Here's what's new in Beta 3A over Beta 3 (basically what we did over the weekend). We're trying to tidy things up for the 1.1 release. For marketing reasons, 1.1 won't be released until NEXT week. This week everyone's busy releasing KeepSafe so in theory, this build should be considered a release candidate. This does NOT mean we've gotten to every single person's request, suggestion, comment. This is a feature-complete version of 1.1. So if you have some big pro...
Just finished a whole new AI design algorithm for ships and for their adaptations of their ships. The existing designed worked reasonably well if you didn't have every single alien in the game. But over time, due to the nature of what it decided was "optimal" you'd end up with a fairly homogenous set of ships. I.e. every player would have similar ships equipped in similar ways. Some of this has been solved by fixing a glitch that was introduced in one of the 1.1 betas that was ...
The thing about programming a game you enjoy playing yourself is that as you play it, you can keep improving it. So this weekend I continue my never-ending quest to keep improving the computer AI in various ways. I took care of an exploit today with regards to people "buying" resource starbases from the AI. It was way undervaluing them. For GalCiv II, I wasn't really involved on the diplomacy AI. That was a team effort. But since release, I've started looking at how to improve it.&n...
Here's what's new in v1.1 Beta 3 over Beta 2. + More balancing on what techs AIs should research + Tighter controls over tech trading + AI won't lower relations with a player for military reasons unless it has a distinct military advantage + Good civilizations now get an outright + to their relations from neutral civs. + Torians better at making use of constructors + AIs will tend to have much different sets of technologies based on race. + AIs will make a priority out of te...
We've signed on to do a series of 2 page game magazines in Computer Gaming World and Computer Games Magazine. But the question is, do ads drive sales? How many people learn about games from game magazines? It's not an easy question to answer because as active as these forums and such are, they represent only the slightest fraction of the people who play games. If I were to take a poll here on where people learned about Galactic Civilizations II, I bet places like Penny-Arcade...
I learned today that one of my friends was recently in a very serious car accident. I've been been stunned much of the day at this news.
Since Thanksgiving, I've worked every day, 7 days a week, including Christmas other than last weekend where I took one day off. Why? What drives me isn't money. I'm a computer geek. What money I have I put into computer hardware and other gadgets and most of that is taken care of by the company. I do have a nice car . I drive it the whole 6.2 miles back and forth to the office. But that's about it. I don't even have a big screen TV. My main TV isn't even high-d...
Every so often someone, usually someone who just got beaten, will start screaming that the game "cheated!". It's a lot like the neighbor kid who screams "cheater" every time he loses at a game. One of the reasons people like Galactic Civilizations II's AI is because it doesn't cheat. But that generalization is only true to a point -- it doesn't cheat until AFTER "intelligent" (aka "Tough" in the overall difficulty slider). Few players can beat it at that difficulty level and...
Stardock's business model has been predicated adapting to what users request. The company's motto is "Innovation on demand". The idea being that we release the best product we can and then we rapidly enhance it based on user feedback. Users of Object Desktop, for instance, are very familiar with this. We have also introduced this model to our game development which has had very positive results. Our conclusion isn't so much that Stardock is "great" at customer service ...
Stardock's business model has been predicated adapting to what users request. The company's motto is "Innovation on demand". The idea being that we release the best product we can and then we rapidly enhance it based on user feedback. Users of Object Desktop, for instance, are very familiar with this. We have also introduced this model to our game development which has had very positive results. Our conclusion isn't so much that Stardock is "great" at customer service ...
Well in 1.1BETA I found an annoying bug where social production doesn't get shifted over correctly. It took me a second to find it. Here it is: if (strCurrentImprovement == "") { if (pCiv->lMoney<500) ulProduction = 0; ulUnusedSocialProduction = ulProduction; ulProduction = 0; } So there's the bug. The CORRECT code would have been -500. That is, if your treasury is lower than -500 THEN it goes ...
The only major feature we're going to be adding to 1.1 after this is the modder's UI stuff. Everything else will get put into 1.2. I think people will like some of this week's changes. This version will be on Stardock Central in the next day or so. Build 2A: + Tweaked funneling of unused social production. + Fixed visual glitch where it would not show unused social production + AI less sensitive about starbase building + Neutral civilizations won't discount relation...
I remember talking to friends about how many copies they thought some game would sell. Often times, such discussions would include "Oh, it's a great game, it'll sell millions of copies." You need a very good game to get a million units. But it doesn't mean your game is necessarily better than some game that sold half that or a tenth of that. It just means you had better distribution. One of my favorite games, Dominions 2, probably didn't sell very high volumes. Does that mean it was...
Spent yesterday playing Oblivion. Very impressive RPG. But today I wanted to go back to playing one of my other favorite games. My desk is a mess and I managed to find the CD and put it in. So I try running the game and I get a "Cannot locate the CD-ROM". Ack. So I dig up the other CD for it and try that. Same thing. I've played the game a zillion times before, never had a problem. My Dell has two CD drives (one DVD, one CD). So I tried putting both CDs in the drive, same...
V1.1 BETA Change-Log (March 24, 2006) + New Option: No tech Trading. Players can prevent any tech trading by anyone. + New Option: Blind Exploration. Players can now start out not knowing where the other civilizations are located. + New Option: Disable Minor races. No minor races. + New Option: Randomize player intelligence. This will scramble opponent intelligence by around +/- 10 points to have more variance. + New Option: Randomly pick opponents. Players can simply ch...