Time of Defiance – Release Notes for Client 4.663A © Copyright 2001-2004 Nicely Crafted Entertainment Ltd., all rights reserved. Welcome to Time of Defiance! Existing players should pay special attention to the release notes which detail changes between the last released version and this one. Please read this document carefully before trying this version of the client, as (amongst other things) it contains important notes on known compatibility issues. Contents 1. Release notes 2. Minimum specification 2.1. Operating system patches and notes 2.2. Performance issues 3. Known issues and compatibility notes 4. Note for firewall users 5. Bugs we’re aware of 6. How to report bugs and enhancements and newsgroup usage 7. Notes about the server 8. Installation notes 9. Note about content 10. Coming soon IMPORTANT DIRECTX INFORMATION: Time of Defiance REQUIRES at least DirectX 9.0 to be installed in order to run. If you do not have DirectX9 installed, please visit Microsoft’s Windows Update web site in order to download the correct version. For your convenience, if you have purchased a CD version of Time of Defiance the DirectX9.0b run-time installation program is in the “DirectX9” folder of the CD. 1. Release notes: Version 4.663: • Initial European Language release. New features: • Added a further upgrade to the Reinforced Turret. • New Nespan mining ship. • New third parties flying around the world including the Eighth House Land Registry. • Short-cut dialog next to “To:” box that shows list of people you’ve recently chatted to and allies/friends for quick access to chatting. Also has button to open the player finder. There have been many other minor changes in this build. NOTE ABOUT HARDWARE MOUSE POINTER: Time of Defiance uses a hardware mouse cursor for full-screen users. This is so that you get a smoother mouse move even with a slow frame-rate. We have tested this on a variety of graphics cards, but there may be driver/card combinations that have problems. We have added an “emergency fallback to old pointer stuff” to the launcher (Time of Defiance.exe, under “display settings”). You can check the “Use software mouse pointer” box to get the software pointer back. NOTE ABOUT THE GRAVITY WELLS: This release has Gravity Wells displayed around the floating islands. This is a side effect of the ancient Nespan quantum anti-gravity machines and shows the area around floating islands where gravity is at its lightest. If you suffer performance issues over this effect, it can be switched off using the Display settings of the launcher. NOTE ABOUT SKY AND QUANTUM CORE: Nespanona’s quantum core can be seen below islands as well as the high-level clouds above. You can disable this feature from the display settings on the Time of Defiance launcher application if you suffer display problems. NOTE ABOUT VOICE: Voice announcements of major events or important system messages can be enabled from the Audio settings of the launcher or by using the /enablevoice and /disablevoice commands. You will be advised if your system does not support voice. By default, Windows XP comes with just one voice – and it isn’t “perfect” for Time of Defiance. There are other voices available to download, and some Windows applications install other voices. Office XP, for example, installs a male and female voice that you can test and listen to via the Speech control panel. We would be interested if you find this a useful feature and if so, what we could do to improve it. Also, should you find a really good voice that you believe we should recommend, we’d be very interested to hear (pun intended) about it. Please note that not all Microsoft operating systems ship with speech as standard. You may require further software installed on your system in order to make speech work. If your control panel does not have a Speech panel, then it is not installed on your computer. Numeric keypad controls: In detail view, you can control the camera using the numeric keypad. With NUMLOCK on, you can side-step, yaw, roll, pitch and zoom the camera. 2. Minimum specification You must have at least 64MB RAM, a 500 MHz Pentium 3 (or 100% compatible) processor, a 3D AGP graphics card and DirectX 9.0 installed in order to run this application. Furthermore, your graphics card must be capable of doing 32 bit 800 x 600 displays. This product runs under Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP – but we recommend with Windows 2000 or Windows XP. We also recommend that you seriously consider installing any DirectX patches from Windows Update (www.microsoft.com/directx) and ensure your graphics card drivers are up to date. The vast majority of problems players encounter are related to drivers or DirectX not being up to date. SPECIAL NOTE FOR “Linksys” ROUTER USERS: A bug has been identified in the Linksys router firmware that can cause problems with DirectX9.0. A fixed version of the firmware is now available (version 1.44.2). If you have not already got this version, we recommend upgrading. 2.1 Operating system patches and notes If you are running Windows 2000, you should install Service Pack 4 prior to playing Time of Defiance. Windows XP users should install Service Pack 1. For all supported operating systems (Windows 98, ME, XP and Windows 2000) you should visit Windows Update and ensure that your machine is fully patched and up-to-date before running the client and that you have the latest AGP mini-port drivers for your motherboard (the latter of which is the most common reason for Time of Defiance failing to run on otherwise suitable machines). If you are using Windows XP, you should install XP Service Pack 1 and run Time of Defiance from an account with sufficient privileges to install and run it in. Limited user accounts may not be suitable. 2.2 Performance issues If your machine matches the minimum specification, you should have no problems running Time of Defiance. If you are having problems, though, there are some steps you can perform to improve performance: a. Ensure you have the latest official (signed) drivers for your card. We seriously recommend against running beta or leaked drivers. The majority of problems our players encounter turn out to be driver related. b. Ensure you have the latest official drivers for your motherboard chipset. c. Whilst the client is running, type “/cloudsoff” into the chat send box. d. If “c” solved your performance problem, quit Time of Defiance, re-run and click on the “Change Display Settings” from the launch screen. Turn detail levels down and clouds off. e. Ensure you are running at the lowest (800 x 600) screen resolution (click on “Change Display Settings” from the launch screen when you double-click on Time of Defiance.exe). f. If you run NetMeeting then be warned that it can interfere with the normal operation of DirectX, causing your hardware acceleration to fail. 3. Known issues and compatibility notes • Please ensure that you have the latest certified drivers for your video card before running Time of Defiance. Also, some motherboards may require updates to the BIOS and AGP-miniport drivers to ensure reliable operation. The FAQs on nVidia and ATI’s site are good for breaking down steps you should take to ensure that game software runs reliably. • Users of the ZoneAlarm personal firewall under Windows 2000 (any service pack) may experience application freezes on disconnecting and ultimately a STOP 0x00000076 error. This is a known and documented fault in ZoneAlarm (see www.zonealarm.com). If you are using Windows 2000 with ZoneAlarm and do not have this problem, please let us know along with the version of Windows 2000, DirectX and ZoneAlarm you have installed. • As shipped, this client will run in full-screen exclusive mode. If you prefer, you can run the application in a window on your desktop. You can do this by clicking on the “Change Display Settings” button from the Time of Defiance launcher. It is not recommended that you use any leaked, pre-release or beta drivers for your 3D video card when playing Time of Defiance, as these often affect the stability of your system and can lead to unexpected crashes, memory leaks and performance issues that are not related to problems in the Time of Defiance software. 4. Notes for firewall users Time of Defiance uses UDP, connecting to the port range 2000-2999 at the server end. Client users on standalone systems will be communicating from port 2302, but if you are on a network then you may find ports above 2302 being used. Corporate firewall users will need to ask their IT department to ensure that UDP communication from port 2302 to 2399 at the client side can connect to port 2000-2999 at our server’s address. 5. Issues that we know about None at present. 6. Reporting bugs and enhancements If you wish to report a bug or suggest an enhancement, you can do so by e-mail or via our community forums. The forums are available on our web site and there are specific discussion areas for reporting bugs and enhancements. We greatly appreciate all feedback and bug reports, and will endeavour to fix every reported issue for the next release. 7. Note about the server Occasionally, we may have to make updates to the client and server. This means that the server could be offline during the day whilst essential upgrades are performed. This is very rare. We will make every effort to ensure that downtime is less than one hour per month and will keep you informed of all downtime, reasons for it and what we’ve done to reduce it in the future. If you cannot get through to the server for more than 4 hours, please check with your ISP that there are no known problems with their service and then let us know at support@nicelycrafted.com. 8. Installation Time of Defiance should install itself through its own installation program. This program will handle upgrading previous versions as well as entirely new installations. If you’re reading this, you installed it OK :-) For other issues arising as a result of installing Time of Defiance, please contact support@nicelycrafted.com. 9. Note about content Some players are young people. We ask you to please moderate your language in the public forums such as the Eighth House. Final note: Enjoy Time of Defiance, and thank-you for all your help and assistance – without the feedback we have received to date from our players, the game would not be of the quality that it now is. (TS/July 2004)

Time of Defiance 4.733 Client (19.17MB)