I just got email from Google that they are discontinuing their Google PowerMeter product.

Google PowerMeter allows people who have a supported device to track the energy use of their house in real time as well as look at graphs and such to determine what is consuming their energy. It’s like Google web analytics except for electricity.

After September 16, it’s gone.  Total bummer as it was a very useful service. One I would have been willing to pay for.

My puppy can be pretty disgusting. The things it tries to eat. The things it rolls in. It’s all bad news. And if it’s an indoor dog, it becomes your problem.

And I have to say, I’m glad I waited until after having 3 children because when it’s your own child, you grin and bear it as you learn to deal with icky gross stuff. By the time you get the dog, you’re numb.

Welcome, my friends, once again to the sausage factory.  While Fallen Enchantress continues forward internally, we also continue work on War of Magic.  Right now, we’re working on the betas of v1.3 which are known as the 1.2X series (1.2c being the most recent beta).

Having programmed most of the changes myself and gotten to play around with them at length as well as listen to feedback here are some of the thoughts I have in no particular order:

1. Despite the considerable work I’ve put in to the new population use system on improvements, I think I’m going to have to yank it out. The problem is that it quickly becomes incredibly difficult and not-fun to manage when your kingdom gets large.  This is a classic case of “kill your darlings”.
2. The game mechanic I am interested in seeing is one that rewards the player for intelligently planning out their cities. I.e. better to have fewer, better cities than more, wimpier cities.
3. The default of having 4 guys in a unit is good. But needs more balancing.
4. One of the objectives is to make it clear that champions (and your sovereign) are a very big deal so we want those 4 guys to be mowed down.  However, the weapons they carry make them glass canons.
5. Need more random events.
6. Need more variation on what the goodie huts give.
7. If I don’t get to redo that tactical battle AI code soon I’m going to die. It makes me cry every time I see the AI sovereign run at my guys stupidly.
8. I am getting dehydrated from crying.
9. I need to get in the reward system so that players get more champions.
10. The game mechanic I am considering is having is using quests as the means of getting champions

I’m glad to hear that the beta itself is stable crash-wise. In fact, I haven’t seen any reports of out of memory issues so it’s possible that this problem has been eliminated in this series.  There is a crash problem with the AI thread and the main thread when they’re looking at tiles. The easy solution would be to use a critical section but I don’t want you guys to find the game choppy between turns. So I’m still looking at it.

I also want to get more AI time on it.  I’m scheduled to be full-time on Fallen Enchantress later this Summer.  Unlike War of Magic where I only got a very limited number of hours to work on the AI by release, with Fallen Enchantress I get a lot more time. But I can use v1.3 of War of Magic as an opportunity to try some new things.

So this weekend I had to take my boat out of the water. In the process I had to wade into water that was up to my waste. Unfortunately, my iPhone was in my pocket.

Like an idiot, I immediately try to turn it on and got just the Apple logo which came on and then would go off. After a few tries of turning it on and off, I didn’t even get the Apple logo.

Ruined. Dammit. $500. @#$@#$@#!

So then I started searching online. Surely, I wasn’t the first person who had done this. I found lots of advice (most of it bad) and none of the advice I found actually included whether it was taken and the results.

Well, the one piece of advice I took was to take the iPhone and put it in a bag of plain dry white rice. I was skeptical about whether this would work.  But next morning, sure enough, I plugged it in to recharge and voila, all we right in the world. Good as new.

Change Log: v1.2c

The release team went with v1.2b instead of v1.29 but it's the v1.3 beta.

Well? What do you guys think?

It’s looking possible that this week will see the first beta of War of Magic v1.3.  v1.3 is the most significant gameplay changes since the game launched.

We are anticipating having 3 beta phases of it. v1.29 (this build) will introduce most (though not all) the coding changes. v1.29a will being introducing the balance changes and the AI overhaul. And v1.29b and on will be polishing, bug fixing, and tweaking.

Here’s what is in the v1.29 build:

Brad

Elemental: War of Magic v1.29

Change Log

+ AI more reactive about updating strategy when a target city has been conquered / destroyed
+ Janusk has been removed.  Goodbye old friend. See you in the Fallen Enchantress tutorial...
+ AI now evaluates which player they care about the most with Dynasty ties being a big motivator. When a sovereign dies, it will give its kingdom to its heir.
+ Repeatable improvements now increase with cost as more are built.
+ World difficulty now sets the default AI player difficulty
+ Modders can set the base cost of repeatable improvements in the appropriate .xml file
+ Base unit CON reduced from 5 to 3
+ Special buildings now longer required to build special units. Instead, these buildings provide bonuses (i.e. no need for a command post to train groups)
+ Minimum number of units you can train has been increased to 4.
+ Trained units default HP reduced from 5 to 1
+ Trained unit groups that survive a battle will heal to full strength (i.e. If your group of 4 survives the battle with 1 guy left, it will be replenished to 4 over time). Hat tip to Konan.
+ Insufficient free tiles message added
+ Zone of control from improvements reduced
+ Tech costs increased
+ Number of starting quest locations increased
+ Pedastrians disabled (for now)
+ More aggressively freeing memory
+ Notable locations may now be explored regardless of your level.
+ Notable locations will be spawned NEAR you when you increase your exploration level (but now remember, your opponents can access them too so don't do it if you're surrounded)
+ Objects that have been marked as destroyed are now ignore by subsystems (performance improvement, stability improvement) This is throughout all game systems.
+ LOTS of code to handle the increasing costs in terms of people to run your improvements. If anyone thinks that getting highly talented people remains equally easy as you grow, ask google, microsot or apple about that. It's not.
+ Random events added (not many random events yet though)
+ Pioneers are still trained as individuals
+ Units move faster by default on the map (animation-wise)
+ Units move A LOT faster in tactical battle (let us know if it's too fast)
+ Minor factions removed. Sorry guys, they're just too lame to live for now.
+ New notable locations added to provide weapons, armor, and other "stuff"

IF it makes the window for this week, it will be Thursday evening EST. 

Update: We've staged the beta build but QA wants to give it more of a go so it won't be publicly available until tomorrow afternoon EST at the earliest.

Cheers!

I've been online since I was 15. That was 25 years ago. Back then, it was BBSes using C-net 10.0.

You could say that I've grown up entirely living online. Before people used twitter for facebook to express their every inappropriate thought, I was mouthing off on things that I really shouldn't be mouthing off on (or at least, things that shouldn't be held up to scrutiny).

This year I started to live life in "the real world". And to give you just an idea of how out of touch with "the real world" I was let me explain what my life has been like for the past 20 or so years:

In the morning, I'd get up, go to work, work on "stuff" on the computer until I was too tired or too hungry to continue, then come home, eat, and then get back online to do more work until I had to go to bed and repeat.  

I know I'm not alone in that. Some people squander that energy and time on MMOs and such. I know, I've squandered more than my fair share of time on everything from Ultima Online, WoW, Total Annihilation (boneyards), Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Diablo, Counterstrike, L4D, Stellar Frontier, Demigod, countless internet forums.

But for the most part, I prefer to make stuff than consume stuff. Most of the stuff I've made in my career has failed. That's the thing about running any sort of business. Most of the time, you fail. Because a successful business person means you get used to failing a LOT. 

So anyway, last year kind of sucked. It shouldn't have. My business made money and our company had its best year ever. It was a huge benchmark year for Stardock

In 2010, Stardock's software was pre-loaded on a near majority of PCs. Every Dell came with the DellDock (made by Stardock) and every HP was coming with Fences. A royalty on every PC sold.  We had Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy which was awesome and we released Fences Pro.  And let's face it, Fences was probably the most significant non-game new piece of WIndows software released in 2010. Millions and millions of downloads. Not as sexy as a Minecraft or an Angry Birds but I'd bet more people are using Fences (more to the point, I KNOW more people are using Fences) than virtually anything else released for the PC last year.

The only downer for the whole year was Elemental: War of Magic. But what a downer it was. At least for me. I'm really the type of person who takes the good things in life for granted and fixates on the negative. Not a healthy thing but it is what it is.

The toxicity of the Internet really came home last year. It's interesting how toxic the net has gotten over the past decade. It's not been an overnight process either.

The sheer hate you see online is really breathtaking if you think about it. Endless September doesn't even begin to describe it.

Most people online I meet are great. So I don't want to paint the net as some sort of festering pit of asbergerism.  I'm just saying that there's enough man-childism going around on the net now that last year's War of Magic debacle managed to wake me up and spend some time in the real world.

And it turns out, the real world is pretty nice. And boy have I gotten out of touch with it.  They have self-checkout lines at grocery stores. I watered plants recently. I got a dog.  It's amazing how easy it is to become consumed with work, especially when work involves being online every waking hour.

Last year I felt the fatigue creeping up on me which is why I told my friends i was going to take a sabbatical in 2010. I didn't get to do that of course but now I am and it's great. As I type this, I'm at home, with my kids playing in the yard, my puppy napping and just relaxing.

The Internet is still a place of wonder and enjoyment but a little balance can go a long way. Just something to consider for fellow travelers who have grown up on the Internet.

Once upon a time…

A city level in War of Magic had two key game mechanics attached to it.

First, it determined what improvements you could build. The higher the level, the more powerful improvements you could construct.

But secondly, it limited the number of improvements you could build as well. 

Unfortunately, this had the effect of being very frustrating to users who quickly discovered that they couldn’t get their settlement to the next level without wrecking something which is highly annoying.  So it was taken out.

In v1.3, it’s back. But with a  twist. This time, housing improvements will always be available to construct. Thus, if you max out a settlement, you’re not stuck, you can still upgrade it with more housing.

This will add some teeth to crazy cities that have no local population but have immense numbers of studies and the like. While some users have expressed an interest in limiting what you can build based on the population of that settlement, I preferred to see this mechanic a bit more abstracted. After all, I live in Canton Michigan but work in Plymouth Michigan.  But there should still be some rough correlation between city expanse and population.

When combined with the fact that repeatable improvements will cost increasing amounts and you bring the world back to having a smaller number of important cities without quite so much sprawl.

The beta process will let us do some rebalancing based on this sort of thing.

Historically, I've done most of my work on weekends or on time off.  Regular business hours is when I do management, budgeting, meetings. It's in my off hours that I actually get to code and do "stuff".

And I tell ya, nothing sucks the desire to work faster than a visit to the forums where hyper-entitled man-children bitch endlessly about their $10 to $50 purchase.