Aurora
Forgive me if I don't read through all 315 pages of this thread, but I'm having some issues getting Aurora to work. I can start up the game just fine, but it seems to generate regular errors during gameplay, and in March of my first year it crashed. Some of the errors seem minor, like simply pressing the button to generate random ship class names half a dozen times generating a database error, to others that are totally gamebreaking, like the above mentioned fatal crash.
As many errors as I'm seeing doing such casual things as trying to design ship and advancing time...the game is unplayable. I mean, sure....I can do things and sometimes go 5-10 minutes without seeing an error message, but if the game has so many bugs that simply generating random ship names causes database errors, I'm not going to invest weeks to learn to play it only to run into bigger bugs later on.
So...questions:
1) Are others having these problems as well? Is this just how it is, or is my experience unusual? I've glanced through the Aurora forums, and I occassionally see others commenting that they
"played a game for 60 years and then had to abandon it because it just stopped working." Is the game really in that bad condition, or is it more stable under certain versions of windows, or...what's the deal?
2) Are there other versions that are more stable? I'm using version 5.42. Is this an unstable version with known problems? Would I get more reliable gameplay using 5.4 or 4.91? If I used one of those versions instead, how much would I be missing out on?
3) Is it possible I'm installing it incorrectly? The install files seem very...poorly maintained. As is, I've installed by running the 4.91 executable, then unzipping the 5.4 files into the 4.91 install directory, then unzipping the 5.42 files in after that. From the directions spread out on each download, that appears to be the proper method. Is there something I've missed?