Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Minimum Reqs. We just pull it from out of somewhere

cliffski

Have you ever bought a game based upon the minimum reqs, and found out it doesn’t run? or it’s a slideshow? have you ever pheared the min reqs, but bought it anyway, and be surprised how well it runs?

Here is the inside track:

WE  (the devs) HAVE NO IDEA. WE MAKE IT UP.

Now obviously as an indie dev, I have less ability than Actiblizzard to tell you if the game will run on a 1 Gig RAM, 64 MB video card rig, because quite frankly, I don’t own one. I currently own 3 working PC’s, 1 Sony vaio laptop, 1 ultracheap dell netbook, and my main Mesh uber-dev PC.  That’s it.

Now when I release a game, I check it on all 3, then on my mates PC, my brothers PC, and a few other peoples PC’s. (other indie devs mainly). Then I take a rough guess, and we call it the min req. You might be thinking that this means it’s just me making it up, and that big publishers have 100 different PC’s and they can be scientific about it. I call bullshit.

Lets laughably assume there are only 10 different video cards on earth, and that there are only 5 different drivers for each of them. lets assume there are 5 different sizes of RAM, and 10 different hard disks, 10 different processors and 5 different flavours of windows. That gives us:
5 X 10 X 10 X 5 = 2,500 combinations. Now lets assume 10 types of soundcard and 10 different configurations of other software running (p2p clients, messenger clients, CD burning stuff, antivirus, firewalls, rootkits, viruses and other malware). Thats 250,000 setups even with these stupidly conservative estimates.

When people ask me if GSB will run on their PC (A very understandable question right now, as there is no demo), I give as honest an answer as I can, and here it is:

“My dev PC is a core 2 Duo 6600 2.40ghz with 2 gig of RAM running Vista on an 8800 GTS video card. The game runs silky smooth at 1920×1200 res with all options at Max. If you have a PC that in any way gets close to my spec, it’s a no brainer. The game also ‘runs’ on my sony vaio which has an intel onboard chip, but I have to disable the shaders for it to look right. It also runs well on lots of people’s PC’s with a lower spec, but if you have on-board video and a maximum screen res height of under 768 I really would wait for a demo”.

I’ve heard some surprisingly good things about GSB performance on MACs running emulators, even under WINE, and on very low-spec PCs, but I honestly have no real idea of min spec. So here, as a service to people on the fence considering the pre-order, if you have bought and played GSB, feel free to post your specs, and the games performance in the comments. (Note that its frame-locked to 60FPS so you won’t see it go faster. It uses any spare ‘headroom’ to do a few fancier effects if it has time)

120 thoughts on Minimum Reqs. We just pull it from out of somewhere

  1. I have the exact same problem as imprezzakc. Only one user on this PC so no one to switch to as in his case. Here’s the debug.

    30/12/2010 – 22::1 – D3DERR_INVALIDCALL
    30/12/2010 – 22::1 – CreateDevice
    30/12/2010 – 22::1 – D3DERR_INVALIDCALL
    30/12/2010 – 22::1 – CreateDevice failed again
    30/12/2010 – 22::1 – Failed to initialise 3D Engine:..\src\Game.cpp 321
    30/12/2010 – 22::2 – D3DERR_INVALIDCALL
    30/12/2010 – 22::2 – CreateDevice
    30/12/2010 – 22::2 – D3DERR_INVALIDCALL
    30/12/2010 – 22::2 – CreateDevice failed again
    30/12/2010 – 22::2 – Failed to initialise 3D Engine:..\src\Game.cpp 321
    30/12/2010 – 22::34 – D3DERR_INVALIDCALL
    30/12/2010 – 22::34 – CreateDevice
    30/12/2010 – 22::34 – D3DERR_INVALIDCALL
    30/12/2010 – 22::34 – CreateDevice failed again
    30/12/2010 – 22::34 – Failed to initialise 3D Engine:..\src\Game.cpp 321

  2. Hi,

    I too am getting the error “Failed to initialize 3D Engine:..\src\Game.cpp 321” when trying to start GSB.

    I updated the NVidia drivers and tried running in XP mode and as administrator.

    System is running Windows 7 Ultimate 32 Bit.

  3. is this a steam bought copy? roughly 1% of steam installs are suffering this, and if you delete this folder:

    \my documents\my games\gratuitous space battles

    Then re-run it, it should be fine.

  4. My copy is from Stardock / Impulse.
    Wiping that folder did the trick!

    Many thanks! Now I can get down to blowing up some spaceships :-)

  5. this is the error I am getting:
    25/1/2011 – 1::55 – D3DERR_OUTOFVIDEOMEMORY
    25/1/2011 – 1::55 – Error creating texture:[rt_transition]
    25/1/2011 – 1::56 – Assertion failure:filename:..\src\GUI_Transition.cpp,linenum:84,build:Full 1.47

  8. need help when I start the game the menus dont come up and when im cliking on the screen it comes up GSB not working and I have window vista home premium 1GB

    pleas need help want to play :P

  9. The game runs fine except when I try to go to the Fleet HQ menu it freezes and I have to CTRL/ALT/DEL and kill the game.

  10. i switched the screen from full screen to not and now whenever i try to play it, it just stays on the gsb title and i cant do anything. Please Help anyone??
    thx

  11. The CD KEY I was given when I purchased the game does not work when input into Online for use in Campaign/Online so neither works for me. Steam referred me to your support page, but that provides no help to this error. Please assist in this NOT WORKING CD KEY this is rather unacceptable.

  12. Ok I need some help here. I was trying to make a fleet setup that I could fight against to test later fleet setups, so I made a challenge and sent it to myself. I went to my online page then and went to click on the challenge so that I could play it, but I accidentally clicked block and now that challenge is deleted and I can’t send myself any more. I don’t see any way to unblock myself either. What do I do?

  13. After a long time, I decided to play GSB again, because I am interested in the Galactic Conquest add on. But after the game upgraded to a newer version, it stopped to work properly. When I start a battle, it seems that the game is missing some archives and crashes. Possible the upgrade process does not worked well. Can you help me? I run GSP on a Windows 7 64-bit, 4 Gb RAM, Phenon II X4 955 processor. Thanks in advance.

  14. I tried to run GSB earlier today, having already played it a while with the Conquest add-on. It won’t run, now. I tried restarting Steam, restarting Windows, even unintalling and re-installing GSB, and then even uninstalling and re-installing Steam. It still won’t run. It freezes on the startup screen and never gives me the menu bar at the bottom.

    I poked around and found the errors text file and saw something that makes me wonder…

    14/5/2011 – 22::18 – Module Type not found ->cruiser AI control module:..\src\SIM_ShipModuleType.cpp 272

    As far as I know, there’s no such module in the game, is there? Why’s it looking for something that doesn’t exist? If it’s looking for it because it thinks this item exists on a ship design that it’s trying to load, perhaps deleting that ship design would solve the problem? … how do I delete a ship design? I looked for that, too, but can’t find any sort of design save file anywhere…

    Help?

  15. I finally found the location of the saved ship designs. I deleted all that I found there, and the game was able to boot normally. Total wierdness. Anyway, the game runs, again, so … problem solved?

  16. Runs (collectors edition) smooth on ion based atx du0 1.6, 2 gig ram atx pc. not steam version .. like ooooh

  17. Nice game, like how you can zoom in and out, but it doesn’t zoom out far enough (or are you working on that?). I don’t like how I can’t see the entire battle field. You could make some super zoom-out view which is so small that you only see explosions of big ships, and little missile hits from the more powerful missiles now and then. Also those fighter repair bays suck. Dude they are useless and don’t extend the life at all hardly if ever. I never see the fighters return they all just kamikaze, and the upgrade is pointless. What’s the point if the repair rate is the same and the fighters all die at the same rate? Also could you make advanced fighters, cuz they suck man. It’s also unrealistic that they’d all die during the game, and as if all the pilots are idiots. I don’t like that you can’t command ships to focus on certain ships either, or to retreat. Also, the speed arrow thing, it’s too sensitive, like if you accidentally don’t press on it exactly you end up shifting the screen, which is SOOOO annoying. Maybe you can increase the border when you move your arrow over the speed button so that if you don’t exactly click on it it clicks instead on the pop up temporary border.

    Also, could you add an extention device, a device that lets you add more stuff to a ship, and perhaps you could make ones particular to each ship, which reconfigures it a little so you can add more stuff to it, or that can change a square pod to a hex and vice versa.

    You better credit me for these ideas.

  18. Argh!

    GSB initially run perfectly until I loaded DLC content.

    Now GSB won’t run. Message: “ERROR: 3D Engine failed to initialise…/src/Game.cpp366.

    Where can I email debug data from GSB folder?

    Sysinfo:

    Win764x Home Premium Edition

    Please help!

    Thanks!

  19. This maybe off topic but I have seen a few babalon 5 as a player types on the net not sure but is that not available?

  20. The game wants to start. It blinks up with a black screen and switches back to the Desktop a few times (jittering).Then i get the following error dialog: “Failed to initialise 3d engine: \src\Game.cpp 336”.

    Win 7 x64 Home Premium
    Running on 1366×768

    Here is my Debug log:

    22/12/2011 – 22::50 – D3DERR_INVALIDCALL
    22/12/2011 – 22::50 – CreateDevice
    22/12/2011 – 22::50 – D3DERR_INVALIDCALL
    22/12/2011 – 22::50 – CreateDevice failed again
    22/12/2011 – 22::50 – Failed to initialise 3D Engine:..\src\Game.cpp 336

    Thanks alot to you.

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