I had forgotten how much I enjoy these things.  

It's great to get out and talk to "my kind". That is, hard core gamers.  Today I got to talk about now just Fallen Enchantress and Sins of a Solar Empire but the transition from 32-bit gaming to 64-bit, mobile gaming, DirectX 11, and the impact HTML 5 is going to have on game development.

Sins of a Solar Empire always demos well since it's got spectacular effects in it.  Fallen Enchantress gained some new spells recently that show well. I can't wait to see what the team does with the new particle effect system with light sourcing and bit strips.

I was reading some articles that covered the Stardock 2012 report and in the comments section one thing that came up over and over was the allegation that I "badmouthed" Steam or Valve or what have you and that I "suddenly" liked Steam after we sold Impulse.

It's annoying when people try to fabricate a narrative that has no basis in reality.

As a reminder:

http://frogboy.joeuser.com/article/315154/Brads_Impulse_Launch_Review

"You would have to pry Steam out of my cold dead hands" -Brad Wardell, June 17, 2008 during the Impulse launch.

and

https://forums.stardock.com/375282

"Well first, I’m a fanboy of Valve because they are everything I admire – excellent. I don’t really see Impulse or Steam as an either/or thing. I use Steam. I don’t want Steam to be “beaten”. But I think as excellent as Steam is, there is a lot more to go and I do not like concentrations of power. " -Brad Wardell, February 2010

Running Impulse never meant we wanted Steam to fail.  The reasons we ultimately sold Impulse are well documented. But us liking Steam and Valve today isn't some recent conversion.  You can compete with something and think that something is good.  

Had a great day demoing Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion and Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.  The updated game mechanics, graphics, and new magical spells like Tidal Wave, Fire Storm, and Grip of Winter demoed really well.

So far, what demoed the best was the upcoming counter-strategies available due to recent changes in how weapons and defenses work (this won't be fully available to beta testers until late Beta 3).  

Feedback was very positive. Given the...difficulties we had with WOM, it was good to see excitement on the direction FE is taking.  

Explains the basics.

In this screenshot, I have the amount of ground cover set to “none”.  It’s a personal preference but I prefer less “stuff” on the map. Others have argued it makes the game less pretty.

We have completed our annual customer report for last year.  Each year we send out a survey to our customer base asking them a host of questions so that we can better serve them.

In exchange, we share the results of these surveys along with a report on what went right and wrong the previous year along with plans for the forthcoming year.

We are pleased to present you the full report here: https://www.stardock.com/press/CustomerReports/Stardock2011.pdf

Kael has nearly finished implementing the stat system for FE.

It's like that line from Star Wars "The last vestiges of the Old Republic have been swept away."

You want the good news or the bad news?

Oh, you want the good news right? Of course. You want that? You want that first anyway? I’m not brave enough to do it the other way.

Well, the good news is that next week, I’ll be traveling to California to visit with the gaming media to talk about Elemental: Fallen Enchantress and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion.  So hopefully we’ll be able to get some coverage and I won’t lie to you, WE WILL NEED YOUR HELP.

I say that because if you’re reading this, you are familiar with the whole Internet thing.  Here’s how it goes:

Website X will write a preview of Fallen Enchantress.

First comment will be “Elemental sucked, they should give up on it! I doubt this is going to make any difference”

Hopefully, you, reading this, have played the beta and hopefully you agree that, Fallen Enchantress is turning out to be very very good, especially when you consider our current estimated target release date is this Fall (think of where War of Magic was at this stage).  So we’re going to need all the help we can get to get the word out that Fallen Enchantress is turning out really well.

Because without positive confirmation from actual people playing the beta, it is, as GamersWithJobs’s podcast recently put it, “doomed”.

Now, the bad news…

There won’t be a beta update this week. The team is trying to get the build ready for Beta 3 which is what I’ll be showing next week.  When I get back, we’ll be putting it together for you guys. It’ll have the dramatically changed Quendar and Gilden factions. We think you’re really going to like what we’re doing with faction differentiation and can’t wait to get your feedback.

As some of you may know, 32-bit Windows XP users only see 2GB of memory no matter how much memory they have installed.

Windows 7 users see 3GB of memory IF they're running a 32-bit version and 4GB if they're running 64-bit -- as far as Fallen Enchantress is concerned (native 64-bit programs can see effectively unlimited amounts of memory).

The #1 thing holding us back on having "more" stuff is memory.  We've been optimizing memory a lot in the past month so that we can stuff more but it sure would be nice to have even another 500 megs to play with.

If you are using Windows XP, I would really recommend upgrading to Windows 7 soon.  FE will probably be the last game we make that supports XP.

When people play the FE campaign, they’re going to freak that there’s no special c++ code. Anyone could make it if they were as insane as Jon Shafer is anyway.