From: cfranz@iiic.ethz.ch (Christian Steffen Ove Franz)
Subject: Re: Pax Imperia Demo (playable)
Organization: Dept. Informatik, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, CH
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 16:21:19 GMT

In article <hise.722226976@vincent2.iastate.edu> hise@iastate.edu (Allan R Hise) writes:
>Is it just me or does this demo crash way too much.  I have not been
>able to play more than 10 minutes without it dying.  Kinda sucks, cuz
>I've never been able to get far in those 10 minutes.
>
>Spaceward ho! sure is easier, but Pax is cool - I like the tech stuff,
>but needs work on the interface...
>
>Allan
>hise@iastate.edu
>

I've looked into it yesterday for about five hours. It *is* way cool, even in
its alpha stage. It certainly has some serious bugs and I hope they will be
removed in the final release.

Maybe it's just my Mac or the debugging code inside, but with 40 stars, the
game just crawls. Sceen update is slow at best anyway and the interface seems
to belong to a NeXT or whatever - it's definitely not Mac-like.
Also the program has some serious bugs that are annoying at best, the
most obvious are the different cursors that don't change back when you
leave the window (try clicking on build and then click on the galaxy 
window and try to move a fleet).

OTOH PxImp has some very good innovative ideas, one of the best is the
Map navigator. Click into the galaxy map and keep the button pressed. A
miniature window showing the whole galaxy pops up where you can move the 
outline of the visrect to a specific position. I really like this and I 
wonder why nobody else has thought about it (I'd love this feature in games
like Warlords, Strategic Conquest or even theHo!).
 
So far I have been able to colonize one planet (after taking about two hours
to figure out how to do just that). For those of you who still havn't found
out how: Fly a transport to the desired planet, bring up the surface dialog,
click on the 'land' button, select the transport. The cursor changes to a 'land'
arrow. Click into the surface map and keep the mousebutton pressed until the
popup menu appears. There are three items to choose: Invade, Raid and Assault.
After selecting onen, a new dialog appears showing the planet, it's defenses,
and an approach indicator. Click somewhere into the dialog and keep the button
pressed. Once I managed to approach the planet all the way and I conquer the
it. On all other tries, for some reason the program aborted the attempt. So far I 
havn't figured out why.
Anyway, although this is all quite nice to look at and very interesting, it seems 
very cumbersome to me, especially if a planet isn't inhabited. A simple 'land-and-
begin-production' button should suffice IMHO.

Still, I will try not to judge the final version by it's alpha. It looks more
than promising to me and in contrast to the great Ho!, PxImp seems to be very
interesting when playing alone. Lets hope this will be true for the final.
And lets hope it will be *much* faster then the alpha.

Cheers,
Christian

BTW, PxImp didn't crash once on my Mac (cx). But then I disabled all inits
-- 
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Christian S. O. Franz                 |                   cfranz@iiic.ethz.ch
ETH Zuerich, Swizerland               |