I can't reproduce this. CUniverse::Update doesn't seem to get called until after I press the OK button. What symptom are you seeing?

If i leave the game on the 'ok' button overnight and come back to it in the morning, i'll be instantly dead due to running out of fuel (assuming nothing else kills me before then, like gravity or enemies)

 …I’m going to tentatively guess that this might be related to the Windows/Wine issue behind the infinite gate loop bug and the not-in-system bug. It sounds like things are trying to run for the playership before the playership actually exists in-universe. Neither of those bugs happen on 1.5; I’ve suggested to Wolfy that he try leaving the OK button up overnight on a 1.5 game to see what happens. I’ll also do it on Linux via Wine with 1.6b4 and report back.

 Okay, maybe not quite overnight, but still for a good two hours or so. Wolfy reported no bug running 1.5 in Windows, and I had no bug in 1.6b4 on Linux via Wine. This does indeed look to be another part of the Windows/Wine issue.

Ok, I did some more testing and it seems that on a long load this happens because any sort of mouse click or keyboard interaction (as far as it seems at least. It picked up on the windows key getting pressed) will trigger it to proceed anyways.

Normally this causes it to skip the OK button entirely (another bug in and of itself), but i think it might be possible the button stays visible with the screen if the click/key presses happen early enough?

The Ok button also shows up too early on really long load times.

Basically, the behavior i'm suggesting is the following.

Clicking, and only clicking (or maybe pressing enter too) will allow the OK button to proceed.
The button will not show up until everything is actually finished and ready to launch. Pressing enter or clicking before the button is shown will do nothing.

Suggestions:

• The crawl screen should have a small "skip" button (in the lower left). If clicked, we check to see if the game has been created:
• If the game has been created, we go straight to the game.
• If we're still creating, we put up a spinner (with "Creating the universe..." label) and then go immediately into the game as soon as we're done.
• If the player does not click skip, then we wait until either the crawl is done or the game is created:
• If the crawl finishes first, we remove the skip button and show a spinner (with "Creating the universe..."). Once creation is done, we show an OK button (we don't go into the game without further input, in case the player has stepped away while waiting for creation).
• If creation finishes first, we wait until the crawl is done and then remove the skip button and show an OK button (as above).

See also: https://forums.kronosaur.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7230&p=64296#p64296

I would tweak this a little:

Start the crawl, plus immediately show the spinner and "Creating Game" at the bottom.

Once the game is ready, then remove the spinner and put in the Skip or OK button depending on whether the crawl is done. Either way the button goes straight into the game.

I am not sure I would have any button until the game is ready. I can't really see a use case for "Start playing at some random interval in the future just when you aren't ready for it"