I'll give it back to you in your own words:
never-ending stream of errors or interrupts
Actually, if you look, that's j.h, not me.
If it ends, it isn't a campaign killer.
If that's how you want to define your terms, that's fine, but something that throws up dozens of dialogs every time increment without preventing me from continuing on meets my definition of "campaign killer".
On another note, how, precisely, does "more NPRs" equate to /0 or overflow errors? Have you ever had either?
Yes.
Do you know what typically causes them?
Generally, they are areas where upping the difficulty mod leads to overflows. Steve has fixed some, but not all of these, over time. NPR wealth calculations that overflow 32-bit numbers are the first one that jump to mind, but anything that an NPR has lots more of that a standard player when you up the difficulty % and run for a few decades was a potential cause.
There's one potential source of /0 errors that would be affected by flooding the game with NPRs, but genning a system that causes a /0 error is rare enough that you can play for decades or centuries without encountering one.
Usually it's a few decades before I leave my home system. See my previous post where I talk about how issues are more frequent if you don't play the game the way Steve does.
Incidentally, /0 and overflow error are by and large trivialities, because there are a limited number of potential causes, most/all of which can be easily removed.
I think this is just another semantic difference between us; as I noted before, I think you're assuming that someone has the db password and knowledge of the database structure, both of which certainly go far beyond the abilities of your average game player. The fact that you and I can do these things due to having invested time in learning something about relational databases and the structure of the Aurora DB doesn't make them "trivial", anymore than hitting a baseball with a bit is trivial just because someone who played a lot in high school can do it easily.
The only time I've ever seen an error that was neither of those and that didn't go away if I clicked through it was due to a faulty install. I can't recall ever seeing errors related to NPRs buggering up their ship designs, and I've never seen any related to commanders (unless it was so long ago and easily resolved that I've forgotten it). You don't need Designer Mode to fix most errors, by the by.
It sounds like the argument you're making is "since I don't have these problems except in situation A, Situation A is the only time these problems occur". I hope you see the mental bias and logical fallacy involved in such an argument.
Have you ever played EUIII!? (Rhetorical question, for the sake of my sanity I'm assuming you have, please don't answer.) It only throws up interrupts for random events, declarations of war, etc. You also have little or no control over when it interrupts.
I'm guessing you've never used the feature that's been built into each of the games with the Clausewitz engine (and some of the ones built on the previous engine, though I don't have a comprehensive list) where you can right-click on a popup and change whether it pops up with no pause, pops up with pause, or does not pop up. I've found it very helpful in all of the Clausewitz-engine games to control what auto-pauses and what doesn't. And, of course, no matter how much you speed up EU3, the ticks are of consistent size, which is not true in Aurora's case, which is the root cause of the behavior. All of those values get stored in the messagetypes_custom file, if memory serves.
Aurora will interrupt for damned near anything unless you've set an obscenely high minimum tick count so that it can only interrupt every five minutes or so. If you do that in combat, you bloody well deserve to be mauled.
I understand that you feel crossing a previously empty system with a 5-day increment only to have missiles at my hull because the interrupt fired at the end of the several-minute chunk (I think Steve programed the pulses to be increment/3600, min 5sec, but I'd have to go back and look) rather than when the sensor contact would have first occurred instead, I just do not agree.
Let me reiterate: Aurora is one of my favorite games. However, it's one of my favorite games *despite* the fact that my play style is fundamentally different from Steve's and, as a result, the way I play in his sandbox tends to lead to problems that he doesn't see and, therefore, doesn't fix. Some are nuisance (such as errors getting thrown after a few decades whenever I create a team of any type, which I've still never been able to determine the specific test case for) and some are bigger beasts that lead me to have to close 20 dialogs every time increment until I decide it's time to start a new campaign, instead. I mean, I'm still getting way more than what I pay for.... it's the best sci-fi sandbox game out there. But much like I think it's silly for someone to complain that Steve isn't creating the game *they* want to play, I think it's silly to act like anyone who is playing in the sandbox in a less-supported-way is doing it wrong.
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Topic: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games (Read 2848673 times)