Zenon

[ot] Oh, and the Dreadnought seen in the vid is just pure win, if a little obvious... Dreaddy: I HAVE COME TO DESTROY YOU! Banshee #1: Aww man, I thought you were going to ask me out... Banshee #2: And I thought we were going to play chess? Dreaddy: ... [/ot] Zen

Mmm, didn't think of it. I guess that may actually solve the problem. True again. But keep in mind that they are just generic drivers, and it's best to use the disk-specific ones, if available. No, next year will bring Windows 7!! Zen

Yes, this could be a temporary measure, but keep in mind that not all motherboards support UDMA, and hard drive performance drops a lot. It may also prevent the correct installation of the SATA drivers. In my humble opinion, and from a few troubled experiences, it is always best to install SATA and the like at the very beginning. Therefore, I keep recommending Sileath to perform a fresh installation with integrated SATA drivers. Zen

Eh eh, first time I saw this vid, back in august, I almost fell of the chair 'cause I clearly heard the Force Commander say: This planet is ours, b***h! Sigh... I'm a long time fan of both Sacred and Dawn of War, and I have long awaited for the sequels to these gamesto come to life... only to find that none of my PCs is powerful enough to run neither one nor the other... From what I have seen/heard DoW 2 is quite unlike the first installment of the series and its expansions, no base building (at least in sp), no reinforcements, more rpgish style including choosing the best equipment for every mission, etc. etc. It's going to be fun. Zen

Congrats, Silearth! Eheh, Smilodon, it sounds a lot like a "dinosaurish" name! You may want to momentarily turn off PAE and see what happens. Take a look here. By the way, how much RAM do you have? For SATA, you should integrate specific SATA drivers for your hd in the XP installation disk. Look here. You may be interested also in reading the rest of the guide, its definitely worth it. You should also download and install the latest drivers for your CPU and mobo. Oh, and does your mobo support boot from usb? If so you may be interested in using this guides along with the unattended installation one, this way you don't waste a cd, and it's a lot easier to modify/improve whenever you want: here and here. Hope this helps, and have fun with your new monster! EDIT: added tip about booting from usb. Zen

@thek: switching to windowed mode doesn't solve anything, as I said in the first post. Tried to turn off movies as you suggested, but nope. @plastique_exploda: another good idea like thek's one. I originally discarded it, 'cause after seeing the resolution was fixed, I didn't think I could have found something useful in there. Took a look anyway, after your suggestion, but still there is nothing that makes me think a change to it could affect the resolution. The setting you must be referring to is located in the settings.cfg file, located in the game's directory. You can also change it through the Sacred configuration application. UPDATE: Went on an "installation spree" tonight, and mounted different Sacred versions on different operative systems, respectively Sacred vanilla (yes I have this one), Sacred 1.6, Sacred Plus, Sacred Underworld vanilla, Sacred Underworld 2.28 on Windows Xp service pack 2 and Windows XP service pack 3. None of those worked so far. ABOUT DXDIAG AND ERROR LOG: The error log is located in the game directory. To generate a DxDiag log file go to the start menu, select "Run..." and type "dxdiag" (without quotation marks), click ok. Run the various test and then click on "Save All Information", then choose where you want the file to be saved. Later today I'll try meddling with AsTray and programs like that... First post updated to reflect changes. Zen

Here it is 9,95€. For a few months it has been sold even at 4,95€. Some took advantage of this to have cheap multiple account keys... Zen

Hi everybody I'm writing this post on my new pc, a Dell Mini Inspiron 9, which is a "netbook". It works fine and all, and it allows me to play (which got me pleasantly surprised) quite a lot of not-so-new games. I'm fully aware of its capabilities and limitations, and having previously played on it all the Blizzard games released as of now (they don't need the cd anymore) without a problem, I confidently plugged my external usb dvd unit and threw in My Precious Sacred Disk (). Installation went fine, but then came the nasty surprise: I clicked on the icon and it immediately quit back to desktop. No problem, just a few changes to the settings. Also made sure that the Mini 9 meets the minimum requirements. It does. Clicked on icon, nope, it kept quitting. Was losing my patience, so I checked the error log, which left me as clueless as before. A-ah, it may be the resolution, so I switched to windowed mode. Needless to say, it didn't work. Set everything at the lowest possible quality, and tried again in both fullscreen and windowed mode. Nope. Now, to help you understand my feelings, it may help to tell you that I'm a few exams away from becoming a computer engineer, and I was raised by a mechanical engineer (my father). I first used a pc when 6 years old. Then, it may be easy to imagine just how much I hate things that are broken, or simply don't want to work, or a combination of the two. Therefore, I cleared the error log and began a whole new cycle of tests, aided by my desktop pc, in order to "gain valuable data", as I like to call it (the same as "achieving failures", but it sounds better). This time the log gave me some useful data, for example it kindly informed me that the game resolution is fixed at 1024x768. My screen has a native resolution of 1024x600. But the problem must be something else, it must be deep inside the game graphics mechanics. I know this because no piece of software has ever given me problems of this kind so far, game or not, whatever resolution it was set to. My conclusion is that it must have something to do with non-standard DirectX calls, something that my vga seems to hate very much. This happened three days ago. After that I removed the game 'cause I needed space, and began to bear hard feelings toward the Sacred dev team. Since I'm still young and don't want to take the bad habit of giving up on things, I'm going to give it another try. Eventually I'll succeed, and after the Mini I'll try to make it work on the other netbooks out there. In the meanwhile, let's concentrate on the first step. So, if you have a netbook and want to play Sacred on it, keep an eye on this thread! If you already succeeded in this task please post brand, model, problems encountered and method used to circumvent/solve them, and game performance on your netbook. If you have ideas or suggestion, please post them! It may also help if you post your error logs and DxDiag (more on this in a post below). I'll keep updating this post as I (hopefully "we") get closer to the goal and find something worth reporting. Ok, this is what we know by now: Game resolution is fixed at 1024 x 768. This may prevent the game to run on systems with lower native resolutions, although it may not be what causes the game to crash. The game crashes at start. Oddly enough, Sacred is listed as compatible with Intel gma 950. Take a look here. Turning off movies doesn't help (thanks to thek). Nothing useful in the registry (thanks to plastique_exploda). Switching to windowed mode doesn't help. Using the configuration utility doesn't help. Meddling with the settings.cfg file doesn't help. I like pie. Game version doesn't influence the problem. Neither does Windows version (at least not under Windows XP). Thanks in advance to everyone provides advice and/or useful info! Edit: corrected two or three little grammatical errors. Also updated with new findings. Zen

congrats! Well, Lago Maggiore (literally Major Lake, Verbano on the map), were I live in summer, is enjoyable for the most part of the year; a finnish friend o' mine this august said their lakes ar warmer though, at least in summer. But that maybe because in the upper part of the lake, the Canalone (literally Big Channel) the wind is "channeled" 'tween the mountains, thus increasing its speed (and chill). Perfect for sailors and surfers, the only downside being the water, a "little" cold even in summer. By the way, what class were you using? I "ride" a Laser (standard) 4.7. I posted a few pics on Facebook, if you're interested in our lakes! Oh, and if you happen to drop by and feel like enjoying a little more time on the water... well let me know, I can arrange something! Zen

Zenon here, but friends call me Zen and so can you. Mmm? What's wrong, why do you look at my that w- ohh, got it... A-ehm: Andrea Augusto Astarte, at your service! And now you can laugh at will. Zen

Weeeee, back from the dead! Hello there again! Sorry for my sudden disappearing, but I've been very busy from late summer to a few days ago. Many things happened, none of which bad fortunately. I've had to go through the yearly routine of working during summer as sailing instructor for the young, prepare some exams, attend to classes, etc etc. The change was that then I started to work, then Xmas break, broke up with my seraphim-turned-daemoness-girlfriend, then began to work full time (even less time for university), then I moved from home... Now that I've almost moved everything from parent's home to my new lair, now that I got finally settled at work and am not working even when I should sleep (they were behind schedule when I joined), now that I'm single once again, now that I've some free time on hand... I decided to renew my bonds to... to... what do you call it when you are not dead or dying? Life? Oh, yeah, life. With all its pros and cons, including things such as cleaning home (definitely a con) and gaming (definitely a pro)... Zen

Thanks tomi and gogoblender! Oh, not only beer, but also slaves! (yeah, in our dreams...) As for the Wiki, I think that I'll start by following Schot's suggestion: to implement it, filling the gaps and maybe translating in English Italian articles, if I find them useful to the project. Meanwhile, I could start translating English articles in Italian, keeping them ready. So when and if you deem useful to have articles avaiable in both languages, half the work will be already done. I take from what you said, gogoblender, that the result would be exactly like wikipedia, where a page is avaiable in different languages, selectable on the left panel. Am I right? Zen

Thanks, Schot! So be it! Zen

Thanks, bhj! Zen

Thank you all for the welcome! One last exam next week, and then I can dedicate myself to the translation. Zen