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 ...

With Beta 4 less than two weeks away, things are starting to get pretty exciting here.  We're in bug-fix mode on a ton of the newer features.  For example, fleets are in and they're pretty fun to watch fight it out.  There will be polishing on those screens until we ship I expect since making a fleet battle look cool is a lot of work.  I've been trying to tune the game play a bit as we wait to get the fleet stuff ironed out.  Can't really do the AI with fleets...

Spent a lot of time this weekend working on the game. There's just so much to do. Maintainence costs of planetary improvements weren't implemented which messed up the economic balancing. The cost of production wasn't being correctly calculated.  Right now, there's still an issue with production bonuses which I'll hae to work on. The AI is building fleets. Not well. But I had to turn it off because it's made the game very unstable. We'll have to fix that this week. The AI now des...

Beta 4 of Galactic Civilizations is the first gameplay beta of the game.  It's as this point players will get a decent idea of whether we're on the right track. Beta 3 and before were basically engine tests. We needed to find out what compatibility issues we were going to run into and work around them.  But beta 4 is different. At that point, the clock starts.  We will have from November 1 to Christmas break to essentially "finish" the game.  After that, it's just polish. ...

This week we're starting to work on the Civilization Manager.  Galactic Civilizations I didn't have a Civilization manager and some people thought that was definitely something we should have.  And we agree.  BTW, the screenshot doesn't have anything to do with it, just wanted to have something pretty to go along with this blog entry. So what does the Civilization Manager have on it?  Four things: Civilization Summary This is a screen that displays in brief informat...

Improvements in Galactic Civilizations II are done completely different than the first one.  It's probably the most radical change to the game-play and probably the most risky since one of the things that has always helped GalCiv was the lack of micro-management.  So we've had to really think about how we want to handle planets. In GalCiv I, most players (myself included) would just go to the governor and have every planet build everything.  This time around, we wanted to l...

So how are the different civilizations in Galactic Civilizations different? The easiest way to illustrate the difference that I can think of is how each of the civilizations would deal with the scenario in which they are driving a car down the road and there's a turtle trying to cross... The Drengin would swerve onto the shoulder in order to squash the turtle. The Arceans would run over the turtle if it were on the road, otherwise they would drive past. The Humans would swerve ...

Galactic Civilizations I didn't have many hot keys.  This time around, we want to have lots of them. Here are some of the preliminary ones (and if we have time, we'll make this configurable -- maybe for the bonus pack). F1 through F4 are different views of the map. 1 Ship List 2 Planet list 3 Research Screen 4 Domestic Policy 5 Foreign Policy 6 Galactic Census 7 Ship Design TAB Find next ship SPACE pass on current ship (give up moves) ENTER end turn ` Toggle grid lines ...

The weapons in GalCiv beta 4 aren't well balanced.  We're moving towards the point when it's time to start thinking about how to balance the weapons and defenses. In general, the idea is that defense technologies will be somewhat cheaper to research and be somewhat cheaper to put on your ship than weapons. But they'll both use up costly space. So what's more important? SIZE or COST?  Cost is the pain that keeps on coming because the Maintainance cost on a military vessel is 3% it...

As I get older or at least busier, I have a lot less toleration for micro management.  I just don't find it fun.  I know lots of people do but I personally hate it.  When I play Civilization IV, for instance, those workers go on A (auto improve) right away.  And I think it works fine.  I'm sure the workers aren't optimal but they're well into the "good enough for me" area. That said, I've always resisted having any micro management issues resolved by computer AI. ...

The relations system in GalCiv 1 was dynamic but hard to understand.  The AI would look at where it currently was in terms of how it felt about you, go through a load of calculations, and then adjust its relations.  The problem was that it was often hard to understand. So this time, I've started making it so that the AI calculates its relations with you from scratch each turn rather than adjusting up and down. Different situations given different points for and against you. ...

In the original Galactic Civilizations on OS/2, playing as good, neutral, and evil were considered to be pretty innovative concepts for a strategy game.  Depending on which moral alignment you chose, different ships, technologies, and plantary improvements would come into play.  Moreover, how races interacted with you would heavily depend on it as well. In Galactic Ciivlizations II, released over ten years after the original OS/2 version, such moral issues in strategy games are no l...

"So what did you do over your Christmas break?" "Rewrote several key modules of the artificial intelligence engine in Galactic Civilizations..." Galactic Civilizations has always been known for its strong artificial intelligence.  Since the game is designed to be a single player game, it bloody better have good computer players.  Most people reading this don't know me very well but I'm actually a multiplayer fanatic.  I was one of the top ranked Starcraft players on Ba...