I’m a bit out of the loop this week. My family and I are in the process of moving to a new house that we’ve been building over the past 4 years. Meanwhile, Blizzcon has sucked up some Stardockians.

Charles, who has posted on occasion, had a baby (well technically his wife) this past week. Scott (Boogiebac) also had a daughter a few weeks ago and had this week off to help out at home.

Stardockians: Breeding at a rapid pace.

Cari and Jesse are off this week recovering from “The Summer of no vacation).

Paul (Mormegil) is in Colorado this week.

It’s like a ghost town this past week.

And yet, v1.1 continues apace as Toby mentioned earlier. A lot of the underlying systems are in place, it’s now a matter of content.  The new user interface got in this week which should vastly improve the ease of getting around with your units (and making it a lot more friendly to new players).

The new economic system got in this past week as well. People generate income (and modders can tweak how much or how little you get). This gives players a reason to have fewer, better cities since population means money.  Population also now used explicitly for city improvements and other things. So you can, for instance, build as many workshops as you want or as many studies as you want as long as you have the people to staff them.  How you choose to use your population becomes one of those “interesting choices”.

I didn’t get to work on the AI but I can show you what I’ve been doing in general with the AI in terms of making it multithreaded:

The art team has been working on content, content, content. New creatures, new special units, new spell effects, new special ability effects.

We originally intended to bring out v1.1 this next Thursday but with Kael joining us on November 1st, we decided that v1.1 is a good opportunity to do the hand off. So we plan to do a public beta the first week of November and then release the final v1.1 shortly after and then get a demo out there.