The relations system in GalCiv 1 was dynamic but hard to understand.  The AI would look at where it currently was in terms of how it felt about you, go through a load of calculations, and then adjust its relations.  The problem was that it was often hard to understand. So this time, I've started making it so that the AI calculates its relations with you from scratch each turn rather than adjusting up and down. Different situations given different points for and against you. ...

Let's have a common sense excercise: Wilson, a civilian, is sent over to African to find out about the yellow cake claims. He comes back and not only reports that that the story was unfounded but writes op-eds to the New York Times blasting the Bush administration. Either: a) Wilson was stupid for not thinking that people would want to find out how the hell he got the job to go to Africa. His wife was stupid for pulling strings to get him the assignment since inevitably, questio...

George W. Bush is on the brink of having his presidency remembered as a failure.  His poll numbers are very low -- less than 40%.  That's worse that Reagan's at the height of Iran-Contra and Clinton's during impeachment.  How did it come to this? Simply put, Bush's character flaws and poor judgment finally passed an unspoken threshold in which people, even those inclined to support his policies, have concluded that Bush is a lost cause. The straw that broke the camel's back ...

In the battle of Okinawa, a small island in the Pacific ocean, over 12,000 Americans died and another 38,000 were seriously wounded. Mind you, this was to take an island that was tiny and had a population less than part of Baghad. And we're still there today. Luckily, Americans were a little bit tougher of skin back then.  We didn't shirk or slink away from paying a high price to do things that were important in a larger sense.  2,000 Americans have died in Iraq over the past...

Galactic Civilizations I didn't have many hot keys.  This time around, we want to have lots of them. Here are some of the preliminary ones (and if we have time, we'll make this configurable -- maybe for the bonus pack). F1 through F4 are different views of the map. 1 Ship List 2 Planet list 3 Research Screen 4 Domestic Policy 5 Foreign Policy 6 Galactic Census 7 Ship Design TAB Find next ship SPACE pass on current ship (give up moves) ENTER end turn ` Toggle grid lines ...

Last night the master database became corrupt and one of the machines had a catastrophic failure.  I kind of "perfect storm" of failure -- two bad things on two seperate servers.  For a few hours, JoeUser ceased to exist. It was the worst case scenario. However, LUCKILY, we do daily backups on all your blogs. So this incident can at least provide some assurance that all your hard work, your thoughts and written record are being treated with respect and care. It does mean, however...

The Detroit News just had an article on how the United States, and Michigan in particular, is starting to fall behind in terms of being able to produce enough qualified people with technical degrees (Physics, Math, Engineering, Computer Science, etc.). When combined with the very restrictive H1B Visas to bring in good candidates from overseas, companies are finding themselves increasingly outsourcing for these key future markets.  We're not talking outsourcing guys to India to work ...

Spent a lot of time this weekend working on the game. There's just so much to do. Maintainence costs of planetary improvements weren't implemented which messed up the economic balancing. The cost of production wasn't being correctly calculated.  Right now, there's still an issue with production bonuses which I'll hae to work on. The AI is building fleets. Not well. But I had to turn it off because it's made the game very unstable. We'll have to fix that this week. The AI now des...

Improvements in Galactic Civilizations II are done completely different than the first one.  It's probably the most radical change to the game-play and probably the most risky since one of the things that has always helped GalCiv was the lack of micro-management.  So we've had to really think about how we want to handle planets. In GalCiv I, most players (myself included) would just go to the governor and have every planet build everything.  This time around, we wanted to l...

With Beta 4 less than two weeks away, things are starting to get pretty exciting here.  We're in bug-fix mode on a ton of the newer features.  For example, fleets are in and they're pretty fun to watch fight it out.  There will be polishing on those screens until we ship I expect since making a fleet battle look cool is a lot of work.  I've been trying to tune the game play a bit as we wait to get the fleet stuff ironed out.  Can't really do the AI with fleets...

Okay, here's the deal.  It's okay for people to vent on THEIR blogs about things.  The main golden rule is that you may not put the person's real name or full handle into the title of an article (since JoeUser is so popular, what you write here ends up on Google pretty quickly). That said, you post it to the forums and then it becomes our business.  When you make an article, by default it has a checkbox that says "post to forums too".  If you're writing something that is e...

Back in 1992 I was in college and was writing a computer game called Galactic Civilizations for IBM's OS/2 operating system.  I hung out on Usenet's comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic and almost like a collaborative design team, the users on that news group, where I was (and still am) a regular put together the features for this game. I had started a little company called Stardock Systems in order to help pay for school and this game was being done under that umbrella.  IBM was very...

Beta 4 of Galactic Civilizations is the first gameplay beta of the game.  It's as this point players will get a decent idea of whether we're on the right track. Beta 3 and before were basically engine tests. We needed to find out what compatibility issues we were going to run into and work around them.  But beta 4 is different. At that point, the clock starts.  We will have from November 1 to Christmas break to essentially "finish" the game.  After that, it's just polish. ...

Bush's latest Supreme Court nominee I think pretty much seals it that Bush is really just an idiot.  I've had misgivings about him and was not a fan of his in the past but this nomination reeks of arrogance. The Roman emperor, Caligula, made his horse a senator.  I suppose now we know that reincarnation is possible though at least Bush's advisors managed to thwart any ideas of nominating a favorite horse to the supreme court.  Bush's croneyism is possibly the worst in the m...

This December will be the 6th year that Stardock has been a Windows ISV.  In December 1999, Object Desktop for Windows was released. And by this December, WindowBlinds 5 will hopefully be ready for release (though no promises, nothing ships until it's ready).  Back in 1999, there were only a handful of us in a tiny office in Livonia.  Now, there's over three-dozen of us in multiple locations.  I think the key to having a successful company in the long-term is to develo...