We've been so busy lately that we haven't had time to do much in the way of journals.  Things have been going a mile a minute. We're internally working on what will eventually be considered beta 3B. It's the last beta drop before we move onto beta 4 which is due out just before Halloween.  What we want to do is get all the non-diplomacy, non-campaign stuff done so that when we move towards beta 4, we're feeling pretty good about the core parts of the game. Beta 3A, which is the version that is available to the beta team, is still pretty weak in terms of game-play.  It's getting better but we still have a long way to go.  GameSpy and Gamespot both ran very nice previews on beta 3.  Even in the few weeks since that build, we've come a long way.  Let me outline a few things that were just this week alone as an example.

Scott started implementing tool-tips.  The tool-tips are going to be a major part of the game this time around because we want every variable in the game to be understood by the player.  We're also working on the large hulls for human players.  And in fact, most of the ships aren't in yet.   Right now, we've only got 3 total hull styles (human and two others).  In the final game, there should be around 5 total.    Joe worked on performance and usability items.  For instance, a lot of screens had the full ship model in there, which looks nice because you can rotate it in the thumbnail but it is an expensive call that slows down the game.  So we moved to a static bitmap which looks just as good (and I suspect few people even knew they could rotate their thumbnails around when they selected ships or planets).  This makes the game a lot quicker and more responsive.

We also worked on the fog of war.  In Beta 3, the fog of war didn't really work right.  You could see enemy ships in it and visually places you explored were pretty transparent.  Now if you don't have sensors, the explored but out of sensor range areas are pretty opaque.  Joe also did work on the mini-map to make it more usable.  Ships look like triangles, you can zoom in easier on the mini-map, and the strategic map scaling is much nicer (and you can see shields on planets in strategy mode now). 

Another area of work has been in things most people won't notice but they would notice if they were missing.  We had to put together a new mode for displaying ship info if you clicked on a ship that was in orbit. Since we have less room, we had to pick the most important parts.  We also had forgotten to have a "Planet" button on the planet context window.  In beta 3, the only way to get to a planet was to double click on it. That's not really intuitive. Now there's a button that takes you there.

Another thing that was changed is that when you click on the build ship button on the planet context window it brings up a little dialog that lets you quickly pick your ships rather than going to the full-blown start port window.  And in the progress screen of it we put a little tiny buy button so players can buy ships directly from the main screen.

I should go on about performance for a bit, under the covers so much work has been done to make the game faster.  We haven't heard complaints about it but we're kind of anal about the speed of the game.  This is a game that is meant to be played for many many hours so we don't want the game speed to get in the way of the enjoyment.

The ship yard got some playability love too.  Ships you've built in one game now live into the next game.  So if you have the proper technologies, a ship from previous games will be displayed.  This is really handy because I built a ship called the Velocity Colony Ship.  It has poor range but it can move at two moves per turn.  With the new system, it's always there at the start of the game.  So one can imagine new players creating their own set of default ships at the start and only having to do this once.

We've started moving on cultural warfare.  It's quite a bit different than GalCiv I's system (and we think much better and more intuitive).  Every planet has a number of forces on it (culturally) working to influence the people.  You have your own pushing out and other influences pushing in. 

We've defined this as a ratio (alien influence vs. native influence).  If a planet is within its own territory, that number will be less than 1.  If it is 1, then the planet is on the border.  If it greater than 1, then alien influence is greater than native influence.  At some point, alien influence can become so much more that the planet will "flip".  Certain things will help (planetary improvements and a fleet parked in orbit) but sooner or later, if the ratio is too much, it'll revolt and become part of the other civilization.  In the screenshot on the left, the Korx are suffering from a 4.69 to 1 alien to native ratio.  Unless they do something, that planet will be mine soon.

Of course that touches on the AI which is still pretty weak.  My biggest pet peeves with the AI (and it's my job to fix this stuff) is that it's currently horrible at managing its planets, its ship designs have no strategy beyond brute force, and its battle tactics are pathetic -- just dribbles ships.  In Galactic Civilizations I, the AI had a concept of "force projection".  It didn't work out terribly well in practice so this time I'm going to toss that out and put in "battle groups".  I hope to make use of the internal rally points features and have the AI make use of them.  They'll send their ships to a rally point that they make and then when enough ships are at that rally point they'll go at a particular target.  This way, when you get attacked, you're getting attacked by something that matters and not just isolated fighters.

Probably the biggest and most complex feature we've been working on is the fleet battles screen and fleet management system. It's not in Beta 3 at all but it will be part of Beta 3B.  Beta 3B will only be available to a handful of beta testers so that we can nail down problems as we progress to beta 4.   The fleet combat is really slick as you get to watch ships battle it out in a full screen view with Star Trek like battles. I have to say, it's definitely the most impressive "action" stuff I've seen us do before.  There's about 2 months of effort into this feature.   How that feature evolves will remain to be seen (depending on how much time we have).  We want to stay away from having players control the battles in any way since most people won't want to do that, they'll want "auto" but that means having some "AI" do it which will never be as good as a human player (as long time MOO fans know).  Hence, we don't want the overall effectiveness of a player come down to how good they are at tactical battles.  Galactic Civilizations is a "clash of civilizations" games. Not a clash of tactician skills.

When beta 4 rolls around, the most obvious change will be that it will have the textures in them.  Diplomacy will be in its infancy but it'll be in.  And the fleet combat will be in and hopefully be in pretty solid shape.

There's still lots of tweaking to go.  We'll be listening to feedback and making adjustments based on it.  Stay tuned!