First of all it's a great game, breath of fresh air, and has made incredibly leaps in the last lot of patches. However... Since preloading in the lobby has been taken out in Gamma I don't see how the game is fair. My system manages to play the game smoothly in new patches but now preloading is gone the game often starts before I've finished loading. You can say 'buy a new system' all you want but that isn't so easy for most people. Previously it seemed to work out ok, the game would load while waiting for players to join and then you'd get ingame pretty quickly but now it's just unplayably unfair. Any comments on why this was done? The only issue I noticed with preloading was that the client would be incredibly slow while joining the game but otherwise it only seemed to be a benefit.
Preloading was unintentionally broken during some of the updates made for Gamma, and it will be making a return when Uber can fix what broke.
@omegabolt Indeed, even the lead dev in another thread said he was gutted when he saw it had broken in gamma. For an interesting read on where they are taking the lobby, very soon, see here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/lobby-decisions-how-to-start-a-game.57491/page-7
Actually I think the issue is bigger. When playing a skirmish with AI the game loads in 30sec-1minute with several planets but in multiplayer doesn't seem to even finish at all. I've only tried playing 2 multiplayer games in Gamma because of this and each time it's simply been stuck on 'generating planets' with only the solar system and sun in the planets dropdown box. Each time I left it 'loading' for even up to 5-10 minutes whilst doing something else and it never seemed to finish at all.
Depends when you have been playing. Uber have released almost a bug fix a day this last week, many of which combat these "generating planets" crashes and disconnect issues. Try it again soon and hopefully you will have more luck. Also, it can never hurt to check you have all the latest drivers and such
I had the exact same problem, but now that the fixes have come out and that the wait time has been increased to 5 minutes I can play on up to 5 planet again.
