What’s the best Battlefield 3 weapon?  I don’t know.  But for me, I’m using a decked out F2000. It fits my particular, admittedly crappy, style of playing.

My style, such as it is, comes from playing too many years of Duke Nukem 3D where I was rewarded for charging in, Leroy Jenkins style and killing a bunch of people.  It doesn’t work so well in a game where one hit means you’re dead. 

The F2000 assault rifle is nice because it has little kick to it so I can spray a bit. I do aim, but I tend not aim..well.  I do fine with shotguns as well but the F2000 is also a long range weapon (unlike a shotgun).

My favorite scope is the IRNV which is totally cheesed right now because it effectively lets you see, even in the day, other soldiers that you would not normally have any chance of seeing.  They’re going to fix it soon so I’ll enjoy it while I can.

It’s amazing how quickly you can pick up all kinds of weapons. Made me feel much more knowledgeable when talking to my father-in-law this weekend who has real knowledge on real weapons.  “Sure, the AK-74M is a good weapon but I find it climbs too much…”

This is me in the debugger so bear that in mind as you watch this:

http://screencast.com/t/QJhXaIbR

One of the changes to Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is a significant update of the graphics system. This is done so that Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion remains state of the art visually.

Example:

BEFORE:

and…

AFTER:

Two challenges for AI champions and sovereigns:

#1 Have them intelligently improve themselves over the course of the game (without cheating):

Done.  Level 10 means he’s been beating the crap out of monsters and enemies.

Second challenge: Get him to use this power intelligently in tactical battle…

Nope, not there yet.

Some years ago, Stardock and Gas Powered Games announced the Gamers Bill of Rights. 

Chris Taylor and I were very concerned with some of the practices of game developers and publishers that we believed were driving consumers away from purchasing games (or at least not pirating them).

We maintain the site: www.gamersbillofrights.org.

Stardock has tried to adhere to the GBoR and has not always been able to live up to the spirit of the document.

Moreover, as the years pass, the GBoR is becoming increasingly dated (does anything still make you put a DVD in the drive to play it? Are there any copy protection schemes still installing root kits?).

To that end, we invite you to post your own list of things you think developers and publishers do (not just PC but in general) that you believe are counter productive or even harmful to those developers and publishers in the long run.

There hasn’t been a lot of talk of the most obvious game play change in the Elemental universe. We call them Wild Lands.

We got rid of “minor races” in Fallen Enchantress.  We had bigger plans for them. And those bigger plans manifest themselves in the form of wild lands. These are chunks of the world that are still trying to hold on to the pre-cataclysm days.

There’s a bunch of different ones, all that look different and feel different. 

You don’t go into the Wild Lands unless, you know, you want to die.  Badly.  But if you are powerful enough to survive there, it’s filled with amazing stuff. A lot of AI work has been put into running the wild lands and in getting the AI to try to take them on (at this stage, I haven’t had a lot of success with the latter, they’re very dangerous places).

To use classic game mechanic terms, thing of Wild Lands as being like Orion (or Antares). If you can take it’s really awesome. But don’t expect to be able to.

You know the #1 suckiest thing about writing AI for me?

It’s that not only do I have to play in cloth map only mode (I run with massive debugging) but I have to run in ugly cloth map mode.

I’m not going to say I hate every single person on this planet. I’m sure there are people living in deserts and jungles who are just fine. I still hate them, mind you. It’s out of principle. So yea, I guess I do hate everything.

Until I am freed from having to play the game like this, I’m going to be one grumpy bastard. You gotta feel kind of bad for Stardock. A real company wouldn’t let one of its devs even post this kind of inanity. But of course, I’m the boss so I can post how annoying it is to play the game at 3fps in cloth map mode. 

There’s nothing that can be done. I did GalCiv that way too. People cried. Their tears were delicious and nourishing.  But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

One of the things that is giving me fits in Fallen Enchantress is getting delicate units to a dangerous place safely.

The classic case, sending a pioneer to claim a new area – but without getting killed on the way.

The hardest part of writing AI isn’t coming up with *A* away to solve a problem. It is solving the problem that doesn’t require a lot of coding time AND doesn’t doesn’t eat up a lot of CPU.

So, for instance, I don’t have the luxury that you humans have of looking at the path a unit generates between A and B and see what’s dangerous. That would be immensely expensive. 

Similarly, while providing a body guard for a unit is another path to take, the problem there is that you could really slow down your expansion and get wiped out by the human player who is able to make better decisions.

So with Impulse over to Gamestop and the digital distribution competition no longer something we’re participating in we’ve developed a new digital updating client – Stardock Central (what’s old is new again).

But unlike the old “big” client, the new one is very…very simple.

(sorry for the lame screenshot, I’m caught up on my games on this new machine and haven’t installed any apps yet).

Your Stardock purchases will show up here once you login. Just pick what you want to install (or update) and press a button and it’ll use our massively fast CDN to install it (we have a long-term agreement with our CDN except now the only thing using its bandwidth is our stuff so the download speeds are kind of ridiculous – it’s like being the only guy on a 1 gigabyte line).

The new settings includes an option to have it simply update your software automatically.  So you can either choose to stick with older versions or always have it up to date.

..

OK, let’s say you don’t like to have to install a client at all.  That’s fine too.  You can update your software and games via the web as well:

Pick whether it’s software or games and it’ll look at your account, when you last updated, and off you go.  The installer will figure out what you need to install (i.e. if you have multiple machines with different versions) and off you go.

It’s designed to be as streamlined as possible.

UPDATE: TRY THE LATEST VERSION HERE:

https://www.stardock.com/products/stardockcentral/

Elemental has rally points.

Oh, you guys don’t get them. There’s no UI for it presently. But they’re there. Just like in Galactic Civilizations but much more sophisticated.

Did I mention you guys don’t get them right now?

One of the things I’ve been working on is getting the AI to use them in ways far beyond what I’ve done in GalCiv or other AI’s before.  Using rally points intelligently (and without using a lot of CPU time) is a serious trick.

Now, in the screenshot above, the AI’s archer army is building up just outside of town even though those armies had to collect together from a very long way away.

While simple on the surface to do, there’s a lot of thought that has to go into making this work (otherwise, the player could just figure out where the rally points are and station an army there ready to pick them off, there’s a lot of timing involve to make sure units aren’t vulnerable long).