This week I'm out on the west coast on business. While staying in Redmond, I was able to hang out with Blair and Craig from Ironclad (Sins of a Solar Empire) since they're in the Vancouver area.  People on the outside probably don't realize how unique the Stardock / Ironclad relationship is in the game industry. When it comes to Sins, we might as well be a single team. While I can't speak to exactly why our partnership has worked out so well, I can say that I think one reason is that ...

Want to try out the latest beta preview of Impulse? You can get it here: http://storage.stardock.com/files/Impulse_setup.exe   FAQ: What is Impulse?   Impulse is Stardock's successor to Stardock Central. It is designed to merge all of Stardock's various digital networks into a single platform (TotalGaming.net, WinCustomize.com, and Object Desktop.net).  With it, users can buy, download and update a wide variety of software. Will Impu...

One of the most frustrating parts of the GalCiv AI for me has been the planetary improvements.  It is the single biggest piece of the code I didn't write and to be honest, my C++ skills are relatively basic. I'm an algorithm guy, not a particularly good coder. The result is, I've always had a hard time working on the improvement code because it's hard for me to understand (it was implemented as a quasi-SQL database as opposed to say a linked list or an array). So anyway, while playing ...

Here are some screen shots of our current internal build of The Political Machine...

Players can visually design every aspect of their candidate. The candidates in the game aren't "modeled". We just provide the pieces and the rest goes from there.  All candidates are bobble-headed in order to make them more like real-life politicians.

I have the greatest job in the universe. And finding that out was no small feat. With the universe having a diameter of 14 billion or so light years, I had travel a lot in order to make that determination. So why is my job so awesome? Because I get to not just play games but as I find things that bug me, I get to change them right on the fly. My job today is to continue to walk through the different computer AIs and civilizations, making changes to them based on YOUR feed...

For updating the computer AI more fully for Twilight of the Arnor, I'm creating tournament maps. This way, I can help balance the different races while at the same time improving the AI plus creating more tournament maps. Today's example is the Drengin Gambit. I play as the Drengin Empire in a medium map. Ignore the quality of my screenshots as I'm running in the debugger.   Drengin default tech tree I start out with a kick ass planet. A...

Altaria has the strategic fortune of being located in the outer rim. As a result, even its handful of colonies are relatively unimportant from a strategic standpoint. The Drengin Empire had largely ignored the Altarians during the Dread Lord war of 2225. But the Dread Lords tended to put specific effort to do harm to the Altarians. According to Altarian legend, the Dread Lords were involved on Altaria during the opening stages of the Precursor wars eons ago.  The war between the Precurso...

Well friends and family who are keeping up on "Future House". The plot plan has been largely completed. Click to enlarge We have the plot of land. It's a little strangely shaped. It's about 3 acres overall. We've settled where the house is going to sit on the property.   Here is a closer up view. Click to enlarge. The driveway is subject to change as I am trying to avoid cutting down trees (though, sadly, we've cut down a lot of tr...

This holiday weekend my plan is to get some serious AI coding on GalCiv. I've been looking forward to it and my new home PC box has arrived. I don't know if it's because I'm getting older or if there just isn't as much benefit to upgrading as there used to be but the box it's replacing is over 3 years old. I used to upgrade every year and now it's 3 years. My new box is an Alienware machine. We do a lot of business with Alienware and in the past I haven't bought their machines because the...

Twilight of the Arnor has been a real treat to work on.  This week, we're releasing Beta 6 of it and then, over the next week, I'll be dedicated to the computer AI in updating it and balancing the races. The plan is to do a game example for each race, documenting what things are working well and what things need to be balanced.   As I post my own observations, I am hoping that fellow players will be chiming in their own ideas and input and I'll be looking forward to integrating...

This new machine is even faster than my monster machine at work which is saying a lot.

As seen here, our future house is under construction.  Some of the general goals were in that first article but to quickly summarize what we are looking to do: This will be our "last" house until old folks home. Needs to be completed while our children are young so that this will be their "home" when they go away to college or sugar mines or whatever they are going to do. Needs to be "green". I.e. I am willing to spend extra to make the hous...

I've often been asked what it takes to be successful in starting your own business and being successful at it. Similarly, I have seen in various political debates about how CEOs are largely replaceable/disposable which I know from experience is definitely not true. Below are some traits that most successful entrepreneurs I've met have (some may seem incidental but they are key and few people are good at all these things): Must be pretty good with money. Budgets. Forcasting, e...

The revelations that Obama's paster is a rabidly anti-American who clearly hates this country on their own wouldn't be that damaging. But when combined with Obama's wife's statements that she has never been proud of this country until recently and Obama's own issues with the pledge of allegiance, flag pin wearing, etc. you begin to see a pattern. Personally, I don't think the man likes the United States at all. I think he is like a significant percentage of the Democratic left that thi...