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[KaelGotDwarves]

"x2yzh9 has been ecstatic lately. He has read a Let's Play of Aurora recently."

Have you ever noticed that Let's Plays are far more interesting when the player has no idea what the hell he's doing?

I have. 

[Gabeux]

I'm way too sleepy but I want to keep going on the tutorial.

Btw Kael, make sure you post here once you've done it! haha
I want to see civvies minding their own business, it must be cool.

Reminds me a lot of Northstar..

[Magnnus]

I hope people realize that you can turn the over-protectiveness of Vista and Windows 7 off; its called UAC. For Windows 7 go to control panel, system and security, action center, change user account control settings; vista is a bit harder: you have go to run, type msconfig and enter, go to the tab all the way on the right, look for a tool called disable UAC in the list, and run that (Vista how to is from memory so it may be a bit off). This gets rid of all the pestering popups and confirmations and frees up program files.

[SteveW]

That's interesting and weird altogether.
The sad part is that you are right, you are doing it for yourself.

Dwarves can't stand to see potential, rough gems taking a course like that, and keeping quiet.

I still believe you should give the UI some work in the future, maybe using scrollbars or something.
Maybe someday you'll change your mind, after all..fixing that issue would be great, a game being able to run only is some resolutions, for me, sounds weird.
But you're right about the "love it or hate it" style anyway.

Let's hope everything improves for everyone, and that someday it'll be easily playable without workarounds.

It's perfectly playable now without workarounds if you meet the only system requirement, which is 1280x1024 . It isn't really that the game will only run in certain resolutions - just that it has a minimum resolution at which it is playable. There are scrollbars already on the F12 Task Group window because I spent time setting them up in response to a previous request of this nature in the past. That effort convinced me it was unworkable, mainly in terms of the effort required for all the other windows but also because the game would be incredibly clumsy. There are a lot of windows in Aurora and trying to manage them all on a desktop space that is not even large enough to display all of one window at once would be extremely hard work and frustrating. The only real option in terms of resolution is to make the windows smaller, which means more tabs and less information presented at once. That would be a huge amount of work so realistically it isn't going to happen.

Steve

[Areyar]

I'm enjoying it hugely, regardless of the cosmetic bugs and huge screens.

The complexity is only a small hurdle but when the wiki grows more complete this will no longer be an issue. I'm actually enjoying exploring the program and all its convoluted windows and options.

A bit more streamlining in the interface would be swell. For example being able to open windows or menus in context; ship info and/or orders by clicking a ship icon on the map. or any other object for that matter.

---
Eeks! The year is 2026 and my humans have just started exploring the jump points to the neighbourting stars. Our only armed ships are 3 missile destroyers for which we have yet to research the ordnance for.
A prime target for colonization was located at Prox.Centauri and a scout was parked in orbit around it. Active scanner on.
Imagine our horror when our scout was charged by 4 7kt aliens at 10,000+km/s and it being cut apart at 50000km by 5beams per contact!
ouch! my best ship is a third the mass, has 3 shortranged lasers and has a max speed of 1000km/s

I was only minding my own bussiness.
So I just finished researching asteroidmining. . . is it best to give a miner a cargohold? or can a dedicated freighter pick up the ores when the miner has left for another 'roid? Giving it geosurvey sensors is a bit expensive obviously... esp as a miner is expected to sit 'idle' at the same rock for long times on end.
I'm trying for a vanNeuman approach with small cheap ships. (non reproducing) rather than a Red Dwarf mega miner. Though both suggest interesting mechanics: 1)Shipyard ships/stations (stations would get a bonus on slipway size due to micrograv) 2)a huge mining ship might be able to tow it's roid.....maybe not, the low number of rocks suggest only the really huge ones are represented.

---
I'm having a blast reading Steve's fiction too. The Terran campaign was fun. The TN campaign I'm just getting into, but it is less engaging than the former.

I recently read a couple of Jack Campbell's lost fleet novels, the same chord is struck inside me by this simulation. 
a cool inspiration for shipdesign. Having an integrated fleet like that would require quite a bit of years of development in-game though. heh. a challenge!

[KaelGotDwarves]

How did you get through the jump points? I'm exploring them but doesn't seem to be doing anything...

Read the forums and tutorial about default to explore... etc. When I transit to the jump point the ships sit around doing nothing. "Unknown system" "No moves Available" "Transit Jump Point #1 (Unexplored)" under task group orders.

[Areyar]

How did you get through the jump points? I'm exploring them but doesn't seem to be doing anything...

Only ships with a jumpdrive can cross them, but first you have to locate the points by scanning surveypoints with a gravimetric sensor equiped ship.
If both these requirements are met, just order the ship to traverse the JP.

---
Were there installation instructions? I didn't see any, so I did not realise the game was actually in the update.archive and assumed the installer contained a batchfile that automatically did this for me. lazy, but heh.

[KaelGotDwarves]

Ah, found the points but need the jump engine. Silly me.

Does it mean anything if the screen keeps refocusing on random points of the system in between time?

Also, first irritating bug, every once in awhile the time passage will glitch and if I tell it to go 5 days or 30 days it'll move at a max of 1 day, or sometimes I'll click 1 day and it'll move max of 1 hour. This fixes itself after awhile.

[Aavak]

You know, it would be easy, given the time controls and readouts to set up a community game where each person plays for x many years. Or even, renaming various civil administrators as the various players and then maybe setting up the first player as the governor of the home-world, then playing until he dies or retires for whatever reason (though perhaps we should agree upon a minimum term as it would suck to get the game then your avatar retire the next year due to an accident or something) and if you play multiple times or have to adopt another avatar due to an early death/retirement you can rename them as offspring of your previous character

It would actually be pretty cool I think, this game seemed build for storytelling, and judging from what Steve said, was designed for it from the get-go. So this would lend itself amazingly to this sort of play style and after reading some of the AARs on Aurora forums I'm dying to get to writing up battle reports and such!

What does everyone think? (And yes, I may be repeating what someone else already said with the 'let's play' thing, I wasn't sure if that meant a community game or just documenting ones own play through... >.>)

At any rate, if we do decide to make a community game count me in! Also, there's the obvious possibility of a multilayer game, though that might be harder to run and at least one person would be excluded from play as they'd need to be the SM watching over everything and feeding out the game files to whoever needs to make a decision.

[Aavak]

Ah, found the points but need the jump engine. Silly me.

Does it mean anything if the screen keeps refocusing on random points of the system in between time?

Also, first irritating bug, every once in awhile the time passage will glitch and if I tell it to go 5 days or 30 days it'll move at a max of 1 day, or sometimes I'll click 1 day and it'll move max of 1 hour. This fixes itself after awhile.

After reading (and posting) on the Aurora forums another user was kind enough to take the time to write a very lengthy and in-depth explanation about why this is. Rather than repeat it I'll just post a link to their reply:

http://aurora.pentarch.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1839#p18189

[KaelGotDwarves]

Well then...

"Events" Ctrl+F3 is the most important window I've seen next to F2 and I completely forgot about it Thanks for that.

@Cernunnos: Let's Play can be anything, similar to community fortress where we name everything after each other while one person writes the story, or succession game where we take turns leading and passing save state around.

I'll probably start a community game but I still am scratching the surface.

[Aavak]

I think we all are It'll be one hell of a fun way to learn though!

[Magnnus]

A community or succession game sounds fantastic!

I'm glad to see the muck in this thread clearing up and some great things coming out.

Edit:
Whoa! I just got a message that the ice sheet on mars has melted thanks to my terraforming efforts, which reduced the planets reflectivity and caused it to jump another 4 degrees Celsius. Its great to see that my efforts are really paying off.

[AussieGuy]

This game looks pretty neato even tho it looks a bit clunky. I'll give it a whirl now and see how I do.

Yeah a community game sounds awesome, I'll be a part of it. (if I'm good a playing)   

[fenrif]

So after messing around with it im beginning to get the hang of what to do, i think...

I'd set my colony ships to ferry colonists to mars, then return and pick up more, though 50 trips would be enough. Turns out mars cant support that many people, so unrest started spreading. I assumed that i needed infrastructure to support more population, and tried to set the cargo ships to ferry that back and forth from earth to mars, but theyre hung up at earth. For some reason they cant load the infrastructure (dont think its cause i dont have any... a build order of 1000 just completed)

Also, mars doesnt seem to want to build anything itself, so I'm assuming they're either too lazy, or need to be terraformed.

The survey ships are doing allright though, loaded them up with some eological teams and sent them off into the solar system finding me some minerals