Fire-Watch pointed out that I’ll need to get a virtual image of Windows XP going in order to program GalCiv. Otherwise, I’d have to take some people off of Elemental to migrate the GalCiv II project to Visual Studio 2005 or 2008. Right now, I’m on a bit of a sabbatical to get back to focusing on tech. So installing a virtual PC image (or VM Ware) is kind of cool. I’ll let you guys know how it goes as I’m doing it.
So I’m on a sabbatical which was planned a long while ago. Basically, it’s an opportunity for me to get back to my roots. One of the things I’m working on during sabbatical is GalCiv II (Twilight of the Arnor). It’ll be lots of little tweaks and improvements (AI, gameplay, balance, bug fixing). But this is the kind of thing I enjoy but can only justify on vacation. It seems like for the last couple of years my role has been less CEO and more fire fighter anyway. While...
Cisco doesn't support their VPN's on Windows Vista 64. What does this have to do with Galactic Civilizations? A lot actually. I have been working on the GalCiv II v2.0 (tentative release date is November 5) to update the AI and take care of a long list of little pet peeves of when I'm playing. When I do this from home, I need to use the VPN because I use Vista 64-bit. And Cisco's VPN doesn't support 64-bit Vista which makes it tougher to get updates back into the main source tree. ...
The good news is that there will be a Galactic Civilizations III. The bad news is that it won't be out this decade. Galactic Civilizations II v2.0 is currently in development but it's free for all players of the expansion packs. But that will serve as the code basis for any further GalCiv II updates. Right now, the team is working on the "unnamed fantasy strategy game" sometimes called "not-MOM" (not Master of Magic). It's a totally new graphics en...
This week we should be relatively feature complete for The Political Machine 2008. We're pretty happy with how it's turning out. The first edition we did was a pretty good game, but it wasn't really well polished and its replayability was limited (it was hard coded to 1 map with one set of data). The 2008 edition is just so much better in every way. I'll be glad to take Memorial Day off and so will the team. It's been a pretty rough month for all of us. I'll also be hap...
About once a month someone, somewhere, will comment on something I've written saying how "A CEO shouldn't act unprofessionally in public". Over the years, I've gotten that message hundreds of times along with predictions of demise for my company due to my "public" behavior. A long time ago I took a calculated risk: Most people would prefer a CEO that is transparent, open and tells the truth even if those truths are sometimes not what they want to hear versus the tra...
Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor Info Guide By Brad Wardell Designer and AI Developer Title: Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor Description: Expansion pack to the award-winning PC strategy game, Galactic Civilizations II Requires: Galactic Civilizations II: Gold Edition or Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords + Galactic Civili...
New opening cut-scene of course...
So here we go, we're in the final stages. Lots of features being tweaked. The computer AI has been enhanced. I will go so far as to say that it is about twice as intelligent as the last publicly available beta. If people find this AI unsatisfactory well, they can go write their own game. So in my testing, I want to make sure that the AI personalities are doing a good job and just make sure all the new content is working right. Setting up a custom ci...
Who would win if the human player stepped out of it. Let's find out if the AI improvements are making a difference.. Early game: Gray = Korx. Orange = Arcean. Dark brown = Korath. Purple = Thalan. Blue = Humans Year 2: Gray = Korx. Orange = Arcean. Dark brown = Korath. Purple = Thalan. Blue = Humans Year 3: Gray = Korx. Orange = Arcean. Dark brown = Korath. Purple = Thalan. Blue = Humans ...
Over the past few months the AI has gotten access to a lot of new APIs that are letting me significant improve the computer AI in Galactic Civilizations. Armed with these APIs, I am now ready to revisit the Korx and the Thalan who have fairly unique tech trees which provide different challenges. One of the APIs now tells me how many of a particular improvement is on a planet. So now I can keep an AI from filling up planets with stuff I don't want it to have. A lot of the AI issues...
Today Stardock and Gas Powered Games announced their partnership to develop and publish the much anticipated PC strategy/RPG game Demigod . Demigod is going to be a milestone PC game for a lot of reasons that will be made clear in the coming months. What Gas Powered Games and Stardock are doing is not your typical publishing agreement. Just as Stardock and Ironclad teamed up in an unprecedented way on Sins of a Solar Empire, the three of us are teaming up in ways that, to my knowledge,...
This week I'm out on the west coast on business. While staying in Redmond, I was able to hang out with Blair and Craig from Ironclad (Sins of a Solar Empire) since they're in the Vancouver area. People on the outside probably don't realize how unique the Stardock / Ironclad relationship is in the game industry. When it comes to Sins, we might as well be a single team. While I can't speak to exactly why our partnership has worked out so well, I can say that I think one reason is that ...
One of the most frustrating parts of the GalCiv AI for me has been the planetary improvements. It is the single biggest piece of the code I didn't write and to be honest, my C++ skills are relatively basic. I'm an algorithm guy, not a particularly good coder. The result is, I've always had a hard time working on the improvement code because it's hard for me to understand (it was implemented as a quasi-SQL database as opposed to say a linked list or an array). So anyway, while playing ...
I have the greatest job in the universe. And finding that out was no small feat. With the universe having a diameter of 14 billion or so light years, I had travel a lot in order to make that determination. So why is my job so awesome? Because I get to not just play games but as I find things that bug me, I get to change them right on the fly. My job today is to continue to walk through the different computer AIs and civilizations, making changes to them based on YOUR feed...