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[PTTG??]

Greetings again, Administrator...

Who else wants to play Startopia, the game that is kind of what you might get if you painted DF in chrome and moved the lever from "FULL AHEAD DETAIL" back six or seven notches closer to "MODERATELY ACCEPTABLE GRAPHICS"?

It came out in 2001 and pokes fun at a huge variety of trope from Star Wars, Aliens, Star Trek, and above all, Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (and a few others, such as Discworld via tangent). Check out the thread on the game for more info.

So, it has Multiplayer via GameSpy and Lan. Who else wants to give it a try? There's four player slots, and of course I'm in one of them.

We will, naturally, be using both the 1.01 and 1.01b patches.

[Jakkarra]

Damn straight i want to come.

[Pathos]

http://www.strategyplanet.com/startopia/modfiles.shtml

Is it possible to use mods in multiplayer?

[Aavak]

I tried to get this working over a LAN about 6 months ago. Try as we might we could not get it working at all... but if you do get this up and running I would certainly be interested!

[PTTG??]

So far I've got it working on LAN for a brief time, but eventually the other player drops out for some reason. We will have to experiment.

Let's plan a game for Sunday.

I don't know if multiplayer mods can be done consistently. Once we get the basics working.

[Servant Corps]

I hope to join, but I first got to get it installed. 

[forsaken1111]

While I am interested, I have little hope of actually getting this to work. I've tried several times over the last few years and its never worked right in multiplayer.

Seems like a game ripe for a lets play! thread though

[Koja]

My apologies for the slight necro. However, Startopia is a great game, and I feel bad for anyone that doesnt know this. For those still looking to meet up:

Write protect your autosaves. It helps protect against the multiplayer crash bug.

[Siquo]

Slight necro? Watch me!

So I just recently installed Startopia again (this happens once every two years or so), and was wondering if people are still interested in this?

[PTTG??]

Sure, I'd need to find the disk again, and in order to do multiplayer, I really suggest we use some kind of VPN. Anyone know a good one?

[Siquo]

Hamachi?

I just read something about a new one called "Evolve", that has a B12 group on it.

Also, there seem to be some crashing bugs with the multiplayer, I'm going to look into it when I'm home.

[Rift]

from a fansite referring to multiplayer:

We found Startopia crashed frequently on GameSpy, but its autosave features rescued it every time. Actually, there's a theory that did the rounds in the Startopia forums that the autosave feature itself may be the cause of the crashes. You can avoid the crashes (a little) by write protecting the autosave files found inside your Profile folder in the game folder.
But it DOES run beautifully in a LAN environment for us - but we have found that many multiplayer menus simply won't return you back to the game. We suspect its a DirectX9.0b issue.
So: only network the game on a LAN; don't try and save anything, DON'T hit Pause or even think of touching ESC while you're playing. Avoid Gamespy multiplayer like the plague - and you'll have hours of great fun. Don't worry - its sim management: you can leave it running in the background to answer the phone or go on holidays during a game.
Don't be too surprised if a game simply dies prematurely. Its a bugger.

interested in playing, no idea if we would have success though.

Also, there is a 1.02patch that adds shadows made by one of the developers much after the company died. its called 'unofficial' though.
Edit: the 1.02patch also stops it from forcing to have the cd in. I'm going to call that legit though, since its one of the original developers who made the patch, to a company that no longer exists.

[Siquo]

Also, there is a 1.02patch that adds shadows made by one of the developers much after the company died. its called 'unofficial' though.

Ooh, got link?

[Rift]

http://home.comcast.net/~tom_forsyth/startopia/startopia.html
[the devs little startopia page with the patch]

[PTTG??]

Now that's a really awesome engineer.