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In order to play Space Civilizations you need to download the game client.
We use Windows Installer as the Setup program, which should be part of your standard Windows installation.
Download the file and double-click to install. Please follow the installation instructions.
Also read the chapter on how to install Space Civilizations without administration rights.
Please Note: Even though we constantly publish new versions here, you only need to download this file the very first
time you register to Space Civilizations. After that the game patches itself automatically every time you log into the server.
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Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista
Minimum Required Hardware: 1 GHz CPU, 256 MB memory, 20 MB free hard-disk space,
DirectX 9 compliant graphics-card with at least 32 MB of graphics-memory.
Required Libraries:
DirectX 9.0,
GdiPlus Library.
Only download and install these libraries if you get an error message when you start the program.
These libraries should be part of your standard Windows installation.
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During installation you will be given a warning if you do not have sufficient user rights.
In this case make sure you do install into a directory that you are allowed to access.
Attempting to install into the default folder 'C:\Program Files' will fail without sufficient user rights.
Please install into a different folder instead, like e.g. 'C:\SpaceCiv'.
Space Civilizations will attempt to register a file association and mime-type, that allows you to enter a galaxy with a single click.
However, this is not required to play the game. You can play Space Civilizations even without that.
If the installation process went fine, you will see the following requester when you try to enter a galaxy:
We recommend to un-tick 'Always ask before opening this type of file' so that this requester will not pop up the next time
you try to enter a galaxy. Now click 'Open'. This should start the game-client.
If the installation partly failed, and the file association and mime-type were not registered, you will see the following requester:
In this case follow these steps to enter a galaxy:
- Click 'Save' and preferably save it to the same location where Space Civilizations is installed to.
- Open a Windows Explorer and browse to the location where Space Civilizations is installed to.
- Drag the file 'GalaxyPass.scgalaxy' onto the 'Space Civilizations.exe' and drop it.
Please note that the Galaxy-Pass is only valid for 3 minutes!
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Space Civilizations is currently in its beta-testing phase. The version of the client that you are downloading is the
Debug Version. This means that a lot of extra testing is happening during execution, which results in a in average 5 times
lower performance than the Release Version.
During execution it can happen that so-called Assert-Windows pop up, which usually occurs when something unexpected happens in
the program. These events are written into a log file. You can send us that file, together with a short description of
what lead to the error, to asserts@spaceciv.com
Alternatively you can configure your computer to automatically create so-called Crash-Dump Files every time a application on your computer
crashes. These are especially helpful to the programmer, as they contain a lot of useful information as of why the error occurred.
To activate automatic crash-dump file creation you need to change a setting in your registry. The following .reg file will do that for you:
| File Name: | CrashDump.reg |
| Download Size: | 1,20 KB |
| Date Published: | 18.03.2007 |
Download the file and run it on your computer.
Now, if an Assert should happen while playing Space Civilizations, press the 'Retry' button, which forces a software-crash, which will
shut-down the application and create a 20 KB 'CrashDump.dmp' file on your 'C:\' drive.
Please send those to crashdumps@spaceciv.com.
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Necessary Ports
In order to play Space Civilizations your computer needs to have permission to open ports 4711-4799 (depending on the galaxy you play in)
and port 6789 to the outside.
This will allow the game to run in Direct-Connection mode, which is the preferred connection method.
Using Http-Tunneling
If that is not possible because you are sitting behind a firewall or a router, Space Civilizations offers you to route
its packets through http-port 80, using a technique named Http-Tunneling. This port is usually used to surf the web.
You can activate this mode by click on 'Change Connection Settings' in the Progress-Dialog at game-startup, and ticking 'I Am Behind a Firewall'.
Playing via a Web-Proxy-Server
In rare occasions it is possible that even http-port 80 is closed. This is a likely scenario when you are working at a company
that closed all incoming and outgoing connections. Usually the only door to the outside for employees is a so-called web-proxy.
That means if you try to surf the web, you don't send requests to the web-site directly, but you send them to a
web-proxy server instead, which will check if the request is valid, and then forward it to the desired web-site.
Space Civilizations manages to by-pass this hurdle too, by routing its traffic via that web-proxy.
However you need to find out the address and port of your local web-proxy server.
Space Civilizations will try to automatically detect those settings, but if it fails you need to enter them manually.
An example of a web-proxy server address could be proxy.myprovider.com at port 8080
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You need to download and install the
client-software, in order to enter any of the galaxies below |
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