The first public beta of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is nearly ready to go out. Now we're in the final testing phases for getting something that functions. It's not done but it's definitely playable.

A good portion of the challenge has to do with packaging. There's a LOT of stuff in there and we have to make sure that you can play Dark Avatar or Dread Lords together which means making sure the directory structure is in place.

What I'm about to show you is a brief walkthru of the game from the new screen on. I'm in the debugger while doing this so you're going to see uglier graphics, frame rate counters, and  more.   Here we go...

The new title screen. It has a grimmer look to reflect the darker nature of the backstory.

This is the new choose opponent screen. It's much simpler (I think) and yet more powerful since it supports user-designed players.  I'm going to create a quickie custom opponent now.

So first I set up the basics.

Now, on the customize opponent screen on appearance I can choose a custom ship style. This screen still needs work because it's hard to find the custom button, it's way too small for such an important feature.

On the custom ship style screen, I can actually tell what ships the AI will use visually. This screen still needs some work. It needs icons or thumbnails for one thing. Secondly, the available ship templates are based on the chosen style which I'm not sure is a good thing or not.  In essence, players can design the ships that the different computer players actually use -- even modded ones.

Now, on the customize opponent screen, is something we're still working on and will be worked on more (along with the repercussions of it) for months. The different settings are pretty self explanatory.  But the ones that we think gamers will find interesting are:

1. The Natural Abilities.  The AI in GalCiv gets more difficult baesd both on amount of resources it gets (like most games) but also on which algorithms it gets to use. So we've split the amount of money they get from the "smartness" of it.  We still have more work to do on this because we need to display what "Difficulty" the AI is now at based on these settings which will be a combination of Natural Abilities plus Financial Resources.
2. The CPU Usage is going to require a lot more work.  Basically, for many functions I'm writing a "HCPU_" function equivalent that lets the AI project further into the future. This will be a big deal for players who want to see the AI perform better tactically since a lot of "smartness" of computer players boils down to raw CPU -- how much analysis should the AI do about strategies?  But it does mean re-writing a lot of AI code which I've only started to do.  What's a bummer is that this is really a BIG feature for players but I'm not sure how many people other than the people who actually play the game ongoing will really see the benefit. This feature costs as much as say a full cut scene or two.
3. The Super Ability. Players can choose which kind of super ability your custom race has.

And so we have the civilizations set up.

Now you might say, well big deal that Dark Avatar has two new civilizations. But the real work is in the AI personality -- the coding behind the AI.  The custom created opponents still have to borrow the AI algorithms and they still have to rely on the text written for others. So it's not a trivial matter creating new races (not even counting all the artwork involved).  But still, I think most gamers will find it pretty cool that they can set themselves up with opponents of their own design.

So now I'm in the game. The selected ship is my colony ship. The other ship is a space miner which is used to construct mining outposts on asteroids.

On the finance management screen, there's a new slider -- Espionage spending. You can spend up to 25% of your economy on Espionage.

The constructor has been improved graphically. That's one of the things gamers are going to notice pretty quickly is that we went back through all the graphics and re-did them to look nicer. And they actually use less memory.

Diplomacy has been enhanced and will continue to be enhanced with better dialog and more options.  For instance, there are now Economic and Research treaties. You can only hand this out to one player (and them the same way). But the result is that 10% of your economy or research is shared with them. The key words -- shared. You lose nothing from these treaties, they're basically a way of helping civilizations you like.

Here's a bug in my code. But what you are seeing here that the dialog is trying to find a response for the treaty being too early.  One of the annoyances I have with GalCiv II is that you aren't given very much information as to why they reject a given offering.  So we're going through and trying to improve this.

Here's a bug -- the Snarthi didn't remember what image I assigned them.

Meanwhile, I've gotten my first agent. See the red button over on the left. That's my quick link to place the agent. If I press it, the mouse cursor changes and then I select what world I want to put him on. Let's do bad things to Iconia.

The ugly agent graphic is still in this build. But basically I just assigned an agent to the factory on New Iconia. Now, their production is weakened significantly. I can use agents to really slow down my opponents early on if I want.

Since UI is so key in a TBS game, you can in the espionage tab quickly manage all your agents in the field as well as see if your planets have agents on them.

And so now I can see there's an agent on the planet. As a side note, you can't really see in this shot but ships in orbit now actually orbit the planet, you see them flying around.. it's kind of a cool effect.

I've also found an asteroid field to mine. But I have competition for it.

The Altarians are in Dark Avatar but now they're the Altarian Resistance due to the events in GalCiv II: Dread Lords.

My mining base is now in. But I'm only getting 1 industrial point from it since Earth is so far away. There's a secondary problem, because it is so much in the Snarthi sphere of influence, it is likely to end up rebelling and working for the Snarth.

So that's all for now.  Lots of work still cut out to do. I didn't even touch on custom environments or tons of other features...that's for later!