What a difference 4 days can make.  So as I mentioned in my last journal, I was concerned that the visuals of Galactic Civilizations II wouldn't be where we want them to be.  But if you can compare these in-game screenshots with the ones I did just 4 days ago, you can see how much just a few days can make. And bear in mind, we have nearly a year of work to do. So you can imagine how cool this stuff will be when the final graphics are done. The planet interface still ...

OS/2 is a lesson every ambitious game developer needs to know about.  OS/2 in 1994 was so much better than any alternatives that it should have been the defacto OS.  It ran DOS, Windows, and OS/2 programs side by side. It was very stable (rarely crashed).  It had a very easy to use, object oriented interface (Similar to what we finally have in Windows XP) and it had preemptive multitasking and a DirectX capability called DIVE. Yet, despite all that, despite being from IBM, Wi...

Long long ago there was a hyper-advanced civilization that had colonized the galaxy. They are called the Precursors.  Eventually, they split into two races who went to war with one another.  Just as the final battle between the two was being fought, they disappeared.  This was hinted at in the first game but not truly explored. Thousands of years later, new civilizations slowly started making their way into space.  But they lacked the ability to travel great distances.&nbs...

And so beta 2 of Galactic Civilizations II has arrived.  We still have a lot of work ahead of us.  But I can tell you from even these early betas that we're very excited about the direction the game is heading.  Some of the new game mechanics over the first one have created all kinds of new strategic opportunities that simply didn't exist in the first one.  But before I start giving examples of that, let me talk about beta 2. First off, the beta still does not have the fi...

Most of my week on Galactic Civilizations II was spent doing game-balancing.  That meant messing with the various .XML files that determine how long technology takes to research, how much different weapons and other ship items should cost and how powerful they should be.  The result was that a ton of changes were made to the values of these things. For example, the weapons used to scale way too fast IMO.  You could quickly end up with ships doing 300 damage and that starts to b...

The team is getting features in like a well oiled machine.  The new research screen just totally rocks. Kudos to Mudflap and Mormegil for getting that stuff humming.  BoogieBack and the Elf Girl (doncha just love these handles) made good progress for getting the new star base system in and the new freighters in. Our newest team member, Jesse (no cool handle yet), has started on the ship battles.  We want the ship battles to be really impressive and we want ships to show damage....

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 vers...

Holy cow are things going fast now.  Up till now, it's been engine building. And even now, it's still engine building. But now we're starting to get into gameplay features which are far more fun. Fleets are in. Totally in. Of course, at the AI guy, I have to get the AI to effectively use them.  I just finished working on the AI's handling of the planetary improvements.  The planet surface code is all done with STL which I'm a bit sketchy with.  So my first crack at it was ...

People with fancy new monitors make me mad. That's because I don't have a fancy new monitor.  But Paul Boyer, the UI designer behind GalCiv II has a new one.  See the screenshot there? That's from his monitor. There's been so much going on.  I didn't get to bed until 5am last night.  The number of touches, tweaks, and enhancements to make the game "fun" has been immense. For me, I'm been working on balance. Making sure the game is fun and challenging.  This has...

So much of a strategy game, particularly a single player one comes down to little things like pacing. If things cost too much, it's too slow and boring.  If things cost too little, then things move too fast and nothing has value. That also holds true to the difficulty levels. How hard should it be? How aggressive should the computer players be?  For me, what I've tried to do is make it so that I can beat the game at "Intelligent" (for the AI players) but just barely. At higher le...

The hours are starting to get to us.  Stardock, as a company, is 7/8's a Windows desktop software developer and 1/8th game developer/publisher. At least, that's how revenue in 4th quarter came out to be.  It's not that the games do so badly but rather our other products are so popular. But right now, nearly everyone in the office is on Galactic Civilizations II.  One thing that really hurt us is turn-over.  In all the years we've done games, we've never had anyone...

It's been a productive holiday season.   The AI that existed in Beta 5 (public) is dead. It's gone now. And it won't be remembered fondly. Not by me at least.  It functioned.  But the fact is, in a game that has no multiplayer the standard of quality on AI should be very very high.  It isn't enough for a game AI to be challenging.  The AI needs to be more than that.  It needs to play like a human being.  Much of what I've done this holiday is go through an...

When I play strategy games against the computer I am always amazed that no one does a simple for loop through the enemy units to see if they're literally just outside my city, base, planet, whatever ready to attack. That's what we humans tend to do.  The most lethal strategy in these kinds of games is usually to line up our units, ready to attack and then WHAM, knock down the AI in a couple of lethal turns. In GalCiv, there is also the influence attack -- building influence base after...

One of my biggest disappointments in the GalCiv I AI was how it fought its wars militarily. The computer players in GalCiv I were given a lot of kudos but that mainly was because they were so efficient in how they handled their resources and on-the-fly military decision making. But when it came to the overall strategy of war, the AI was disappointing.  It wasn't supposed to be that way, it's just that the best laid plans can fall apart when things get complicated and there's not much ...

GalCiv II has a new diplomacy AI.  It's a complete rewrite from what was in Galciv I.  The AI literally calculates how much it should like a given player based on a broad range of factors.  Some of these factors are displayed on the "report" dialog on the foreign policy window. During the course of the betas, the kinks in the new system have shown up and this past week I've been going through and addressing them.  For example, the AI tended to go to war with way too many p...