rec.autos.simulators

Well, sorry for not seeing the humor, but I put a couple of hundreds
of Euros into my machine simply because GTR is a *** bug parade on
any 98SE / ME system, so for for me it's no laughing matter, esp. when
they (whoever "they" is, but I am quite certain that *nobody* tested
GTR on an ME / 98 SE system online for longer than five minutes) state
right on the fscking box that 98SE / ME is a RECOMMENDED operating
system alongside those other new fancy MS stuff.

Cheers, uwe

PS: Can somebody confirm / deny that any of the most obvious bugs
related to 98se / ME have been fixed by any of the patches? I had to
"upgrade" to XP, obviously 8-P

--
GPG Fingerprint:  2E 13 20 22 9A 3F 63 7F  67 6F E9 B1 A8 36 A4 61

Actually, due to lack of official DirectX support, Win98 support is being
removed from the international release. There's just some things that
couldn't be guaranteed with an unsupported OS as the online and lobby code
was advanced.

It works fine in Win ME though, so I'm not sure what the showstopper is
there that was referred to. But the long and short of it is that any gamer
knows that for solid OS support and network code, the latest Ms OS is the
way to go.

SimBin Devs.

Win ME is a show stopping bug itself :)

I guess the German box claiming that both 98SE and ME are considered
recommended operating systems by GTR will become a collector's item
then pretty quickly 8-P

Funny nobody saw the necessity to check into this before the title
went gold (in Germany at least).

Maybe the international publisher (Atari?) should consider putting
this statement on the box ;-)

Show-stopping bugs I remember off the top of my head:

- GTR crashes when selecting the direct-connect multiplayer screen
  (CTD)

- GUI / lobby / garage gui buttons will refuse to work after 10-20
  minutes of online play (I admit this is the nastiest and hardest to
  track of them all as it's not reproducible *all* of the time)

Sorry if I come across a bit pee'd off, and meanwhile I've upgraded to
xp because the company I work for allows usage of an xp pro home
office license, but really I do not understand how those bugs could
have slipped through even alpha testing. Please disregard this message
if the bugs have been fixed by the 1.2.3 release, but I saw nothing in
the readme of that sort.

OTOH it's good to see that GTR enjoys continued support by the SimBin
team, even in this viper pit that is RAS ;-)

All the best,

uwe

--
GPG Fingerprint:  2E 13 20 22 9A 3F 63 7F  67 6F E9 B1 A8 36 A4 61

Hi Uwe

We have no reports on the forum or bug list of Direct-connect causing a CTD
with anything other than win98. The lobby disconnect and direct connect
issues were fixed in the last patch.
We did go through a complete test cycle with Win 98 including full
networking tests with an external testing company.
As I say, we have continually advanced the features and code since release,
and with Win 98 not being supported by its makers, it's impossible to
guarantee trouble free networking with it. We aren't including win98 support
in the international release even though it does work with the occasional
Win98 related hiccups.

SimBin

Hi Dev,

thanks for your reply and comments. I find the above statement quite
hard to believe, given the bug parade that was 1.0.0.0 or even 1.1.0.0
on 98SE, but then I have no idea how the external testing company
defines a "complete testing cycle": "installed" (check), "runs"
(check), "exits without Crash" (check) <approved ;->

I'll let the matter rest now (or I'll try to ;-), and thanks again for
commenting and explaining simbin's point of view on these issues here
in RAS.

I reported the "gui button bug" numerous times both to 10tacle and
several forums (both official and inoffical), but I never heard back
from anyone except 10tacle support (and that report was pretty much
automated).

I hope you understand the "itch to ***" on this topic after shelling
out several hundred euros just to get gtr to work reliably on a rig on
which it should have run flawlessly in the first place.

All the best,

uwe

--
GPG Fingerprint:  2E 13 20 22 9A 3F 63 7F  67 6F E9 B1 A8 36 A4 61