Re: Master of Orion 2 Intro Cinematic

A video response to the Master of Orion 2 Intro Cinematic:



...and here the next MOO2 influenced generation, making fun of....hmmm what exactly?! ;)



Finally scored:

RAMDiskXP and 4X Comparison

There has been increased activity on Matthew's game blog in the recent weeks. You should check out his RamDiskXP guide. Furthermore he found a detailed 4X Comparison of Galactic Civilizations 2, Sword of the Stars and Space Empires V.

The Galactic Council

Blackscorn is a fresh member of our evergreen MOO2 online community (he joined this weekend). He made an interesting discovery on ebay last year and picked up this picture of the council room (click it to enlarge):




Blackscorn told me that some mom was selling it for her son who said he won it in 1996 as a prize at a game convention. It is signed by the creators/devs of MOO2 and dates back to 1996 (but it is still in a mint condition):



For now I can decipher the signatures of Jim Cowlishaw, Steve Barcia, Ronnie Gauny, Jim McIntyre, Kenneth Burd, Pat Owens, Kevin Albers, Shelly Hollen, Rob Corell and Russ Williams. I need a closer look for the other signatures. Is there anyone else out there with the same picture?

DOSBox 0.70

A new release of DOSBox was published a few weeks ago. Apparently, the new default settings of the dosbox.conf work quite nicely on new computers now. Lord Brazen proposes in this post the following fine tuning:

a) Change output from surface to overlay.
b) Change gus from true to false.
c) Change joysticktype from auto to none.
d) Change ipx from false to true. (for multiplayer games)

The other highlighted items were already my default settings. I don't have sufficient feedback yet, but I assume that you should adjust frameskip to 1 or 2 for old computers. Additionally, I am not sure how the auto core feature works for old computers. Feedback is appreciated.

I will update the DOSBox guide with the new dosbox.conf files in the next days.

Russian MOO2

Impressive! Grig de Griz found a way to implement cyrillic letters inside MOO2. He completed his russian translation of MOO2 (based on 1.31) a few weeks ago. Take a look:

For example, the Racestuf screen...


...and even the system names were translated!


Currently, the localization is still based on 1.31 but LordBrazen has already provided a modified 1.4patcher for the Russian 1.31. Probably, there might be a Russian 1.4 version pretty soon!

The current version can be downloaded here: http://www.mo3.fatal.ru/moo2tfiles.htm

There is also a MOO2 discussion forum on his site to discuss his mod and (forthcoming) MOO2 tools: http://www.mo3.fatal.ru/forum/forums.php?forum=19
(I have also added it to the sidebar.)

You should have no worries to install the files, they can coexist with the English 1.31/1.40 versions.

DOSbox Fine Tuning

LordBrazen posted some info regarding the new build DOSBox 0.66rc1 CVS on his blog. Additionally, he now recommends to use the setsound.exe (the MOO2 folder or CD should contain this executable) to configure the sound (instead of editing the DIG.INI). Though on my PC the sound is slightly choppy (especially during screen changes) with the proposed settings in the DOSbox guide. Shadowlord assumed in this forum post that this might be caused by the experimental auto cycle feature and frameskip. With his settings the sound seems better. Or is it just my imagination?

A Few Thoughts About 2006

First of all: Happy MOO Year!

Though in this post I want to look at 2006 once again:

Traffic
Our two MOO2 blogs, this one and lordbrazen.blogspot.com, finally achieved google page rank 3 in the last months of 2006:



I am hopeful that this achievement will even further increase our traffic in this year. Generally, I was already surprised about the traffic in 2006. I started to track this website in November 2005 with statcounter.com (see the counter in the sidebar) and visualized them with the so called ClustrMaps. In the last the few days I tried to animate these maps with the EasyGif Animator (shareware). Here is the result:



This is my first gif file. I would be very thankful, if anyone can propose a better tool which is able to compress the file without loss of too much quality.
Thanks to all visitors. There is far more traffic than I ever expected.

4X Turn Based Strategy
2006 was also the reincarnation of the Space Based 4X Turn Based Strategy genre. Who expected this after MOO3 was such a disappointment? Galactic Civilizations 2, Sword of the Stars and Space Empires V were released in 2006.

Galactic Civilizations 2 is surely a good game. But most of us MOO2 fans were disappointed that tactical combat was excluded. Additionally, a game without multiplayer is IMO boring after a few months. Besides the last point GalCiv2 is an ideal MOO2 successor for those MOO2 fans who preferred strategical combat (i.e., without ship design and battles). But who actually preferred that option? I guess less than one percent of us. There is some hope that tactical combat and multiplayer will be included in GalCiv3. There is even the possibility of an MP extension for GalCiv2 but I doubt that this will be happen.

More of us MP players were interested in Sword of the Stars (SOTS) since it includes tactical combat and MP. Several players considered themselves already as SOTS fanboys. But the demo was a disappointment. To put it mildly: The UI is at least controversial. These both posts on the quarter of three board lists a lot of good points: #262 and #267.

But the answer of the SOTS Dev Martin Cirulis was rather harsh: #290, actually the worst PR I can imagine. Most forum members were upset by his comment so it was no surprise at all that the host of the Quarter To Three forum, the freelancer Tom Chick, wrote a negative SOTS review.
Was that review biased because of this issue? I remember some guys in our community claimed that Tom Chick was spot on, but Martin Cirulis had his own version.

To sum it up: In the current state the game looks more like a riddle than a strategy game and because of the above mentioned quarrel I am afraid we won't see UI improvements in a forthcoming SOTS2.

Regarding Space Empires V: I have to admit that I have tested the demo just for a short while. Gusset wrote in our community forum that the tactical combat is restricted for singleplayer. AFAIK the Play by Web option is currently the most popular multiplayer mode and tactical combat won't make much sense there. There is also a TCP/IP mode but unfortunately it is still too bugged. But keep in mind that the publishers are well known for their support. I hope that Gusset, who has already tried some MP games, keeps us informed.

The year 2006 gave us three potential substitutes for our beloved MOO2. But my favorite is still MOO2 which has IMO the smartest UI and best balance between strategical and tactical elements. Actually, some reviewers called GalCiv2 the new MOO2 (and it had lots of good reviews). But when you look at the evaluations of the customers, you will see that MOO2 has still an edge. You may have noticed that I added some Amazon links recently (in this post and see also the bottom of the sidebar). Just scroll over them and the average customer review score will appear:



After 10 years MOO2 has still an amazing average of 5/5. GalCiv2 and Space Empires V have good but not overwhelming scores with 3.5/5, just slightly ahead of SOTS (3/5) and please let us forget MOO3.

Blog Upgrade
Additionally, I have upgraded my blog yesterday to the new Blogger (it merged with my google account now). Whatever that means exactly, you will have noticed that the old posts are now labeled. This tagging feature seems quite useful, for example try the labels:

DOSbox
Video
Battle Contest
10 years MOO2
Strategy
MOO2 formulae

Quite easy now to find posts that are related to a specific topic. I will probably add the labels to the sidebar soon.

Nevertheless, I am also a bit sceptical about this upgrade since there are some autoformats involved. Please inform me when you see any bugs after this upgrade.

Updated DOSbox Guide

I have updated the DOSbox Guide recently. I also added several screenshots to clarify a few issues.

Additionally, you can download my own dosbox.conf now. It works in combination with the default MOO2 directory: C:\MPS\ORION2

When you use this configuration you need just to read steps 1-4 and 8. The steps 5-7 explain the changes of my dosbox.conf file.

Master of Orion mobile

I have recently found two interesting posts:

Master of Orion on Pocket PC!!!

As long as I've owned a Pocket PC and known that there were emulators for it, I've longed for the day when I would be able to play Master of Orion on my Pocket PC (I discussed this a little bit here if you're interested).

Well, I just learned that you CAN play Master of Orion on your Pocket PC! Let me say that again: you can play Master of Orion on your Pocket PC!!! The miraculous piece of software that makes this possible is called PocketDOS.

What Is PocketDOS?
PocketDOS is a revolutionary program that allows you to run old DOS programs on your Pocket PC. According to the website, PocketDOS emulates a PC with an 80186 processor, 1 mb of RAM, VGA video, and "the standard support chips." There are a number of add-ons for this program, including some that make it possible to run Windows 3.1, emulate a 486, etc. [...]

and Master of Orion on Windows Mobile!!

So a while back (== a good few years!) I loved playing a certain PC game called Master of Orion (Remember it??). Now I came across the CD's for it the other day, and i was wondering if there was any way that I could get it to play on my phone (Orange SPV M5000 - basically the imate JasJar) - the phone runs Winsows Mobile 5 and I was thinking there has to be some way to get those old DOS games to run on it. [...]