Tomorrow I'm off to Texas for 9 days. Then I come back and I'm off to Redmond Washington for meetings with some software company there for a week.

I heard someone on JoeUser say that only people from Texas would go to Texas on vacation. Well, okay, yes, I'm from Texas. And I'm going to Dallas to visit friends and then to the gulf of mexico.  But it's warm, it's sunny, and I'll get to spend some much needed time with the wife and kids.

It's been a real adventure since this past November.  We got WindowBlinds 5 out in November and then at the very end of February we released Galactic Civilizations II.  I won't deny that it's been a lot of work.  Between Thanksgiving and mid March I had worked every day (including Christmas) to make sure things got taken care of.  So it'll be nice to get away from the computer and such for a couple weeks.

We just released Galactic Civilizations II v1.1 yesterday and things seem to be going pretty well.  It's just as well that I'm going because I've already thought of some new things for the AI that I think could make a difference in how it plays.  And the engine team got my new option in -- "Allow AI to use extra CPU time" that people who are willing to wait (or have really powerful CPUs) can set the AI to use algorithms that are more time intensive. 

I don't think most people sit and and realize the restrictions on writing computer AI code is.  You can't do things like do a for loop of all the tiles that are uncovered by the FOW that a ship might travel on in its turn or the following several turns along with nearby tiles to see what might happen. Each ship has to decide its move in less than a milisecond. Each planet has about a milisecond to decide what it's going to build.  And this is on typical hardware mind you, not state of the art machines. The trick to writing good computer AI isn't just sittin gthere putting together clever algorithms, it's also being able to create algorithms that do their thing without using much time.

For example, one of the most intensive things that the AI does is design ships. Part of that reason has to do with the actual graphical assemblage which I don't fully understand what's involved on that part.  But I only allow the AI to design ships once per year right now. If I tweaked it to even 3 times a year I think you'd notice a significant difference, especially early on when human players have better ships because in 2226 the human player has gotten plasma weapons and the AI is still running around with laser 1 or something when it has actually researched Plasma weapons as well.  But I digress.

I've really had a lot of fun these past few months. There's not a real good business justification to be working on AI tweaks on weekends and such, but that's not what it's about.  It's about making cool stuff. If I weren't doing this on GalCiv II, I'd be modding some other game and at least in GalCiv's case, I have the source code.

One of the real bright points of my day was the arrival of some really thoughtful goodies from Texas Wahine, a blogger on JoeUser.com. She and my wife are on-line friends and she's a really nice person. She lives in Hawaii and sent some really neat Hawaiian stuff. Thank you very much TW if you see this.

But that's the whole thing about on-line communities, I love them. You meet such great and interesting people. A lot of companies don't actually have their own forums and such. I think they miss out.  Even though I get flamed dozens of times per day (one irate user emailed me about the "Unpleasant like northern Michigan" joke that I put in the user manual, she didn't find it funny at all), it's still worth it to talk to people and hear their ideas.

So anyway, hopefully no one will burn down the place while I'm gone <g>. I will be pretty much off the grid. Hope you have a great couple weeks. When I get back, we've got new DesktopX builds, Galactic Civilizations 1.2, Multiplicity 1.1, a new IconDeveloper, SoundPackager, and a bunch of other stuff on the schedule to get out in a short amount of time.  And I have to start arranging interviews for game developers to work on Society.

Cya!   (Draginol/Frogboy)