Two takeaways from the PS4:

1. GDDR-5 memory. This means a lot of bandwidth to communicate between assets and the CPU. A pretty big deal as it ensures that their CPU will be more fully utilized.

2. 64-bit. This is huge. Means you’ll be able to support megatextures and have vastly richer worlds to play in. More specifically, it’ll mean that it’ll support types of games that you couldn’t realistically do on a mobile device which keeps the iOS/Android games away. It also means that the games might be slightly cheaper to make. A lot of time is spent optimizing games to fit on current hardware and that’s very very expensive.

While some people will say it’s just a souped up PC, it doesn’t really matter. If I’m a game developer and I know that my minimum spec is this, I can create games that are simply unimaginable on the current PC.

I’ll be curious to find out how much L2 cache it has and a bit more on the GPU. Sounds like an AMD 7800 series level chip.

So I have a 20KW solar array. Love it.  But it has one big problem for me that is surprisingly hard/expensive to solve: If the grid power goes off, so does the solar array.

That’s because the solar array feeds into the grid with me taking what I need first.  But if the grid isn’t up, the solar array has to shut down because it is no longer connected to the “circuit”.  Besides that, you wouldn’t want to run your house where the power could go on and off randomly based on clouds moving in the sky.

The solution is to have a battery sink for the solar array. The solar panels feed the batteries and if the power goes off, the house uses the batteries until they run out with the solar array feeding the batteries as best they can.  However, it turns out that those batteries can be expensive. Very. Very expensive. As in tens of thousands of dollars expensive.

My house has a backup generator already in the event that power goes out. But in a true Zombie apocalypse scenario, my solar array would be worthless.

My dog Bailey turns 2 years old this week!

Bailey when we brought her home

Bailey recently

Do you have a pet? What do they look like?

I was reading a forum discussion regarding a car shop owner who lost his temper with a customer and berated them (hurled a bunch of profanity at them). The customer filed a suit against them for emotional distress. I couldn’t find a link to verify if this is even a real lawsuit but the discussion itself was illuminating.

One of the participants said that they hope that the car shop owner “gets taken to the cleaners”.

Really? This is the society these people want to see? Someone being mean to you is not a lottery ticket.  Thankfully, our system doesn’t work that way. At least not yet.

Obviously this hits home for me since I’ve had to deal with hyper-entitled people over the years who think because they’re the customer that they have an unlimited license to be abusive.  I could imagine some ticked off banned forum user one day suing us for “emotional distress” and finding plenty of people who hoped that they “took us to the cleaners”.

I sometimes wonder how many misunderstandings occur online due to people who don’t speak English as their native language interpreting dry humor as literal statements. 

I recently saw on a forum a discussion that quoted banter back and forth between myself and our PR rep. It goes something like this:

PR Rep: Got a 4.5 out of 5 on Game X!

Me: Oh no! That’ll wreck the Metacritic score – we want it to end up at 79. High enough for sales but low enough so we don’t have to give bonuses!

PR Rep: Stop! What is wrong with you?

Me: Same thing as when I had that case of Tourette's Syndrome

The dry humor part is the infamous rumor/fact that studios won’t get bonuses if the metacritic score is less than 80. But on the forum I saw, they were taking these statements literally. But the people doing so didn’t speak English as their first language.

Obviously, it’s possible they’re just…you know…dumb. But I wonder how much is lost in translation.

In our own vaporware category we have Society.

You may recall this game that has been in various stages of development for ages.

Here’s a sneak peek GameSpy gave to it from 2005.

It had a number of radical (at the time) ideas such as being “free to play” with a “persistent world”.

So what happened? Basically we’ve been having to wait until the hardware gets to the point where we can do it.  We developed our Kumquat engine for this (which is what is now the basis of our current 4X titles in development) but to do a real-time, huge scale RTS, we really need a 64-bit, DirectX 11 style game engine. 

So Society may be on hold but it’s not gone or forgotten.  It’s just an example of a great game concept whose day will come. Until then, it’ll have to remain in the ether of pre-production.

Sorry for the bit of self-promotion but I recently set up a new blog site that takes all my posts written as Frogboy (my day job account) and Draginol (my personal account) and puts them together.

The site is www.littletinyfrogs.com. 

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Stardock CEO Brad Wardell’s blog site

I have added a new forum called the Kickstarter forum.  It'll slowly propagate through the Stardock ecosystem.  Use this to promote Kickstarters you like.

We’re working on Fallen Enchantress 1.3 which has a lot of nice balancing updates that we think you’ll like. We also improved performance, fixed a save game corruption crash and just generally integrated some great ideas from the forums.

Since the screenshots we have up are…well…you know…horrible…here are some from a pre-release of 1.3:

One of the new features is a pretty big change that you’ll notice almost immediately. Procedural tile yield generation.  Basically, it means that the tile yields will be a lot more varied and interesting (and generally bigger).  Way less 3/3/1 tiles (in fact, rare) and way more 5/2/2 tiles or 2/5/2 tiles or even 1/4/3 tiles.

Not a huge change but a lot of balancing was done on how many resources are placed and where. The result is that you don’t hit that plateau of “hitting the turn button waiting” that sometimes creeps in.  In fact, you may find the game feeling like it’s going by fast – until you check the time.

Diplomacy improvements were big on the wishlists of FE players. And so we put a lot of effort into making the AI players play more intelligently here.  No more “Want to sign a treaty? Give me 90 gold” only to have them declare war the next turn…admittedly, that is actually a pretty smart strategy but kind of a jerky one.

Now, the diplomacy works by players building up a rapport with different players over time.  This means that you can check on the relations and it may say Neutral but show a ton of negatives (or positives) there that point to where your relationship is going in the future.

I just thought this looked pretty.

Another big change is that the AI is much more aggressive at going after the Spell of Mastery victory. In fact, we had to change the UI because it was actually quite annoying at how abruptly the AI could sneak up on this.  Now, the UI will actually warn you when a player has started building the components of the Forge of the Overlord.

We expect this to go into beta within the next week.

If you haven’t heard of the Dog Shame group on Facebook, it’s hilarious. I contributed Bailey to it today when I came back from a meeting with Derek I found her in my office with the remnants of my candy bar (and yes, it was chocolate).