I was thinking about writing a series of articles on the history of Stardock. That is, how we got started and some of the challenges that are involved in running a small technology company.  But I wanted to find out first if there’s interest in this before I put in the time to write them.

Let me know in the comments area if you’re interested in such a series.

Stardock’s ModernMix has officially been released. Version 1.0!

I’ve been using Windows 8 as my main machine since its launch and I still can’t believe Microsoft is forcing PC users to run the new Windows 8 “RT” apps (aka Modern UI or Metro) in their own separate, full-screen environment.  It’s amazing how useful these new apps can be if you can run them in a window on the desktop while you’re doing other things.

To get ModernMix go to www.stardock.com/products/modernmix

Also pictured is Start8, the best way to get the Start menu back on the desktop: www.stardock.com/products/start8

As some people know, Stardock’s main business isn’t games. We make games because we enjoy making them.  Lots of individuals do this every day – they spend their “off hours” doing what they like and their day jobs doing what needs to be done. 

That’s not to say that we don’t enjoy making “regular” software. We do. Multiplicity, Fences, ModernMix, Start8, WindowBlinds, etc. are crazy fun to work on.

But games, I just love to work on games. I spent this weekend coding AI on Elemental (Legendary Heroes expansion to FE).  There’s business justification to do that.  I’m free labor to the games unit so I tend to work on all kinds of things since I’m not “billed”.

I bring this up as a lead-in to a general preemptive apology to our gaming customers who I’m routinely rude to on our forums. I don’t what to posit this as an “excuse” but rather an explanation as to why I have (and only for the past 20 years or so..) taken a different mindset when dealing with gamers. 

I don’t think of you guys as customers. I think of you as friends. I’m a gamer. I don’t make games as a “job”. I make it because I love games and – and this is the key part – I like hanging out with you guys. That’s what motivates me.  That’s why I’m on so many game forums (even though journalists occasionally plead that I stop doing that since I inevitably say something horrible online).

I make games in order to hang out with other people online talking about games – not the other way around.  I only made Galactic Civilizations in order to please my friends on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic. That’s why I work on the AI or other parts of the games. I just plain enjoy interacting with other gamers.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to over my notes regarding DISC and tax planning. If anyone wants to shoot me, they know where to find me to put me out of my misery.

I’m glad people are liking the new tactical battle maps.  I normally stick to AI coding but I always found myself auto-resolving battles in FE and felt that if we could just make initiative matter more and get the battle doing quickly that it would be a lot more enjoyable.  The maps in LH were the first tactical maps I did and I’m slowly getting the hang of making them better.

Here are some I worked on this weekend:

Fallen City

Kingdom City

another kingdom city

There’s a bunch of others. I really like the effect they’re having on ranged units.  Don’t come to a knife fight with a bow. Having multiple types of units should matter.

Now, my kingdom for a good fire particle effect. Burning cities would look cool.

Outposts can be upgraded.  The question is, are people actually using this and if so, does it make a difference to the outcome of the game?

When battling it out on the strategic map, what are your go-to spells for victory?

Overall, we’re pretty happy with how Elemental: Fallen Enchantress turned out. It’s sold pretty well and it’s looking like it’s going to end up with an average review score of about 4 out of 5.

Obviously, there’s always room to improve. And that’s where Legendary Heroes comes in.  This expansion pack is a top-to-bottom revisit of Fallen Enchantress. We’ll have a full change list up soon (and it’s many pages long) but here are some of the highlights told in screenshot form.

The Legendary Heroes

In Fallen Enchantress, your ability to acquire champions (which led to your victory or defeat often times) was dependent on how the map placed the champions at the start of the game. You literally would find them camping out in the wilds.  This had the tendency of making victory less about how powerful your civilization was and more about amassing champions. In fact, some players were able to win the game without ever building cities.

In Legendary Heroes, champions are earned through the fame your civilization has generated. This is done through the city improvements you build, completed quests and monster lairs that get cleared. 

New Leveling Systems

There’s 5 paths a champion can take.  A new one, Commander, replaces the governor (and it hasn’t been fleshed out for beta 1 yet).

In addition, rather than a randomly selected list of traits being available on level up, players can now choose a pre-set path. This lets players focus on their strategy towards victory rather than hoping that they get lucky with the random number generator.

Better tactical battles

Be warned, beta 1 only has a smattering of these new maps. Don’t judge the final game (which is still months away) based on the variety. Our focus has been to nail down a few and then expand from there.  The overall goal is to make it so that melee units get into the battle pretty quickly and that ranged units are placed in the rear. 

The idea being that if you have only ranged units, you’re going to get slaughtered if you don’t have units protecting them. It also means that initiative matters a lot more because contact will often (but not always) be made on the first map.

The maps are much more varied (and will get more so as time goes on).

Conquering cities now means fighting it out in the streets

Zoomed out

Cleaner game mechanics

We’ve reduced the number of variables on weapons and instead gave them special abilities in tactical battles. So we’ve done away with pierce vs. cutting vs. slashing because, as a practical matter, they don’t really make the difference between life and death in battle.

By contrast, a spear being able to impale multiple units with 1 hit and having multiple units swarm another unit does matter.  One thing on swarm, if a unit is surrounded by enemies, then when one of them strikes, the other strike too. But the effect is that the target enemy’s defense is lowered (the other units are, in effect, distracting it) as opposed to having other units getting an extra whack at them.

The Graphics are just plain better

I know some people have said that they don’t care about graphics. But the fact is, graphics matter. They sure do to me.  I won’t give up game play for graphics but in the picture above, in FE, that dragon would have no shadow and it really takes some people (like me) out of the experience.

Better UI

This one screenshot shows a number of things at once.

First, units now get a preview of their path before moving. Just mouse over where you want to go and a path will show up with how many moves it takes.

Second, the button button is now yellow if you have an idle city or units with moves left. We don’t force you to deal with all those things but you now have the choice.

Third, your relations with other players is now displayed at all times in the power list (see the smiley or frowny faces next to tehir names).

Much bigger maps

This screenshot doesn’t really do it justice. I finally did the math and huge is about 50% bigger than large. So it’s pretty big.  Now, if you’re running 32-bit, we’re going to see how the beta goes. In the game pictured here, a 32-bit machine would have run out of memory.  There’s nothing more we can do about that.  This is a game that has thousands of units, each with their own unique equipment and that is, unfortunately, expensive.  But we want to hear from 32-bit players directly on what they experience on it.

More cohesive mechanics

There’s no longer any reason to ever have a city idle (which is why it’s tempting to force players to assign a city to do something before ending the turn, we’ll see what the beta testers say). Technologies will let players access “Ongoing projects” which let them produce growth or research or wealth.

And lots and lots of other stuff

We also added a bunch of new monsters (skeletons, liches, brood hunters, to name a few). New quests. New Spells. Lots of new special abilities. And on and on.

Not too shabby for twenty bucks.  

The first beta is expected this Thursday. No promises though.  Just remember, IT IS A BETA. We have a lot of additional content coming in over the next month or so.

We expect to finish in May.

The goal is to have the Legendary Heroes beta out this week.  It’s been held back mostly because we’re having trouble with the self-shadowing.

Shadows are a pain in the butt.  In Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, more engineering hours were spent on the self-shadowing than anything else. But ya gotta do it. It’s one of those uncanny valley things.

Game Geeking

Derek (Kael) and I have been going over various UI elements, particularly regarding the behavior of selected units.  Most of you don’t know this but Derek and I lived together for a year.  When he first joined Stardock, he lived in Ohio and until his family could find the right place here in Michigan, he lived with me and my family.  I can honestly say, now that they have their own place, we really miss having him live with us (my 6 year old in particular asks when Derek is coming home).  So a lot of day time gets “wasted” now discussing game stuff like when units should be centered on the screen or how much we wish we could steal and clone Soren Johnnson’s brain.

You’d be surprised how much time can be spent discussing the best way to implement shadows.  Baking vs. dynamic. How realistic should they be? How much perf should they be allowed to use (memory vs. GPU).  As geeks, we never get tired of this stuff.

Starcraft 2

I’ve spent too much time playing Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm.  Tom Chick, aka, the meanest man in the world, has a review on it.  Personally, I’m loving HOTS but having not played SC2 since it was relatively new, I’m not sure how much of the awesomeness is in HOTS and how much has evolved in free updates. In either event, Blizzard deserves a lot of credit for turning a strategy game into its own ecosystem.  I am particularly impressed with their AI which provides a good, if decisively non-human, challenge.

DLC

I’m getting a lot of emails regarding post LH DLC.  Yes, we plan to make it but we basically want to focus on making LH as good as we can and then after release find out what people want us to make. 

Yes, we’re still hiring

We’re looking for more experienced game developers. Stardock pays well and has lots of fringe benefits (personal fitness trainer, nutrionists, movie days, etc.).  There won’t be any MP in any of the Elemental games until we can hire at least 1 more network developers.  We want MP. I agree with the arguments for it. I think LH in particular lends itself to it. But I have to have coders who can do it.   I’ve literally got 2 people on the games side of the company who can do that work and they’re working on future games that absolutely have to have MP. 

Stay tuned

I am still hoping we make this week for LH.  The current plan is for LH to go “gold” this Spring.  We’re friends with the Snowbird guys and we agreed we’d come out after they come out so that no one is stealing the other’s thunder. Here’s my plug for Eador: Masters of the Broken World.  If you want to see a game with a good use of shadows, check that game out.  Talk about a beautiful looking game.  They have another game coming out that I think has been announced called Caribbean (think 17th century RPG).  Keep an eye on Snowbird.  As a child of the 80s, I get a great deal of joy interacting with game developers in the former Soviet Union.  It just goes to show how much better the world is today than it was 30 years ago.

Anyone with a Stardock forum account can create a blog on JoeUser.com which in turn supports external blogging APIs.

I'm using that right now to write this blog via Word 2013 on my Surface RT.

Here's the Metaweblog API URL:

https://www.joeuser.com/api/MetaWeblog.axd

To say the response to ModernMix has been overwhelming would be an understatement.  In the 20 years that Stardock has existed, we’ve never put something out that has has been this positively received, this fast.

To recap: Last week we put out the first beta of ModernMix, a program that lets users run Windows 8 ModernUI (Metro) apps in a window, on the desktop.  It’s a free download that you can also buy for $5 (which gets you the full beta and final version).

The reaction has been universally positive. But also, people (including myself) have found that ModernMix may be the single best thing to happen to ModernUI apps. It makes them relevant because many of them are really good – but not something you’d want to dominate a 22 inch monitor.

Can anyone seriously say that these ModernUI apps would be better run full-screen on a large monitor?

Here are some of the headlines:

Here’s the $4.99 utility that might just have saved Windows 8 [The Register]

Slick Trick: $5 tool runs Modern apps on the Windows 8 desktop [Computerworld]

Start8 and ModernMix – Windows 8’s last, best hope for normality on the desktop (ZDNet)

ModernMix Runs Windows 8 Full-Screen apps on the desktop (LifeHacker)

Run and resize Modern Windows 8 apps on the desktop (Neowin)

Windows 8 tip: Run Metro Apps in windows on the desktop (WinSuperSite)

ModernMix: Makes Windows 8 better by running Metro apps on the desktop (GHacks.net)

Stardock’s ModernMix lets you use Windows 8 apps in desktop mode (WinSource)

ModernMix runs Windows 8 Metro apps in traditional desktop windows (GizMag)

This five-dollar app solves the biggest problem with Windows 8 (CiteWorld)

ModernMix: Runs Windows 8 apps on the desktop (The Windows Club)

How to run Windows 8 apps on the desktop with ModernMix (CNET)

Stardock ModernMix app allows ALL Windows apps to run in desktop mode (Mobile Magazine)

ModernMix enables all Windows 8 apps to run on the desktop (Geeky Gadgets)

ModernMix lets you run Windows 8 apps in a window on the desktop (WinBeta)

ModernMix Fixes Windows 8, runs all apps on the desktop (Laptop Magazine)

And these are just the ones I know about and is by no means complete (and it hasn’t even been a week since the beta went out).