Our friends at Nexus Mods have set up a Fallen Enchantress mod site.  It’s pretty awesome I must confess. 

It’s already getting filled up with some excellent mods.

You can get to it here:

http://fallenenchantress.nexusmods.com/

As a reminder:

1. Save a backup of your \english directory (it’s the <game>\data\english directory) before getting too crazy with mods
2. Make sure you turn on “use mods” in the options screen
3. Have fun!

I’ve already seen mods that add in some crazy new races, cool new weapons (cross bows, etc.), higher resolution screens.

Over the coming months, we plan to put a lot of time working with modders to make it easier and more robust to create more world changing mods.

Anyway, visit: http://fallenenchantress.nexusmods.com/ to check out the mods.

One thing I've noticed over the years is how often someone thinks a post (blog, fb, tweet, etc.) is about them. Makes me think of the song "you're so vain".

Anyone else ever experience that? 

Stupid Thanksgiving sale. 

It’s too late for me.  Save yourselves!

Have a great day everyone!  We are thankful for many things and among them is how grateful we are to be able to hang out and talk to you guys (and gals) on a regular basis.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We’re babysitting Paul (Mormegil) and Kristin’s (Kristin was my partner on PowerUser.TV) dog.

She seems to be surviving:

My wife is addicted to Christmas.  And so this year we decided to line the trees up the drive way with Christmas lights.

I’ve been watching the fall-out from the destruction of Hostess.

I’m not going to get into the “blame” game other than to say it’s kind of dumb for people who go on strike to be shocked that they lose their jobs.

What I will get into is the never-ending stupidity of complaining about CEO pay.  Americans have no problem with paying athletes and entertainers tens of millions of dollars annually. But they rage about people getting paid a couple million for running a multi-billion dollar company.  Frankly, it just amazes me.  Our society just seems to have its priorities totally messed up.

For those of you who aren experienced modders, much of which follows is just preaching to the choir.  But for those of you new to modding, you may find this useful..

As some of you know, FE development was led by modders.  Derek Paxton and Jon Shafer are best known for their Civ 4 mods (Fall From Heaven in Derek's case).  As for myself, I got my modding start with Civ 1, MOM, Total Annihilation, and so on.  My love of Civilization 1 ultimately led to writing Galactic Civilizations.

And this brings me to the frustrating part of modding: the limited lifespan of the mod.  I eventually got to know Total Annihilation so well that had they made a Total Annihilation 2 with a derivative of their original engine I'd been already set up to do crazy cool stuff.  But that didn't happen (and don't talk to me about TA:K).

So our approach has been to approach Elemental from the perspective of it being a platform that mods can be built with for years to come.  Many of the mods that worked with War of Magic work, with slight changes, with FE.  That's because WOM and FE are built on the same platform which we call Kumquat.  

Kumquat is a relatively new engine and we have land-based strategy games scheduled to use it and upgraded versions of it for the next several years -- and not just Elemental universe games.  So the skills and understandings of what you get from modding FE will lend itself to more modding. 

We also plan to support both Nexus Mods and the Steam workshop as we go forward in ways that make what we have today seem very primitive.  

The point being, the age old issues of short-lifespan mods is something we are hoping Kumquat addresses. We looked at Kumquat as a platform that modders can use to create increasingly ambitious mods.  I can't promise source code or scripting support yet. Resources are tight, but we will be supporting this underlying platform and the expansion of its capabilities until *at least* 2017.

If you played WOM in 2010, consider what FE is like in 2012.  Now, consider what Kumquat will be like in 2014. 

There's a school of thought that it's better to have fewer but bigger updates to software.  I tend to be in that school of thought.

But as a developer, we really enjoy sharing what we do with our customers as quickly as humanly possible. 

For example, in v1.02, if you're using it right now, you hopefully noticed that we were able to vastly improve the per turn times over v1.01 and earlier.  We thought that a big deal (we came up with a different algorithm for finding units more efficiently which, late game, is a big deal).  v1.02 also starts out using a lot less memory due to dynamic memory caching, a technique we have been working on for awhile but wasn't expected to be ready until v1.1 but actually got done early so we included that.

Right now, for v1.03, we're working on a new way of storing compressed textures and clearing the texture cache (right now, we cache textures for the entire game session which gives a slight performance improvement but over the course of the game can eat up a lot of memory).  We're doing this because we know how many users like really big maps and we'd like to pave the way to larger sized maps eventually.

So anyway, are these regular updates annoying you? Would you prefer if we slowed down and had fewer, bigger updates?

Thanks!

I'm really digging my Surface RT.  However, it's the hardware that makes it so compelling. It's compelling despite the software called Windows RT. But the hardware is so great that it's the first time I've used something that made me think I was using something from the future since my first iPhone.  It's that good.

And yet, Microsoft -- the software side -- has failed in Product Management. Someone, pretty far up the chain there, is incompetent. There's no other explanation. 

Below I will list a handful of oversights that are unnecessary, baffling and detrimental to the success of what they're trying to accomplish.

In no particular order:

1. SkyDrive is not fully integrated.  Surface RT has about 15GB of space. That means, realistically, you need to deal with your stuff in the cloud. And yet, I don't have an easy way to access it unless I use the SkyDrive app or if I essentially launch it from within an app. I can't, for instance, just have a music folder on SkyDrive that the Music app just looks at. Or a Video app. If I want to load a file, I'm going through the hundreds of gigs of SkyDrive stuff. 
   
   For example, I can't go and my Photos folder from SkyDrive to my Photos library.  The integration is basically to just add SkyDrive as a drive to everything rather than letting me quickly get to stuff as if it were on my local drive.
    
2. Skype.  Microsoft bought Skype awhile ago. And yet, the RT version doesn't support searching -- like for contacts.  That makes it very limited for heavy users. It's also strikingly annoying to use as it has the same annoying issues that it has on tablets where it seems to insist on downloading the entire conversation history before it gets you caught up. I'd rather they get the *latest* discussion first and then fill in the back history later. It diminishes its use as a quick and easy way to deal with instant messages.
    
3. Basic Apps.  Remember when every gadgtet/widget program always had the same 10 apps? At this stage, there's a half dozen "gotta have" apps for any tablet.  They include: Mail app, Web Browser, A Music Player, a Video Player, Twitter App, Facebook App, Photo app, Map App, IM app.  These are basics.  And yet, let's look at them:
   
   The Mail app is decent. But it relies on People and People doesn't have my contacts like it's supposed to so it's not working quite right.
   
   The Web Browser app is great.
   
   The Music player is hampered by the weird RT UI standards. Creating a playlist with it is a big pain. There's no cloud integration (beyond having a simple SkyDrive short cut if I want to load a file). It's just plain a pain to use.
   
   Video player is the same as the music player with the same problems. Luckily, most people only care about videos from the net and in that area, the XBOX stuff is pretty good.
   
   There's no include Twitter app and the ones out there on the store are quickly hitting their 100k tokens.
   
   There's no Facebook app.
   
   The Photo app suffers the same problems as the Music/Video apps. There's a SkyDrive folder. But the app is extremely difficult to navigate. I don't even know how to create an album. I'm stuck using the desktop Pictures folder except...there's no SkyDrive availability there. I hate to say this but this app is basically useless.  Does Microsoft just hate folders / organization?
   
   The Map App is pretty decent.
   
   Skype RT is better than any version other than their desktop PC versions.  Which means to say, it's still not very good. You can't even search for contacts which makes it very problematic.
   
   These are the apps Microsoft should have had nailed.  You could argue that the stock and weather apps included are decent. They are. But they're more like bonus apps AFTER you get the basics done.
    
4. Weird UI choices. There is good UI and there is bad UI.  Metro has some bad UI in it.  The most obvious to me is that sliding from left to right takes you to the last app you used and sliding from right to left brings up the Charms bar.  What a lost opportunity.  Right to left should have taken you to whatever app you just switched to from that direction and left to right the opposite. That's intuitive.  The Charms bar could easily have been placed as a button in the app preferences (which you get to by sliding from top down or bottom up). Alternatively, you could have given it its own gesture (like slide right and back to left immediately to correspond with the left and back to right immediately on the  other side to bring up the window list). 
   
   Once you get used to using Windows 8/RT as a touch device, it's amazing how often the inefficiency of getting around apps comes up. It's baffling and reeks of some compromise due to infighting at Microsoft.

Just 4 things. All fixable. None of them technically challenging for Microsoft to have addressed long before Windows 8 shipped.  And that's why I think it's incompetence at the upper levels of Microsoft.  They clearly have the development talent.  But the people who were supposed to have the cohesive vision just blew it here.

I think the outcry from early adopters will get these things fixed.  But the tragic thing here is that they released something that, with just a bit of common sense could have been a revolutionary product. Surface RT / Surface Pro are MacBook Air / Ultrabook killers. 

I can't imagine very many people who sit down and use a Surface device would want to go back to an Ultra book. The superiority is that great -- except for the fact that Windows 8 / RT have these glaring deficiencies that force users back to the desktop, using other apps, to get real stuff done.

BTW, this article was written on a Surface RT.