Stardock’s lead game developer, Cari “Elf” Begle, who led the effort in Galactic Civilizations I, The Political Machine, Galactic Civilizations II and part of Fallen Enchantress (until she went on maternity leave) will be leaving us on May 1 to focus on being a mom.  She’s one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met. She’s an amazing developer, a kind hearted person and is always eager to take on new challenges. She was the one who did most of our network programming (including the multiplayer in The Political Machine and was critical in fixing the MP issues Demigod had when it first launched).

For now, that leaves me as the interim lead game developer at Stardock until we can find someone to try to step into her shoes.

CariElf will still be around, but not in any official capacity.  I’ll miss her daily presence. She always brightens up any room she’s in with her infectious positive attitude and excitement to do something new.

As a reminder, our jobs page is here: https://www.stardock.com/about/jobs.asp

My wife and I saw this on Friday.  I won’t put any spoilers in this post but suffice to say I was fairly disappointed.  Tom Cruise did about all he could do with it and the production values were amazing but the story fell flat for me.

6/10.

Stardock is pleased to announce that the release date to the expansion to its popular fantasy strategy game, Fallen Enchantress has been set as Wednesday, May 22nd.

The expansion, Fallen Enchantress – Legendary Heroes, picks up where Fallen Enchantress left off. The world of Elemental is seeing new monsters invading the land and new champions have arisen to aid the player in their quest to bring order and civilization back to the people.

The expansion is loaded with new features including a new champion system, an improved tactical battle experience, a new leveling system, new monsters, more spells and quests, larger map sizes, improved visuals, smarter AI, Steamworks achievements and much more.

For Fallen Enchantress players, it’s only $19.99. For new players, they can get Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes for $39.99.

Media Kit: https://www.stardock.com/press/Elemental/felegendaryheroes/FE_LegendaryHeroes_Preview.zip

Learn More: https://www.elementalgame.com/legendary-heroes

Screenshots:

There are two main problems game developers, particularly *strategy* game developers are trying to deal with these days:

1. Memory

and

2. Feeding the GPU

There's almost a third which involves CPU starvation which has to do with the poor way we handle our data structures but that's a lesser issue.

Now, with regards to memory, we can say all day that graphics shouldn't matter but they do. Forums are full of people saying how much they still like some old game but the fact is, visuals matter. A lot. It has nothing to do with coding ability. High resolution textures use a lot of memory. Moreover, Megatextures (which help with CPU starvation) use a ton of memory in exchange for greater performance, especially on lower end hardware.

People like pretty graphics and the 2GB limit we've been programming to since 2001 remains the same. On a 32-bit setup, you'd be hard pressed to beat the visual experience of Supreme Commander or Age of Empires 3 even today. Memory, not CPU or GPU, is the limiting factor on strategy game visuals.

As a result, we developers have had to find other ways of improving the visuals of strategy games while staying in 2GB of memory. We limit zooming out. We design games that have fewer units in them (there's a reason that Sins of a Solar Empire hasn't gotten a 4th faction, there's not enough memory).
Going 64-bit solves that problem right away.

Second, feeding the GPU. This is where cores come in and DirectX 11. Having a large chunk of the market sticking with Windows XP until recently was really painful because DirectX 9c only allows one thread to interact with the graphics driver. So all those cores you have on your CPU could do some nice things but at the end of the day, only 1 thread can interact with the GPU. DirectX 11 fixes this completely (other than video drivers that serialize things still but that's an issue that is being addressed). With DirectX 11, every thread (which are enhanced by your cores) can talk directly with the video driver.

When you combine these things, you could potentially have strategy games that comapre well to scenes from The Two Towers. Note that none of the Unreal engine demos take on that kind of scene. Pay attention to the number of units/objects in a given scene. To be able to show entire armies battling it out in amazing cool detail you need memory and you need multiple cores sending stuff to the GPU in parallel.

Recently I was involved in a discussion regarding the two Boston Marathon bombers.  It started off with someone expressing concern about the amount of anger and hatred being directed towards the bombers.

I am dismayed and afraid about the amount of hate and vengeance for the two who planted the bombs. It is spreading the attitude of vengeance in our country. I saw a quote from Ghandi this morning which I have not verified, but it struck me as true. "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind". What is the difference between those two and us wanting to kill them?

This comment launched a discussion that had one side advocating that we should try to understand – show “empathy” towards how people could become so “disenfranchised” that they would commit such violent acts?  They also argued that it was unhealthy for us, as a society, to feel so much anger, hate and a desire for vengeance against the perpetrators.

I disagree.

We have the ability to indulge ourselves in this discussion precisely because we live in a civilization that instinctively and actively removes the monsters from society. We should be thankful that the instinctive emotion by our society is anger, disdain and hate towards these monsters and not empathy or compassion.

A civilization that frets too much on whether it's acceptable to dehumanize monsters has little expectation to survive in the long-run. It only took two monsters to shut down Boston. And I think we all know that there are many many edge cases out there that could become such monsters.  Our civilization could be severely disrupted by a handful of individuals like the Boston Marathon bombers.  We should show no tolerance whatsoever for individuals that act in this way.

Therefore, as a society that seeks to survive, we should absolutely show the maximum amount of disdain, disgust and contempt for human beings to engage in such behavior. We should absolutely make it clear that people who engage in this act are so loathed that we no longer even think of them as human but rather as animals, vermin, and monsters. We so reject their actions that we figuratively have kicked them out of our species.

I think it's intellectually facile to argue that it's somehow "wrong" to dehumanize human beings like this. At best, it's the result of not thinking through the consequences of what would happen if a significant plurality of our society showed an ounce of compassion or empathy towards these kinds of monsters. And at worst, it's simply indulging in feel-good sanctimonious back patting (i.e. "Look at me, I'm an intellectual because I imagine that intellectuals are above feeling 'negative' human emotions).

If we want to keep our society, we better hope that people continue to think of human beings that would seek to destroy them as monsters, vermin, animals and worse.  “What is evil?” someone asked. Pointlessly and indiscriminately murdering innocents who were there to support loved ones participating in an event that celebrated excellence. That’s evil.

Just my 2 cents.

I was struck by how many Steve Jobs biographers have emphasized how important it was that Jobs got kicked out of Apple. That experience changed him and in the long-run, made him a much better businessman.

Pride before the fall is a truism and even being aware of it doesn’t prevent one from falling into into that trap.

Right now, as I write this, Stardock is doing better than at any time in its history. But it’s only doing so well now because of changes we made 3 years ago. Because 3 years ago, the company was in chaos…

A trip back to 2010

Our main business has been selling software and it had had a steady string of big successes. In 2010, our software came with virtually every Dell, HP, nVidia and ATI card and Parallels for the Mac was using our tech to make Windows apps look like Mac apps. 

At the same time, Impulse was growing at a dramatic rate. On the one hand, it was only doing 1/10th of what Steam was doing, but on the other hand it was doing 1/10th! of what Steam was doing!

And the games side of the company? It had had the dual hits of Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire. 

It seemed like we could do no wrong.

Here was the company structure in 2010:

That sound is the collective gasp of business managers reading this saying “You. Guys. Were. Insane.”

As ridiculous as that structure looked, it was actually a lot worse than that because I also directly programmed on various projects as well and sometimes created artwork and web design for the websites.

The first signs of trouble came with a game called Demigod. While Demigod was a very good game, its launch exposed just how thin we had spread ourselves.  On Good Friday in 2009, GameStop retail put the game on the shelves (it wasn’t supposed to come out until the following Tuesday). Stardock was closed for the Easter holiday and the game, lacking copy protection was soon out everywhere to the point that by Easter – 2 days before the game was supposed to ship – there were over 100,000 IPs trying to connect to he proxy servers per hour. There just weren’t enough people (at Stardock or GPG) familiar enough with the project to scale the network structure in place fast enough to address the problem quickly. 

Simply put, if it takes N seconds to connect one player to another where N is the number of players trying to connect, we just didn’t have enough people to set up enough servers to do this quickly if you had that many people playing. We should have, btw. But because of the lack of depth in the management chain, there wasn’t anyone dedicated to doing the simple math. In other words, if one person made a mistake (such as not properly calculating how many servers were needed to handle say 10,000 simultaneous connections) there was no backup.

The way it should have been done is that there should have been a manager who oversaw a Stardock manager and a GPG manager who in turn had their own teams. Instead, there were no managers on either side. It was both teams chatting via Skype directly.  Because of the sheer raw talent at GPG and Stardock it worked amazingly well (if they hadn’t miscalculated the # of proxy servers needed to make connections really fast no one would have noticed).  In other words, as bad as those first couple weeks were, if the teams involved weren’t so talented, it would have been much worse.

Demigod was a warning sign. But it wasn’t recognized.

War of Magic

In Summer of 2010, the company’s management system had largely broken down. Each manager essentially had to operate on their own because the top level management (me) was spread across 11 direct reports. I was working around the clock by this point because not only did I run the company but I was programming on the game. 

Stardock’s best game developers had been working on Impulse and the majority of those working on Elemental had never worked on a game before. In other words, unlike Demigod, my management failings wouldn’t be masked by having super talented veterans bailing us out.

The new developers received no mentorship, no real training. They had been thrown into an impossible situation. We fell into “It’s faster if I just do it myself than to train someone” to the point that 100% of the quests in War of Magic were personally coded by me via notepad and XML (very tedious).

Moreover, with so little management structure, decisions were made by managers with very little oversight (for example, the release date for Elemental was picked by the BizDev team supposedly because it was easier to get shelf space in August). 

To be specific, if a company’s leadership is bad (like having a CEO that’s spread between a dozen groups and programming) then managers will fill in the void based on what they think is right or what they think is best for their group or themselves. And there was a lot of this going on. Decisions had to be made and if the CEO/President/Founder wasn’t around because he was messing with XML at 4am those decisions still had to be made by someone.

The result was our first truly serious failure in almost 20 years in business. The failure required us to look and see what happened. One thing we saw was that if the decision making tree is too broad it becomes very fragile.

Fast Forward

Stardock in 2013

Now, looking at the chart you might see it isn’t perfect. I could certainly draw up the ideal org chart. But the real world (available management talent) dictates a lot of this. Excellent managers are shockingly rare – I suspect many of you reading this can verify this from your own experience with managers. Going from 11 direct reports to 4 has ensured that the decision making process is a lot more thoughtful and not driven by fatigue or ability to put time into something.

There’s probably a book

Somewhere I am sure there are some great books that go over the maximum number of direct reports and the depth of management structure per 50 employees (feel free to recommend in the comments for all of us to check out).

The point is, if you have success after success it becomes very easy to resist necessary change. I hope my experience helps you in your own endeavors in the future.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Walt Disney recently and he tale is both amazing and quintessential.  His professional life was a conflict between his desire to do amazing work with the challenges of running a business.

Early in his career, Disney was devoted to moving “cartooning” into being a serious art. His first true sound cartoon, the famous Steamboat Willy, required the invention of numerous new technologies in order to synchronize the sound with the animation.  It was Steamboat Willy that put Disney on the map as a leading animation shop. 

Disney’s dedication to quality regularly put his company on the verge of liquidation. For most of his life, he was in debt. Disney cared little about money other than as a means to further his goals.  When he became the first to use 3-color Technicolor, it resulted in the cost of his shorts being vastly higher than those of other studios and no one really knew whether people would care about true color cartoons.  It turned out they did.

Even as they struggled to pay the bills, Disney embarked on a wildly ambitious project – a feature length cartoon.  Snow White. One of the things I was really surprised to learn about is that no cartoon before or since (including Fantasia) had as much love and attention put into it as Snow White.  Every frame of that movie was scrutinized. Every line, every tiny piece of animation was meticulously gone over.  One has to go back and rewatch Snow White to truly appreciate the kind of attention given to that movie because it’s unlikely anyone will ever be able to equal it.

Disney would produce two more feature length cartoons that would have near that level of attention – Pinocchio and Fantasia.  Neither of those two movies were the success of Snow White and it nearly ruined them.  As a practical matter, a movie like Snow White wasn’t practical to make because it had to be a massive hit in order to justify the cost/risk and no one bats 100%.  Bear in mind, Pinocchio and Fantasia are considered classics today and nearly destroyed Disney. 

Disney would make one more movie that even attempted to approach the quality of Snow White – Bambi.  And like Pinocchio and Fantasia, it was initially considered a failure because it didn’t make enough money to justify its cost.  There were extenuating circumstances to be sure (the loss of foreign markets during the World War II period) but it proved that even if you made a great movie that normally would be considered a “hit” it wouldn’t be enough given the costs associated.  As a result, Disney never even attempted to make a movie that approached these.

If one looks at other great Disney feature cartoons like Cinderella, Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp, etc. you will find that the different in animation quality is very different.  And that’s because Disney found, to his sorrow, that most people just didn’t care about ultimate quality in their animation. “Good enough” would suffice.

In fact, just look at 1-frame from Cinderella and compare it to a frame from Snow White and the difference is massive. But Cinderella was a hit nevertheless.

Deep down, most creative people dream of being able to forego concerns of cost and focus purely on ultimate quality even if it doesn’t make business sense.  Disney didn’t care about the money, he wanted to move the art form forward.  In the early days of his studio, he had total control over quality but after Bambi, he would never truly regain it. After that, investors, bankers, etc. would force Walt to find the point of diminishing returns on quality versus profitability. After that, Disney films would become “good enough”. 

Thankfully, technology has moved enough that animation is starting to approach the levels of Snow White again. But if you think we’re getting close, watch Snow White again and then compare it to say Lion King, Aladdin or some other modern Disney hit and you’ll see that even with the amazing technology we have today, we still can’t equal the love and care that translated into Snow White.

A Promising Start

It was 165 years since the cataclysm which had wiped out nearly all civilization in the world. In that time, monsters, thugs and other beasts had taken over the land.

In the far wastes of Ishira, a land long forgotten in the world of Elemental, a young adventurer named Thalan had risen and intended to bring civilization back to the land.

That summer, Thalan founded Aduron, which means “Civilization” in the ancient tongue of the Magi.  The land around Aduron was rich and fertile and contained enough magical essence to support two enchantments.

Opening his spell book, Thalan decided he would cast Inspiration and Enchanted Hammers on his city. This would double the research and greatly increase the productivity of his fledgling capital.

Thalan was one of the few people born into the world with the ability to channel magic. Across the world were pieces of the Telenanth crystal called “Shards” in which the Titans of old had encapsulated the magic of the world.  The more of these he controlled, the more powerful he would become.

As it happened, a shard of fire was near Aduron itself. A promising start.

Bringing hope back

Aduron began construction of the Tower of Dominion. This beacon would send the world a message – a new power had arisen in Ishira. This would increase migration to his city and hopefully attract champions to his cause. 

Part of his mission would be to bring order back to the wilds of Ishira. This would mean destroying the various vile creatures that had taken ahold of the land.  This this end, Ralle Stomborn would join him:

Two champions answered the call but always hungry for glory, they would require that Thalan choose between them.

Thalan and his crew clean the barrens of the violent Wildings

 

In the meantime, Aduron had grown and it was now time to specialize.

The proto-city council met and after much arguing, it was decided that the most important focus their new kingdom would need is food and capital. To this end, they chose for Aduron to be a town (which provides a much better environment for merchants and farmers than the alternatives).

The city fathers now determined it was time to send pioneers off to construct a second city nearby. 30 citizens volunteered for this mission.

Thus was found the second city of Thalan’s kingdom now dubbed “Valar” by the people.  This second city brought an emissary from a shadowing group calling themselves the Syndicate.

“You are not the first so-called “Channeler” to try to tame Ishira. We are the power here. If you expand further, you shall be dealt with.”

The Syndicate

Thalan’s scouts soon found the Syndicate hive.

This particular group was led by a Syndicate Assassin along with an enforcer with a few thugs to back them up.  Thalan decided it was time to strike out at them.

 

While the hive was wiped out, it came at a heavy cost.  Only Thalan and his golem survived.  Fortunately, as the new power in the region, a band of mercenaries soon arrived and joined Thalan’s party.

Moreover, Adamant had grown in size and given its high production levels, it was decided it would become a fortress which would allow it to train units much more effectively than the capital could.

Trogs

The Trogs were the super warriors of the Titans. They were bred for one thing – killing. When the Titans left, they formed an empire called Yithril. Now they menace all the lands.

Verga and his party (right) meet Thalan and what was left of his part (left) near a fire shard.

With pleasantries accepted it was time for the ambassadors to get down to business..

To compare:

Thalan only had 2 settlements and only had net revenue of 1.9 to Yithril’s 2.6.

Founding cities is a serious matter (during the time of Legendary Heroes). People were a finite resource and given that the typical city was only growing at a couple of citizens per season, it was a considerable sacrifice to send out 30 citizens.

The people of Valar would need to find a good location for a third city at some point.  Moreover, peaceful relations with the Trogs were unthinkable. Warlord Verga is a warmonger and militaristic [each game the sovereigns draw from a limited list of traits they might have, these two are absolutely lethal for peace].

Luckily, they had found the perfect spot for a new city. But it would be awhile before they managed to find 30 citizens willing to volunteer. Each citizen represents 100 people [this isn’t documented anywhere as it’s not relevant to gameplay but if you have 100 citizens, you have 10,000 people in your city].

The challenge would be to get the pioneers there. While traveling, Thalan and his crew escorted the pioneers only to be attacked by Brood Hunters. I want to emphasize this: Pioneers require population and going up city levels is the key to victory so losing a pioneer is a big deal.

Brood Hunters are pretty horrible. They lurk in the swamps of Elemental. Their archery skill is, unfortunately, unparalleled. They hit 4 out of 5 shots and they are fast. Very fast.

The Brood Hunters were accompanied by spiders who webbed Thalan’s melee soldiers leaving the Brood Hunters free to strike them from a distance.

Luckily, Thalan had something to save them – an escape scroll!

Their survival a mater of luck more than anything else, Thalan reached the fertile plains.

 

Thus Providence was founded.

Their first visitor was an emissary of the Trogs:

It was decided that they would pay it. For now. War was coming. Thalan needed allies.

Arriving from the East were champions of…unique skills.  Tuatha the Ogre was a reluctant warrior. “The gray skins burnt my village and killed my family,” he said. He wanted revenge.  He would get it.

The news that Tuatha had joined the Valar (Thalan’s Kingdom) did not sit well with the Trogs.

 

The War

It would be a classic east vs. west battle. Morale was high as the Valar controlled plenty of resources, had good champions and good income.

The invasion first came across Trog scouts riding Wargs.  The Valar were weak on mounted units at this stage of the war.

With the frontier clear, Ralle Storborn’s army plunged into the Yithril Empire.

The border town of Alkahoud was poorly defended.

Ralle decided to attack before it could be reinforced.

Yithril responded immediately.

Ralle was able to escape with injuries.  The Trogs were fast and strong but their soldiers, thus far, had relatively poor weapons. This might be exploitable.

Thus was born the Trog Hunter.

The question is whether they would be able to be trained before the Trogs overwhelmed them. Providence was now under siege.

The other army attacked…and destroyed the city of Outpost.

In response, Thalan sent a sortie that destroyed a Trog army.  We were at a temporary stalemate.

Thalan was torn. On the one hand, one of the most beautiful cities in the Kingdom had been razed to the ground. The thirst for vengeance was strong. On the other hand, his army had been mauled destroying the Trog forces in his Kingdom.  There would be time to heal.

Worse, the Trogs had built a settlement just on the fringes of Kingdom territory. They were not well established.

(soon after the Trogs declared war again – I have since modified the code so that it takes the amount of time since the last war ended into account so that making peace means something)

The Second War

In the second war, the Trog Hunters would become involved. The strike force included both Arissa and Ralle in them.

The Trogs had sent their zealots known as the Oppressors to wreak havoc in the country side:

The most concerning point was that they had maces which made them quite lethal.

Even against the Trog Hunters, those maces and spears were deadly.

In the end though, the Trogs were defeated without any casualties on the Kingdom’s side.

But the Trogs had sent that force to lure the Kingdom force out of their cities. Now, attacking on opposite ends of the Kingdom were two powerful Trog armies.

The capital would have to be defended.  The defenses at Adamant, fortunately held (thank goodness for city walls).

Thalan was able to beat back the Trogs forces and even their intrusive little outpost city had been taken. 

However, the Trogs were not without their own answer to the Trog Hunter:

The Manhunter unit was simply…appalling in power. 32 defense.  Only the most lethal weaponry would be able to touch them. 

The Manhunters drove Thalan far far back to Providence which the Trogs destroyed in the year 239AC.

The Kingdom was reduced to two cities.

This would be a war of annihilation.

Thalan would march his forcest into the East and do his best to exterminate the Trogs.

It was a suicide run but one intended to utterly dismay the Trogs. If the Kingdom could hold in the west, Thalan and his army would take care of the East.

[This also gives me an excuse to improve the AI’s defense coordination]

City after city is burned to the ground. But the Trogs begin to coordinate their attacks [well, with the saved game, updating the AI code and restarting to thwart what I’m doing].

In 246AC, the suicide mission comes to its completion, but not before destroying 4 Trog cities.

For a generation, the war went back and forth gradually stalemating. That is, until Trog’s Bane:

For a decade the city of Adamant had gradually upgraded its capabilities until it could train the most lethal soldiers the world had ever seen. 

Instant death to all but the most well defended Trogs.  Of course, the entire Kingdom could only support 1.

vs. an army of ogres:

The ogres are no match.

Or against three high level enemy champions?

Utter ruin for the Trogs.

 

…Time

Passes…

 

The war becomes more intense as both sides bring in ever more powerful beings. Trog hunters are replaced by Trog butchers. The Trogs begin recruiting ogres and trolls.

The war of annihilation would, at one point, see the kingdom brought down to only 1 city – Adamant.

Only Adamant remained. Even Aduron had been conquered.

But the Trogs of Yithril made their lethal mistake in not razing Aduron.  While they had razed every other city, they greedily kept Aduron as a trophy. Had they razed it, the men of Valar would have been doomed. 

A force from Adamant reclaimed Aduron and from there, the tide turned.

It would take another decade of bloody back and forth warfare until the Trogs could no longer resist the advance from the west.

By 294 AC, the world looked something like this:

Verga was not ready to surrender yet.

But as Yithril’s Empire slowly crumbled, the inevitable became clear.

The once mighty armies of the Trogs were long gone. Only old, injured champions remained to fight delaying actions.

Surrender became the Trogs only option.

Verga would make an excellent servant.

 

compared to

This tiny map took over 10 hours of play time.

Thalan, nearing his 155th birthday, was ready to enjoy a just peace.

 

THE END

Doing nothing but AI work today.

If you had to list 5 game sites that you go to regularly to get reviews, news, etc. on games? What would they be?