So many crashes, so little time. Well, not really. Not on the time part anyway. I have a crazy amount of time. I hate to say this guys but I enjoy your crash reports. I’ve mentioned before that this is the first game I’ve been lead developer on since…I think The Corporate Machine which was like 1999. Thanks to the sale of Impulse, I can…indulge myself here. So anyway, here is why your game crashes (most of the time). Unlike with War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress is very very m...

Reading is what I do while I wait for the night to be over to start the next day. I love my Kindle. 99 cent books. Anyway, here are a few books I highly highly recommend for those who dig sci-fi Excellent: Old Man’s War The Last Colony The Ghost Brigades Post-Human and Trans Human Good: The Forever War The Old Man and the Wasteland Decent: Anomaly Zoe’s Tale The Doomsday Book (this is good if you like history) Fat...

Greetings! This is a play through of version 0.85 of the upcoming PC strategy game, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.  For Fallen Enchantress, Stardock reunited the Galactic Civilizations II team and brought in the Fall from Heaven creator, Kael to design a new strategy game that exists in the Elemental game universe.  The game’s campaign is designed by Jon Shafer, the lead designer of Civilization V. Tomorrow, February 23, beta 2 of Fallen Enchantress will be unleashed on the...

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.

My generation (>40 years or older) don’t often see the power of the online world. But I know lots of people are like me out there.  I just enjoy the sentience of other people. You know what I mean?

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.

I wonder sometimes whether PC gamers realize that game developers in the PC game market don’t consider each other “competitors”. People from Valve, Blizzarrd, Bioware, all the way down to a Stardock consider ourselves on the same side. Who do you think we get to hang out other than with each other?

I’m one of those people who have traditionally disliked tactical battles because I hate having to fight all of them out. In FE, my goal is to make it so that the AI does a pretty good job of fighting the battle for you. You’ll still want to fight it out if it’s a close thing or if there are particular units you want to spare. But overall, it does a decent job. Right now, I’m still toying with the concept of having units retreat from battle to let others take their place. I’m not sure i...

Between the Nanny Statists on the left and the thumpers on the right, I just can’t get excited about politics anymore. I really don’t need anyone to tell me how to live. I also really don’t care to hear the religious beliefs of a federal candidate. Why tell me? Are you hinting that you’re going to use the power of the federal government to compel me to live by your beliefs? No? Then quit talking about them. I care as  much for a Federal candidate’s religious beliefs as I do to wh...

It’s hard to believe that our dog Bailey was just born one year ago tomorrow. Here’s how she looked 1 year ago: At 4 weeks: Here’s how she looked at 8 weeks.   Now, fast forward about a year…

Anyone know when Visual Studio 11 is supposed to come out of beta?

A lot of people who read these posts don’t know me. This post comes from my blog site ( http://draginol.joeuser.com ) but gets syndicated out through Stardock’s various forums too. I’m the President & CEO of Stardock. My day job handle on the forums is “Frogboy” (I post occasionally on WinCustomize.com and the other Stardock sites).  But I never intended Stardock to be my career.  I started this company to help pay for college at Western Michigan University, which was the chea...

Details on Windows 8 on ARM are revealed. You can read Paul Thurrott’s pretty thorough look at here . So let me make sure I am understanding this: If I want to make a Windows 8 desktop app (by far the largest market) I need to develop one way (Win32 for all practical purposes and WinRT..maybe..eventually). If I want to make a Windows 8 phone app I have to use a completely different method. And if I want to make a Windows 8 tablet app I have to use a totally different wa...

In the debugger right now working on tactical AI. And I’ve wondered just how many spells there potentially are in a given game.  The current number: 175 (not counting strategic).

Working on tactical AI today. So many tweaks, so many little stupid errors (typos). Thank goodness I can fix and continue.