Still, doesn’t matter what forum you go to there’s always one jackass who knows he is right, you’re all wrong, he’s got a bit of paper says he knows more than your gramma and, hey, guess what, Civ4 does crash.

Get over it.

fwiw, mine scraps out after about 40 minutes playing pushes the mobo temp up to 58C, alarms go off, lights flash, PC shuts down. Can play other games, SWG, BF2, HalfLife, Doom, for literally days and nothing like that happens. It’s not a tried and tested process but I think it does point to Civ4 doing something unexpected, ‘specially as my machines are well above their recommended spec.

I know, I know. Cheap shot. Sorry.

- PCs are impossible to support robustly. TRUE. The reason is that given a near infinite number of combinations of drivers, patches, hot fixes, security updates, and hardware, it is literally impossible for any developer to guarantee that their software will run on anything but the handful of machines in their office.

- It is the developer’s fault if it crashes. SOMEWHAT. The developer (and publisher) must make choices and decisions designed to simplify the play experience for the user. Some developers decide to go cutting edge — you can argue (and I would agree) that by doing so they have a higher probability of encountering Random Fucked Up Shit. Other developers are more modest and will run on any pretty much anything that boots, in exchange for not providing a more compelling experience to the hardcore players. This isn’t a “good” vs. “bad” situation, it’s just a set of choices made.

That said, some developers just suck and their games are slow and buggy even on their machines, but that’s neither here nor there.

- PC gaming is DOMED for these reasons. NO. PC gaming is DOMED for many reasons, and these are just some of them.

It is patently stupid to say that PC developers should just move to another platform if they can’t hack it, because that would effectively mean zero software for the PC. The platform’s success is largely due to its anarchy and openness, and with that comes pain. Should developers try to mitigate this? Of course. Many do, but not matter how hard you try, someone will have some piece of shit early gen Creative SB that had to be manually configured and doesn’t actually support hardware mixing even though it claims it does, etc. etc.

The people who disagree with me about interface, well, I think they’re wrong. Sure, we can always learn to work around the infirmities of a poor UI design. That there are workarounds doesn’t make the UI good. I’ll take the fact that the Civilopedia is being revised as acknowledgement that it doesn’t quite serve its intended purpose, yet. I look forward to seeing the revisions. I’m sure Civ IV will be a better game for them.

http://www.quartertothree.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=23531

It’s true that there are a myriad of issues that could have caused that crash that are arguably not within the control of the engineers that make the game. If this is the case, they should have narrowed the requirements on the box.

If they can’t actually test the game well enough to do this, then they should not engineer the game to require features of the OS or its various services that are buggy (uselessly shiny graphics, for example). Or, they should build the game on a platform that is easier to test for.

They picked the sandbox they are playing in. If they don’t have the resources to do it well, they can’t come crying back too me and say life is hard. I will tell them to piss off and go play xbox.

Obligatory xbox vs. pc story:

I played KOTOR on my xbox, and it was a fun game. My wife was interested in it, so I bought her KOTOR to play on her PC laptop. I carefully made sure that she had a beefy graphics card and all that, and it seemed fine.

We fire up the game, and in the character creation screen, all the heads and torsos and body parts are all disconnected.

It turns out this happens because ATI ships two different types of graphics cards that are nearly identical in hardware, but have different drivers. KOTOR works with the “consumer” cards but not the “professional” cards. Or some such nonsense.

Do I care that it is ATI that is screwing me here and not Bioware? Not really. They are both at fault as far as I am concerned. One thing I am sure of: no PC games.

And since you’re a software engineer, why’d you dodge my request for the methodology you used to determine that your Civ 4 crashes were being caused by Civ 4? I’m not in the field myself, but I do have a Bachelor’s Degree in C.S., so you can use jargon if you want.

To take just the most recent example, that’s twice now that you’ve implied that I don’t own a PC. I understand exactly where you got the idea. You read something I said, overgeneralized it in your head, and then treated your own fantasy as fact.

This is pretty much par for the course for every interaction I’ve had with you since our little contretemps six months ago. For someone who claims to make their living from words, you sure are sloppy with them.

But what do I know. I’m only a software engineer.

And at the end of that same day I would like my PC games reviewed by someone who is familiar with PC gaming, or who at the very least actually owns a PC. Critics need to be somewhat current with what they critique.