One of the big but largely under-appreciated features of Elemental: Fallen Enchantress is the new random generation. In Elemental: War of Magic, the maps were random but the continents were not.  This meant, after awhile, players knew “the lay out of the land”. Now, having a random world generator is a non-trivial thing as those who have written them can tell you. Especially if you want a map that is “fun” (i.e. no one cut off, reasonably fair, and always interesting). So her...

We heard endless about the unsubstantiated charge that some Tea Partier spat on an African American congressman but amazingly, the atrocious behavior of the Occupy movement has largely been ignored or excused. I have friends and family who practically seethe with hatred towards “fucking tea baggers” who I know are sympathetic for the Occupy Wall Street people. What the hell is the matter with these people? While I don’t consider myself a “Tea Partier”, I cannot grasp the antipathy dire...

Stardock is a pretty silly place to “work” at.  So my new rule of thumb is, blame Derek for all my problems.  Compiler problem? Derek. VPN issue? Derek. Incredibuild glitch? You get the idea. Now, if the airs are let out of my tires again…well, who knows what caused that. … Anyway, thanks to Derek, I get to work primarily on the parts of our games I’m traditionally used to working on.  With GalCiv, I knew exactly what I wanted.  With War of Magic, we kind of ...

This is not a story that will make all people happy. In War of Magic, we had a requirement that the game would work on netbooks. And the good news was, it did.  But it came at a price: Pixel Shader 2. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with graphic tech, video cards support various types of on-chip programs with the best known one called Pixel Shader. Pixel Shader 2 will work on really old machines going all the way back to the Radeon 9800 series and the Geforce FX cards and t...

There’s been a lot of talking about the character portraits shown in screenshots. One thing to bear in mind: Developer journals are not marketing screenshots. I take them in the debugger while I’m working. It’s the only way we are able to have so many developer journals. That means the lighting, particle effects, etc. are disabled. Here are some of the character portraits for FE:  

In every Stardock game ever, from 1993 on, the “flavor text” was done by whoever had a moment to throw something in there. Often times, it meant I did it since I type 120wpm and could crank out a lot of stuff.  The GalCiv technology descriptions are notorious for this. In War of Magic, we decided that we would keep the tongue in cheek text to a minimum which in reality just made it dry and boring. Since we didn’t enjoy doing it and our fans really wanted to see our games sta...

How aggressive should monsters be? Make them too nasty and people get frustrated.  Make them too passive and they’re a joke. I’ve got to tweak them in both directions. Gonna have to be a lot of subtlety in the difficulty levels.

Derek and his team have been busy working on the sequel to Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, the sequel to last year’s War of Magic.The final release date for Fallen Enchantress hasn’t been set yet but we do expect to go into beta around Thanksgiving. Beta and Release The initial beta will only be available to those who already have War of Magic. A later beta will be available to anyone who wants to pre-order it.  The beta will be available via Stardock’s new digital store. We plan...

My house uses a lot of energy. Specifically, it uses a lot of electricity. A good portion of that electricity is because of the Geothermal system which uses Geothermal heat pumps to heat and cool the house. To offset that, I had a 20KW solar array installed.  While October is not the most ideal of months for solar power (lot of rainy days), the results are looking somewhat promising. Now, let me first be clear: Even with all the subsidies involved (which are a lot) the cost p...

My house uses a lot of energy. Specifically, it uses a lot of electricity. A good portion of that electricity is because of the Geothermal system which uses Geothermal heat pumps to heat and cool the house. To offset that, I had a 20KW solar array installed.  While October is not the most ideal of months for solar power (lot of rainy days), the results are looking somewhat promising. Now, let me first be clear: Even with all the subsidies involved (which are a lot) the cost p...

Yea, a great feature…if I could ever get it to work on something more complex than HelloWorld.c View the video on the crazy edit I perform to cause edit and continue to fail… http://screencast.com/t/8A524d8ls

I had the story for Elemental: Destiny’s Embers in my mind for over two decades. Twenty Years. That’s a long time. And when Random House asked me to write it, I had no problem providing them with my first draft. Then a second. And so on.  What ended up being printed and available to purchase at your local book store is nothing like what the original drafts were.  The story is the same. Make no mistake, I didn’t have to sacrifice the story. But the way it was writte...

Ever dream of writing the great American novel? I did and I got to do it.  And holy cow was it nothing like what I thought it was. I had originally written the story in omniscient. i.e. Like Lord of the Rings. But nothing is written that way. Random House asked me to rewrite it in first person (from a character POV). This was tough for me as I had to write a lot of exposition that was, to me, not very fun and sometimes the book showed it.  I’m very proud of how Destiny’s Emb...

There's been a number of negative articles about the Chevy Volt for some reason. Let me tell you, it's the best car I've ever owned. Here are some of the cool things about it (and please feel free to ask anything you'd like to know because a lot of what I'm writing here hasn't been talked about): So I've had it 6 months. And in 6 months of normal driving, I have never had to fill the gas tank. It's still using the gas that came with it from the dealership. Something like 2500 miles so f...

I’ve been an Outlook user for years.  But in the past several months, I’ve been migrating more and more to Gmail. The email still goes through our company server to and from ultimately but Gmail is just a better mail reader. Here’s what’s changed: Gmail now has a way of identifying “important” emails. I don’t know how its algorithm works but it works quite well. Gmail has insanely good spam filtering. Gmail has mouse gesture support (I hold down the right mouse butt...