We’ve got N resources and M things to work on. Based on your experiences with beta 2, where would you like N to go the most?
Vote here:
Update: We've made a Start button for Windows 8 that brings up a Start menu. Click here to sign up.
So here’s my Metro desktop. Now, I’ve only been using Windows since v2.1 so maybe I’m missing a few things like…
1) How do I sort the tiles?
2) How do I organize them into groups?
3) How do I change the size of tiles?
4) How do I change the color?
These aren’t customization requests, these are basic organizational features people expect.
I like the Metro style. So I’d love to be able to color code tiles based on how I might use them. Intuitively, I’d expect to be able to drag select (or shift select or ctrl select) a bunch of tiles, right click and choose various options. Except, there are no context menus. Instead, you get an option to unpin or uninstall at the bottom of the screen – great for tablet use but not real useful here.
Android and iPhone users are used to being able to put their stuff in folders/groups/whatever. What about here? This seems pretty basic stuff.
The tech is good
Here’s the maddening part, Windows 8 is the best version of Windows yet – technologically. WinRT is great. The memory optimization they’ve done is fantastic. It’s faster. It’s smoother. But it’s also unusable for trying to get a lot of work done.
This isn’t a case of “just get used to it”. There’s not a lot to get used to. This would be akin to taking away the keyboard on a tablet/smart phone and telling people to just use a stylus to draw what they want and accuse them of not “giving it a chance” when they complain.
What’s the usage case?
In Product design, we typically create use cases. How we expect people to use what we’re making. I honestly can’t see what their use cases for this is. How is a user seriously supposed to do serious production work if all the “new” apps are full screen with no quick way to switch between them?
And I’m not talking about power user stuff here, I’m talking what is the use case of someone who is trying to use Power Point, Word, and Excel together in a Metro environment?
That is an example of an app (the reader app). The back button does not take you out of the app. It’s disabled. To get out of the app, you move your mouse to the top left or bottom left of the screen.
To switch between your running apps you move your mouse to the top left and then to the side:
And you get a list of tiles.
Now, again, I am not trying to beat up on Windows 8 here. I would like one of the Windows 8 fans to make the case on how that metaphor is faster or better or more intuitive than the case where I could have all 3 apps up on the screen at once. Note that I used the word OR. You don’t even have to make the case for all 3. Just one of them would be fine.
Heck, even my Iphone is easier to switch apps than this (double tap and pick the app).
And the PC is not designed to run everything full screen. How many people choose to run everything full screen?
It’s not all doom
The problem with Windows 8 isn’t technical. It’s political. Someone, way at the top, almost certainly over the cries of developers and designers, is insisting on this. Here’s why I say this:
A warning to the fan community
You’re not doing Microsoft any favors by shouting down people’s complaints with Windows 8’s consumer preview. I have a vested interest in the success of Windows 8. Professionally, I need Windows 8 to be a huge hit. I can tell you straight out, unless these things are addressed, few enterprises will move to this and few consumers will voluntarily move to it. And in an age where “Getting a new Dell” is no longer automatic, those Mac Airbooks start to look compelling to a lot of consumers – and it will be a lot more familiar to use than the current Windows 8 experience.
Am I the only one who has wished they could press a button when reading some trolling comment and summon the troll to their presence?
Not to punch them in the nose or anything but for study. What kind of person is a troll?
My personal favorite troll that I encounter is the entitled gamer. Are they an adult? Do they have a family? Do they literally live under a bridge?
Greetings!
March is here! If you’re not in the Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion beta, which starts this week, then you might be interested in what is happening in the world of Elemental. So here is where things stand.
The Beast Lord has the power to recruit certain monsters in battle
We plan to release the next build in the beta 2 series within the next week or two. I can’t tell you what will be in it yet. There’s a lot of things that are being worked on at once. Derek and his team have all kinds of diabolical stuff in the works. A lot of Fall From Heaven players have noticed his influence on the Elemental universe and he’s just getting warmed up.
What I can talk about are the things we’re concentrating on here.
Stability
For most people, stability hasn’t been a major issue. But the game will crash occasionally at some point regardless of how stable it is for you. I can assure you, it will crash some % of the time in Beta 2. That is because of the migration to a much more heavily threaded architecture.
Most of you have played War of Magic. So you know how much faster and smoother Fallen Enchantress is even on the same hardware. Why? Threading. Lots of them. The more cores you have, the better it gets. And even if you have only 2 cores, it’s still a lot better.
Even as the AI has gotten smarter, the world more complex, the time between turns and performance has improved. This is because of all the threads happening in the background. But the challenge is making sure those threads are messing with each other’s data at the same time.
We’ve made great strides here as we’ve nearly finished our migration to the threaded engine update. We hope this will become apparent in Beta 2-B. However, that said, Beta 2-B will not be rock solid. I’m just warning you now. It’ll be better than Beta 2 but as we fix problems, we add new ones. It’s for a good cause. Memory optimization is necessary but painful.
If you’re running a 64-bit version of Windows, you’re already set because Fallen Enchantress will use 4 gigs of memory if it can. So that lets us have more monsters, more players, more everything. But Windows XP users can only see 2 gigs which is why we have to focus on optimization. It’s good to be lean and mean (though my Amiga could do crazy things with 512K of memory).
Balance
Other than making sure the game is reliable for people, balance is our top priority. Balance can include everything from tweaking numbers to adding new assets. Making sure that higher level weapons and armor matter a lot more has a huge game play effect. For example, spears do less damage than they did before and as a result, they’re still good weapons early on or in mass but they’ll get slaughtered by knights. Right now: You can beat the AI by creating cheese spearmen (throw in a few negative traits, get squads and go to town – that’s how I do it anyway).
Similarly, lots of new magic spells are being added to the game which help us make sure that the different paths to victory are distinct, fun, and meaningful.
Diplomacy
This probably won’t make it into the beta 2 series. But diplomacy is going to get a lot more attention for Beta 3. For example, we are considering an option to let players surrender to you where their sovereign becomes your vassal (they get a negative trait called “broken spirit” that keeps them from being too powerful – last thing we need is players being able to spring Verga on their enemies). The idea of snooty Procipinee doing my bidding has some appeal.
The Diplomacy screen is likely to change quite a bit from what you see now to provide more information and more opportunities for interesting exchanges between you and your opponents.
Unique Factions & Champions
The champions have been getting a lot of attention. The idea is that each of them should have a fairly unique ability. This way, as you come to know the world, you know that if you get, say Adant Verris, that you’ll be getting Chain Lightning.
The same goes with factions as we start to incorporate different equipment, traits and such into each of them. If one faction is largely impervious to archery and you’ve decided to focus having massive archer armies, that may affect your strategy for dealing with them.
We are still playing around with different ideas here. Unlike with Galactic Civilizations where players (ironically) intuitively understood that shields were effective against beam weapons and armor was a good defense against mass drivers, most people aren’t that familiar with medieval level armor. We’ve grown up thinking that plate male is always the best and you should just toss that on to everything.
The modders…well, the modders are going to go to town on this game. There was some joking earlier internally about how long it would take someone to make an Alpha Centauri total conversion with this stuff. Even the “look” of the game is, ultimately, just PNG’s and DDS files.
Art, Music, Animation
At some level, knowing you will never see this world again is part of the appeal. Randomly generated worlds mean you don’t know what’s going to happen.
Don’t judge me. So yea, I name my monsters.
Keyboard
Maybe I’m just old but I want to be able to navigate more with the keyboard. This is an area we’re starting to put more attention to. Not just in terms of hot keys but just general navigation through the game. Fallen Enchantress is a game that you “might” play 10 hours straight. So less forced mouse moving = better as far as we’re concerned.
AI
This is something we will constantly be improving on. Every day I play the game, I find something.
For example, today I was able to find out why the AI wasn’t taking over monster lairs. They’re “goodie huts” but they’re a special kind which the AI couldn’t “see”. Another little thing I found was that once the AI merged armies into army groups, it wasn’t treating nearby units as anything worth considering. So you could walk by a bunch of enemy armies safely because it didn’t think it was worth bothering with something so little – as you then went and conquered its city.
Then in tactical battles we fixed a problem where some of the more powerful spells weren’t used because they’re classified differently so again, the AI couldn’t “see” those spells.
Plus, there’s no substitute for play testing and refining.
The next beta will probably lower the default AI difficulty to easy instead of normal because if you’re just learning the game, normal now will destroy the average player.
What’s next
We really hope you guys are enjoying the beta as much as we are having making it.
We got a start button / start menu up and running this afternoon.
http://frogboy.joeuser.com/article/418946/Windows_8_Start_button_returns
I’ve already seen a lot of Microsoft fanboys complaining about how “Stardock always makes Windows look old” which is pretty ironic since it was Stardock that first introduced Windows users to the concept of ZIP files as folders, widgets, gadgets, docks (which we were doing before OS X), side bars, shadows, GUI skinning, composited desktops, open file dialog short-cuts, file version revisioning, etc. etc.
What we do at Stardock is take Windows to try to make it better. Normally, it means adding new features to the OS. Having to bring back the Start button and Start menu is something, ideally, Microsoft will do before Windows 8 ships.
While Microsoft is at it, here’s a few other things that would be nice:
Here’s what we’ve put together in 24 hours:
So if Microsoft doesn’t restore the Windows 8 desktop to being able to work without jumping back and forth between it and Metro, we’ll do it.
Obviously we can improve on this but we’ll see how much Microsoft fixes things up before we invest too much time on this. Comment here if you think you’d be interested in something like this. As the Windows 8 beta evolves, we can start to look at what sorts of usability things need to be addressed and put together something more comprehensive.
Update: GO HERE to get it: https://www.stardock.com/products/start8/
Monster Lairs, it turns out, were using a different object identifier. Thus, the AI couldn’t “see” them. It saw the monsters but not their lairs which is where the treasure is. It’ll be interesting to see how much impact this has.
We’ve talked previously about the work done on updating the visuals for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion.
Tomorrow, we plan to release BETA 1 of Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion so users can see both the graphical update and, more importantly, the new Rebellion and Loyalist factions, Titans, new capital ships and the hundreds of other changes and additions to the Sins of a Solar Empire universe.
A lot of the improvements will be subtle but hopefully noticed by players. The team has updated the AI for both combat (using special abilities intelligently) as well as for strategic use to ensure the single player game gets taken up a few notches.
The multiplayer experience is obviously very beefed up thanks to improvements to ICO and the inclusion of Steamworks for taking a lot of the load off of ICO.
So many crashes, so little time.
Well, not really. Not on the time part anyway. I have a crazy amount of time.
I hate to say this guys but I enjoy your crash reports. I’ve mentioned before that this is the first game I’ve been lead developer on since…I think The Corporate Machine which was like 1999. Thanks to the sale of Impulse, I can…indulge myself here.
So anyway, here is why your game crashes (most of the time).
Unlike with War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress is very very multithreaded.
That means, that lots of things are happening at the same time. But it also means a lot of things can be changing variables at the same time.
If we weren’t stuck with DirectX 9, I’d be able to do some crazy insane things with the threads (with DirectX 10+, I could send a lot of my AI onto the GPU and let’s face it, you guys know I’d totally do it because I have a disease when it comes to computer AI).
Now, with FE, I’m dealing with Kumquat which was architected under a very different set of circumstances. So it wasn’t designed to be as multithreaded as I’ve been making things. This means I have to use what are called critical sections to keep thread A from changing something that thread B is currently looking at.
If I miss one, the game crashes. If I put in the wrong critical section, the game will hang hard (like lock up).
Here’s a classic example:
Thread 1:
for I = 1 to Number_Of_Cities
City = ListofCities[i]
Thread 2:
if CityConquered THEN Number_Of_Cities++
So you can end up where thread 1 ends up looking at a piece of data that is literally garbage and trying to do something with it. The result, a crash.
Now, you might say, why have all these threads?
I can only respond by suggesting the loading up of War of Magic v1.4 and playing through a late game. Nearly all the performance gains in FE are from multithreading. Your CPU probably has 2 to 4 “cores” on it. That means they can do a lot of cool stuff at once.
And in the future, when we ditch DirectX 9, I’ll be able to spin your graphics adapter into splitting up its drawing (#1 reason to look forward to an XBOX 720 is that it’ll probably be DirectX 11 based and that’s a very big deal).
It is a non-trivial effort to nail all these down. The good news is, it’s not hard. It just requires a lot of testing and evaluation which is what we’re doing. Your crash reports have made a world of difference.
Reading is what I do while I wait for the night to be over to start the next day. 
I love my Kindle. 99 cent books.
Anyway, here are a few books I highly highly recommend for those who dig sci-fi
Excellent:
Old Man’s War
The Last Colony
The Ghost Brigades
Post-Human and Trans Human
Good:
The Forever War
The Old Man and the Wasteland
Decent:
Anomaly
Zoe’s Tale
The Doomsday Book (this is good if you like history)
Fatherland
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Next Month: Non-Fiction…