Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
Draginol's Articles In PC Gaming » Page 6
August 9, 2013 by Draginol
Been playing a lot of Company of Heroes lately.  One feature I really really like is the Automatch  vs. AI feature.  So it gathers a random group to go up against a set of AI players. It’s remarkably fun. Anyone have this yet? What are your thoughts?
July 7, 2013 by Draginol
  Hi all! As some of you know, Draginol is my “alt” handle here for Frogboy. Anyway, this week I was on PolyCast, a popular Civilization-related podcast and this episode focused heavily on the upcoming Civilization V expansion “Brave New World”. Feel free to check it out here: http://civcomm.civfanatics.com/polycast/polycast/season7/episode176.mp3 You can see other episodes here: http://civcomm.civfanatics.com/polycast/polycast/season7.php
November 27, 2012 by Draginol
GameSpy’s Katie Williams has a terrific blog on the real misogyny that exists in the game industry. You can read it here: http://alivetinyworld.com/2012/11/27/too-many-reasons-why/ In the article she writes: I’ve been watching the #1reasonwhy hashtag on Twitter with an anxious kind of understanding. Like, part of me wants to jump right in and post a dozen of my own experiences, but I’ve also learned what happens if you say that shit publicly: you’re berated,...
November 22, 2012 by Draginol
Stupid Thanksgiving sale.  It’s too late for me.  Save yourselves!
November 5, 2012 by Draginol
Despite only a handful of reviews (average review score 4/5), it is in the top list of games being played by Steam even though the people most likely to buy this type of game got it for free as a non-Steam game (so it won’t count).  I think it’s safe to say that Fallen Enchantress is the start of a beautiful new fantasy game world.
September 7, 2012 by Draginol
Smarter developers than myself (Which would be most of them) have told me that there are “Tricks” to making DirectX 9 support multithreaded graphics.  Unfortunately, they’re beyond my capability. DirectX 11, by contrast, natively supports a process spinning off a graphics related job into a thread (as opposed to it being in the same thread as the main message pump thread). When I joined the Fallen Enchantress team as lead developer (the first time I’ve held that position in over a...
September 5, 2012 by Draginol
Came up with a bunch of good names for future games --- so good that they were already taken, somewhere at some time. And because we’re such a litigious society, people will sue over even partial names. I remember getting a threatening letter because we had a technology in Galactic Civilizations II called “Space Marines” and that they had a trademark on that name. We renamed it to Stellar Marines (sounds better anyway). In recent times, companies have had to resort with coming up ...
August 21, 2012 by Draginol
I discovered something interesting. Unless I’m mistaken, large address aware 32-bit games may be able access up to 8TB of memory.  I don’t know what tricks the OS is using to do this (a 32-bit process should only be able to see 4GB) but a cursory look indicates when running on 64-bit version of Windows 8, a 32-bit process that is using large address aware is “seeing” 8TB. Take that with a grain of salt since my guys are skeptical about whether you can actually use any of that.  ...
August 17, 2012 by Draginol
Real-time game streaming service, OnLive was a phenomenon when it debuted a couple years ago.  I think my precise opinion of it was “It’s doomed”.  More nuanced comments can be found here: http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/03/25/stardock-ceo-speaks-about-onlive/ My opinion hasn’t changed on it even though it is a marvelous technology. I was hoping they’d got bought out or something to be incorporated as part of a larger solution. See more here: http://mashable.com/2012...
June 18, 2012 by Draginol
It was twenty years ago this week that I started playing the Civilization series.  I remember it well as I got enough birthday money to buy a copy of it.  I played and played and I discovered something fascinating – the birds start to sing in south eastern Michigan at around 4:30am.  The game changed my life.  Civilization was the first “4X” game I ever played and I’ve been hooked every since.  It inspired me to become a game developer.  Two years lat...
May 29, 2012 by Draginol
Why are computer players so often so dumb? The answer is that we expect computer players to make complex, intelligent decisions super-fast. When we make computer games, we know that players have a very low tolerance for waiting for computer opponents to “think”. Historically, that has meant that computer players either cheat like crazy or are play terribly (or both). In one of the minor video game history footnotes, Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations was the first commercial compute...
May 22, 2012 by Draginol
As a business model, I very much like free to play. Free to Play is a direct response to the digitization of PC gaming. It’s no coincidence that free to play is a PC-centric phenomenon.  If we still had a handful of major PC game publications and a major retail presence, there’d be no free to play.  The market adapts, the consumer benefits. Let’s define free to play: Free To Play is software that is fully functional and useful/fun in its free form. It&rsquo...
April 28, 2012 by Draginol
Listen to me bitch and moan while I play Beta 3 of Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.
February 21, 2012 by Draginol
Sorry gang, I decided to not allow our next two titles to be available at retail (Sins rebellion and Fallen Enchantress). The cost/benefit ratio just isn’t there at this time.  It is cool to tell people your game is at the store. But as a business, until the retailers adapt, it doesn’t make sense to deal with them at this point.
February 21, 2012 by Draginol
Wouldn’t you agree it’s cheating if the game doesn’t provide you with UI features that the AI has easy access to? The AI can send 8 armies from distant cities to converge on a target city at the same turn. I can’t easily do that, as a human. Therefore, I didn’t really lose. The AI cheated.