Our background orchard has an apriary. I lost most of my hives this past year. Some of it due to CCD and some of it due to kids with too much time on their hands who come over and knock over the beehives from time to time (and tear off the no trespassing signs).  I could probably write a lengthy article on the cultural rot of upper-middle class teenagers who don’t have jobs, have never had to do anything and have a lot of free time to get into trouble. But that’s a different topic..

Anyway, I have 2 hives back there and the various apple trees are finally coming into bloom. Hopefully we’ll see some good results this Fall.

3D Printing seems to have crossed a major mile stone in that a start-up, called Defense Distributed, has used a 3D printer to create a working gun. It’s still mostly a curiosity since the cost to make such a gun and that it isn’t yet very robust still keeps it firmly in the early adopter era.

So here’s what I’ve found out so far :

No matter which printer you get, the materials for it are currently over $100 a pound. To me, that makes it fairly impractical for most uses. I could imagine taking a Galactic Civilizations ship design and letting it be printable, that might be interesting (and enough to…you know, justify buying one).

The cost of printers is coming down rapidly. The Makerbot Replicator goes for about $1800. The going rate for the higher end but still consumer models is around $2200.

So what do you think? Do you see 3D printing in your future?

Once upon a time…

Thousands of years ago, the world of Elemental was filled with magic.  This was the time of the Magi.  In their quest to create ever more powerful magical devices, the Magi foolishly created The Forge of the Overlord.  It allowed its users to bend the fabric of reality entirely.  It also brought their world to the attention of the Dred'nir, immortal Titans who lived beyond the world.   They arrived and utterly destroyed the Magi and enslaved mankind.

In an effort to keep future Magi from thwarting them, the Titans concentrated the world’s magical essence into pieces of an ancient crystal that they brought with them. This had the effect of cutting the rest of the world off from magic and the land and people slowly become increasingly mundane. 

Rise of the Channelers

However, one day, a powerful Sorcerer was born who could channel the magic from the crystals scattered throughout the world.  This allowed for some fledgling kingdoms in the western part of a continent called Anthys to resist the Titans.  The Titans, recognizing the growing strength of their foes, used their magic on those races of men under their thrall to create new races that men now collectively call “The Fallen”.

Many of these new races used their newfound abilities and power to flee Anthys entirely and exit our story. However, three of them went on to become lethal servants of the Titans – The Quendar, the Trogs, and the Urxen.  The Quendar were the Titan’s most trusted servants. The Trogs their loyal soldiers and the Urxen their tireless workers. 

Still, the free Kingdoms on the west of Anthys, led by Sorcerers who rivaled the Titans themselves and aided by Tandis the Arnor continued to grow.  The Titans, therefore, sought to open a gateway back to their homeworld to bring reinforcements. When word of this reached the Kingdoms, they launched an all out attack to stop it.

The Cataclysm

In the great confrontation between the combined might of the Titans and the entire host of the West, the gateway device was destroyed while in the midst of opening a portal and the resulting blast was so vast that the seas poured separating the remaining east and west from one another. It also laid the lands in waste. This became known as the cataclysm.  The Titans were gone but so were the Kingdoms.

Fallen Enchantress

[SPOILERS from Fallen Enchantress BEGIN]

A century after the cataclysm, civilization is beginning to creep back into the world. The lands have been overrun by foul creatures, bandits and ancient Elemental Lords who were awakened by the cataclysm.  The most powerful of the fledgling civilizations is Pariden, led by Queen Procipinee, the most powerful channeler of her age.  She has had a glimpse of the future – a terrifying one in which an Empire of Sorcery will arise and consume the world.  To learn of a way to stop her vision from becoming true, she sends her most trusted adventurer, Relias, into the shattered east to seek out the lot Oracle of Cyndrum.

Relias sails to the East and meets Procipinee’s agent in the East, Karavox to help guide him to the rumored location of the immortal Oracle. Relias soon learns that Karavox has betrayed Pariden and the Kingdoms of the West.  First, by keeping secret the resurging Fallen who have set up their own empires and secondly, by establishing his own Empire called Kraxis. 

Despite his difficulties, Relias finds the Oracle and attempts to free her only to discover that the Titans had placed a curse on her that transforms her into the Fallen Enchantress. The enchantment begins to raise the dead from around the world to serve as her minions. Relias, having discovered the mechanism of how the Empire of Sorcery is to begin, escapes back across the sea.

[SPOILERS from Fallen Enchantress END]

Legendary Heroes

Our story starts out where Fallen Enchantress leaves off.  In some ways, it is a retelling of the early chapters of Elemental: War of Magic (2010 PC game Stardock released but has discontinued).  But this time, it’s the full story and it plays not as an RPG but as a strategy game.  Legendary Heroes is a knock out, drag out, fight to the finish between the Empires and the Kingdoms.  You’re teamed up with the Kingdoms and the Empires are all teamed up as well. 

Unlike the Fallen Enchantress scenario which could be finished in around 20 hours, we have no idea how long Legendary Heroes will take except to say a LOT longer because it’s a huge world to conquer.

• Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes comes out May 22.
• Visit Time Magazine’s write up too!

Ok. So who’s going to see this?

So far, I’ve managed to stay spoiler free.

So…

Whatcha doing?

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.