizable but I have limited free time and I would rather be working on new features that I can use than something that would be no use to me.
This is a free game and no one is making anyone play so I am a little surprised by just how upset some people seem to get about this. I am not going to spend time 'defending' Aurora when I know that 95% of people won't like it and would never be persuaded to like it. The game is designed for myself and the small minority of people who want to play a 4x game with this level of detail and depth and are prepared to spend the significant amount of time required to learn it. However, if anyone has constructive and specific suggestions on how to improve the game then please post them in the suggestions thread. A lot of these suggestions go into each new version.
Anyone receiving the "3061 error from the DAO database: too few parameters, expecting 1" error or a lot of error 91s, either has mismatched versions of the database and program, which means they may not have followed the installation instructions exactly and should uninstall and re-install, or they have the decimal separator issue, in which case they need to change that in their regional setting. I know some people won't play because they refuse to spend a few seconds changing their regional settings before and after playing That is entirely up to them. It would be a lot of work to make the game compatible with the comma decimal separator and again this would be wasted effort from my own gameplaying perspective. It seems a little strange that people expect me to spend a lot of time modifying a free game to fit their system requirements but refuse to make a few mourse clicks of their own.
Sorry if this post is a little blunt in places but I don't think it will put off anyone who is keen on learning the game. I'll try and answer more specific posts within this thread but I probably won't be able to check it that often. As I mentioned at the start, please post any questions or issues on the Aurora forums. The Aurora community is an extremely friendly, mature and helpful group and the old hands always welcome new players.
Steve
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Topic: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games (Read 2765950 times)