Twenty years ago, if you wanted to make a real game you made it for the PC.  The toughest choice was to support either an Adlib card or a Sound Blaster card.

Now, game developers have to decide between PC, High End Consoles (Xbox/Playstation), Family consoles Wii), Handhelds, iOS, Android, or Web. 

My answer remains the same: It depends on the type of game you want to make. And the type of game you want to make should also consider how much money you have available to you.

The answer, however, is not good news for PC gamers.

If you’re a lone developer or maybe are a developer with an artist friend, the iOS devices look promising.  Big studios will continue to target the big consoles while up and coming studios are increasingly targeting Xbox Live Arcade. Where does that leave the PC? I don’t have an answer for that.

I’ve read so many “The PC is d0med” articles that no one really knows what it means. The PC isn’t doomed. But its piece of the growing slice will continue to decrease and fragment on genre and business model.

Piracy, or more accurately, the perception that piracy is a massive sales killer, continues to be a driving force in the PC development community. While piracy exists on all platforms, there is no doubt that the PC remains the platform with the highest % of people playing games who haven’t actually paid for them. Whether this really tangibly affects profits will be a subject for debate forever. The argument, however, is irrelevant because the people who make the budget decisions are convinced that piracy is a major revenue killer on the PC. This is giving rise to new revenue models (Free to Play, subscriptions, always online, etc.) that are much more difficult to pirate than the traditional models.

The biggest loss to traditional PC gamers is going to be felt from the games that just won’t be made anymore for the PC. Those games made by indies who migrate to greener pastures. This is largely a distribution issue more than anything. There is no PC equivalent to Xbox Live or the iPhone App Store (and no, Steam and Impulse don’t even remotely come close right now, though hopefully that will change in time as these services become more widely spread and provide much MUCH better streamlining for indies).

Another tough area for 2011 for PC gamers is going to be the loss of retail shelf space. Expect to see the major retailers chop their PC game sections even further. This will make it even tougher for the bigger studios to justify PC versions because, despite what some may lead you to believe, major titles still mostly sell at retail and not digitally.

On the other hand, the free to play model works best on the PC right now and that is an area that I think may become very exciting in the next couple of years. As a big believer of making games and supporting them long-term, I like this idea if you can actually make a sustainable living supporting these games long-term. It requires a significant logistical investment to do free to play.

All in all, 2011 is likely to be a pretty decent year for PC games. Better than 2010 I believe.

As we enter the New Year, 2011 has some hope in front of it but I’m not ready to predict anything too exciting.

For business owners, interest rates remain very low which makes capital for those with good credit ratings readily available.  3.25% interest rates are not uncommon right now for those who know how to obtain it.  Thus, it becomes a question of how certain you are to generate net revenue that exceeds what you borrow at the going interest rate.

Historically, I’ve disliked borrowing money in any way. The only times I’ve had to has been to cover accounts receivables and tax bills.  Because 2010 was a reasonably good year for my company, we aren’t likely going to have to borrow.  Our games unit underperformed this past year but the other two units made up for it.

The BMW X5 is an SUV for drivers who want an SUV that is both sporty (read: Can go fast) as well as works as a good utility vehicle. In other words, an SUV that really is an SUV as opposed to simply a car that is shaped like a closed pickup.

My previous X5 was somewhat disappointing. BMW has its “iDrive” system for controlling the internal gadgets and it was just awful.  The 2011 edition has a far superior iDrive with buttons that take you right to where you want to go. Its iPhone/iPod integration is better than any system I’ve seen yet in a car (though I look forward to AirPlay enabled car stereos). 

The 2011 X5 is also slightly faster than the 2008 edition I had and drives with a bit more assurance.  Overall, it’s very similar to the 2008 but the slight refinements made me happy I picked it up.  I still consider it, the best SUV for the price.

Hello. I’m a Mac and a PC. That is, I’m the happy owner of a very new MacBook Pro. Core I7, Solid State Drive, 8 GB memory. And a ThinkPad T400 (Core Duo, Solid State Drive, 8 GB memory).

Some people get attached to pets. Some get attached to their cars.  Me, I get attached to my computers. I’m a zealot. A fanatic. A fanboy. And both these machines rock but for very different reasons and they both suck in very different ways.

My degree is in Computer Engineering. My day job is software design. I love hardware and software. I know how it works and truth be told, I’m pretty good at it. And as I use these machines, I recognize bits of genius far beyond my capability and a lot of half-assery that is disappointing and surprising.

Generalizations

Let me summarize the key difference between a Mac and a PC in my opinion: Mac hardware is sublime, designed by the best and brightest. PC hardware is dumb, spec’d by suits and engineered without passion. On the other hand, Mac software is flash over substance. Elegance at the expense of productivity. And, frankly, surprisingly inconsistent even as it’s slick while being inconsistent. PC software, by contrast, tends to be ugly but designed for maximum productivity.

Specifics: Hardware

The Mac hardware is a joy to use. Its multi-touch touchpad is a joy to use. As a Trackpoint fan, I am surprised with how much more enjoyable and useful a well designed touchpad can be. I say well designed because I’ve found no touchpad on the PC to be remotely as useful.

The MacBook’s touchpad works like this.  One finger to move the cursor. Two fingers will scroll a page (and do so incredibly smoothly and instantly). Three will let you go back and forth on a browser or other app. Four will let you quickly go between windows and programs.  On the PC, the touchpad experience could be considered, well crap. I’ve got a lot of different laptops here and nothing comes close in this area.  The ThinkPads, however, at least have a Trackpoint which serves as a good alternative. But PC users who love their TouchPads would likely return from using a MacBook rather pissed off at how clunky and half-assed their PC laptop’s touchpad was implemented.  This is mostly (but not completely) a hardware issue.

PC laptops, in general, are just awful in comparison to a MacBook. Even the Lenovo ThinkPads are starting to fall behind.  I open up a PC laptop (any brand) and maybe it’ll come out of sleep. Maybe I’ll need to hit a few keys to jolt it. Maybe I’ll have to hit the power button quickly to jolt it awake or maybe I’ll end up rebooting. Depends on the maker and the circumstances. When it does come out of sleep, maybe I’ll get my WiFi connection back within 10 seconds or…maybe I’ll have to rejoin the network or maybe I’ll have to reboot it to recognize something. Oh wait, the forums say I just need to turn off the blue tooth. Or maybe I just need the new drivers..etc.  PC experts know what I’m talking about. Every version of Windows promises to fix this but nothing will fix hardware makers who just don’t seem to give a crap.

MacBooks, by comparison, are wonderful. You open the lid, it’s on and it’s connected. Every time. Always. Perfect. They are well made, well thought out, and clearly made by people who care about what they’re making.  Talk to an engineer at a PC manufacturer and you’ll often hear frustration in how the designed by committee of people who barely use computers decided X or Y was going to be made.   The hardware capabilities versus the software realities are rarely considered by PC manufacturers. It’s depressing.

Specifics: Software

On the other hand, there is no equivalent on the Mac for Windows Live.  iMovie is more powerful but a much bigger pain to use for “simple stuff” than Windows Live Move Maker 2011 (note the version since it took Microsoft awhile to get this right).  I was surprised at how many steps it took to make a simple movie via iMovie versus Live Movie Maker (especially since the source material was on my iPhone).  This sort of behavior is exhibited throughout the Mac versus Windows 7 (note the version).  Simply put, when it comes to getting things done quickly and effectively, Windows 7 is better in my opinion. And it’s better by enough of a gulf that I have a hard time seeing how anyone could come to any other conclusion (then again, I see Android fans clinging to the belief that Gingerbread is remotely as nice as iOS 4.2).  See, I’m an equal opportunity offender.

Now, the versions matter here because Snow Leopard is so much better in every way than say Windows XP to use on a daily basis and MacOS X was better than Window for so long that it’s no wonder there are so many Mac zealots out there.  

Historically, the Mac’s elegant OS and software were its biggest advantage. It’s amazing how long it took Microsoft to get their act together on software and now that they have, it’s under appreciated (though the IE team UI designers should be flogged – the MS engine team do this wonderful job only to have the experience part of it made by people who clearly should not be making computer software).  But Chrome on Windows and Chrome on the Mac are both wonderful so it matters not.

Compared to Windows 7, Snow Leopard makes me feel like I’m jumping through hoops. It’s still really good (especially if you’re coming from Windows XP or to a lesser extent Windows Vista) but it’s definitely not as efficient overall as Windows 7.

It. Just. Works.

The MacBook still has a big advantage in the “It just works” camp over Windows 7. As soon as Windows has to reach out to hardware…well, bad things happen.  My favorite home printer is a Canon Pixia wireless printer.  On the PC, getting it set up is a bit (but not much) of a pain. On the Mac, I just pressed a button, it saw the printer and I chose it. The drivers, scanner, and other goodies “just worked”. No CDs, no going to a website, nothing. It just worked.

Final Thoughts

Now obviously the Mac has the advantage that the hardware and OS are made by the same company. But consumers don’t really care.  The good news is that, really, they’re both so good at this point that you really can’t go wrong. It’s just so disappointing at how poor PC hardware is by comparison when it comes to usability. What’s worse is that the bad hardware designs from the PC side of things comes from depressingly dumb decision making. It’s not even an engineering issue as much as just dumb decisions at the corporate level – where the specifications are made.  If the PC makers could just make it a qualification that you have to have a genuine passion for technology before getting to make decisions, the PC guys would catch up overnight.  Because it’s obvious that the Mac designers love what they’re doing.

At the end of the day, I’m using both my ThinkPad and MacBook depending on what I’m doing.  If I need to do “serious work” I gravitate to the PC unless it involves “serious” video editing and then it’s Final Cut Pro (sorry Premiere, you’re too flaky these days) on the Mac. It’s a lot easier for me to gather my “stuff” on the PC than the Mac but the Mac is more fun to use. 

So that’s just one guy’s opinion as a fan of both Macs and PCs. In 2011, it’s nice to be able to say that overall, they’re both really excellent.

This is by no means a complete list of things that are on our mind for Elemental for 2011.  For those of you just joining our community I should first start out with an explanation of what Stardock is about and what makes our games a bit...different that is the norm in 2011. It might be more accurate to say that Stardock is how game companies in the PC industry used to pretty much operate prior to the flood of IPOs in the late 90s that changed our industry so dramatically.

At GDC 2011 I will be doing a talk about game designs that fail and will be using Elemental's development and subsequent launch as my case study example as this may help up and coming game developers learn some of the pitfalls of when you transition from having a small game team to a much larger one.

Anyway, Elemental: War of Magic was released in August 2011.  Contrary to what some would have you believe, it was a finished game when it shipped. It just sucked and was horrendously buggy.  We didn't think it sucked or was buggy but given we had been working 90 hours plus for months on end, I think, with the benefit of hindsight, that our judgment was a bit impaired across the board.  But what is past is past.

However (and this is important), Stardock is both the developer AND the publisher. Next time you load up a game, pay attention to that first intro screen that lists TWO names: The guys who make the game and the guys who publish.  Since we're both on Elemental, we could go back and revisit all the things in the game that went wrong and do something meaningful about them.

So here's a partial list of things that we think are big deals that we want to address this year in the Elemental universe in order to make it the classic PC fantasy strategy game of its time.

1. Core Engine Stuff.  This means smarter memory management so that we can have larger maps, faster late game performance, etc.

2. Core Strategic AI stuff.  This means an AI that plays the game strategically in an intelligent way.

3. Core Tactical AI stuff.  This means that when you have a battle tactically, the AI units play as if they were being controlled by another human.

4. Core Diplomacy AI stuff.  More interesting and intelligent diplomatic options available to players.

5. More overt AI differentiation. That is, each faction plays different to the point that players can see a difference. They're not predictable but rather they have different ways of achieving their objectives.

6. More faction differentiation. That is, each player is blatantly different across the board. Techs, improvements, weapons, racial attributes, etc.

7. More interesting tactical battles. Specifically, tactical battles that blend the best of strategy and RPG together. A complete rewrite of what we have today.

8. More interesting and important city differentation. That means, more explicit ways to specialize cities, more interesting ways to make different cities unique and strategic on their own.

9. Vastly more interesting world. We have this great world with great lore behind it but you don't see it in the game. This is going to change this year as the lore of Elemental comes into play both in terms of actual game mechanics and game play but in the general feel of the world.

10. Much more modding support than what we have today.

Start Monday, 3 new people join Stardock and are being added to the Elemental team.  And two of them are pretty well known and the other is an amazing game developer that we've bee fortunate enough to find.

Stardock is looking to hire more people for the Elemental team (in particular, Kael and I are trying to recruit a seasoned lead game developer). Please contact myself of Derek if you know anyone who would fit that description.  Stardock has some other game projects that start up this year as well and the publishing group is working on some new things as well. So it's going to be a pretty exciting year for Stardock gamers.

The list I have above is not even remotely a complete one but it summarizes some of the big things on our mind.  I approved the necessary budget in December to fund Elemental for both 2011 and 2012 (most of Stardock's revenue comes from other parts of the company -- we don't live or die on our game sales but we care deeply about our games).

 

Greetings!

On behalf of the team at Stardock, Happy New Year!

2011 is going to be an amazing year for Elemental fans! Kael and his team have some exciting things in the works.  We have v1.11 that will almost certainly go out in the next couple of weeks as well as work on both v1.2 and the first expansion pack.

You’ll be happy to know that sales of Elemental have continued to grow.  Of course, December was Christmas season but it marks the third consecutive month of increased sales for the game which bodes well.

Our goal for 2011 is to make Elemental the definitive fantasy strategy game of this age.  A game that fans of Master of Magic, Age of Wonders, HOMM, DOM3, and other great games will be proud to add to their family of classic games. 

Thanks to community involvement, feedback, and frankly, Stardock’s independence as a studio (i.e. as both developer and publisher it can set the game’s course without interference), we have a fantastic list of things to add, change, improve, and expand in the Elemental universe. 

Moreover, thanks to the growing modding community, we’ve already gotten a taste of some of the great ways we can make each faction more distinct, interesting and exciting along with the game world itself.  In the coming months, the evolution of Elemental will continue.

The team returns on Monday, January 3rd and we’ll have some new announcements right off the bat that we think you will be very happy about.

As some of you know, I’ve been working on a lot of the low level systems of Elemental during the Christmas break.  With the team on vacation, this is a good time for me to get into the bowels of the game itself to make changes without worrying about breaking other people’s changes.

Computer AI is my passion and in recent years (especially since GalCiv II) I haven’t had the pleasure to do nearly as much AI coding as I’d like (with the whole day job of running Stardock and all).  So this is how I’m spending my Christmas break.

Core weaknesses of the Elemental AI

I have a fairly endless list of criticisms with the Elemental AI so I won’t go into more than a few major ones.

The most significant one is that unlike GalCiv, Elemental isn’t able to simulate future turns.  In Galactic Civilizations II, the game would, in the background, play forward a few turns based on its best guess of what other players would do and then react to those future moves as if they were in the present. 

Unfortunately, Elemental is a much more complex game (magic and all) from an AI point of view so it’s reactive. In time, as machines get faster, I hope to eventually create a more general land-based AI that can, like GalCiv, play turns into the future in the background.  But for now, we’ll have to stick to reactive AI with future planning capabilities based on pattern recognition.

Now, before I go into the basic weaknesses here, it’s important to understand that Elemental is not a scripted AI.  That is, I don’t program in to tell it to build this or that in some sequence.  That would be easier to do to be sure but it would, in the long run, result in a game that would eventually become very repetitive.

Instead, my job is to teach the AI how to play the game and have it try its best to “win” the game based on a set of rules and conditions that it is trying to optimize.   The problem with this is that until I get really good at the game, there’s going to be glaring holes. 

In GalCiv, I was pretty good at it so I could teach that AI how to play pretty well. With Elemental, I’m still learning.  When I read on the forums what people are doing I get the distinct feeling I used to get when playing Civilization and thinking I was doing well when I built my first musketmen only to have the Mongols land with tanks. 

So here are the basic problems with the AI that I’m working on:

1. What techs are the ones it should get.  You modders out there can help if you want to.  The tech tree has an AI General section in the XML that I’ve started making more use of to tell the game what techs the AI should value more than others on researching.

2. The AI has a hard time planning ahead on resources. This is a classic issue for any game and it’s typically solved with directives.  Essentially, the AI has a hard time saving up citizens to build things like Command Posts which in turn keeps it from building squadrons of soldiers.  This is a high priority.

3. The AI is not yet good at specializing cities.  It does specialize but some APIs I don’t have easy access to yet.  For instance, the upgrade options when a city levels up have no AI data attached, they’re they might as well be random numbers.

4. General FOW issues that people tend to forget.  I miss the guard tower. The AI was much better at seeing approaching armies with that.

5. How many soldiers should be left to defend a city? How close should a protective army be left?

6. What spells should be used when? There’s no AI data yet connected to spells (that’s a high priority to v1.2) so the AI has to pick things based on general classes. It’s gotten pretty decent at it but it could be way more optimal.

7. Unit design is very challenging in general.

So after, a week and a half of working on it, here’s where it’s at:

Me vs. AI.

TURN 5

ME: Malice

Starting position.

In my private build of tonight I made some significant improvements to how resources are distributed. I got very lucky here that I found a lost library so close. So this should give me a significant advantage.

AI 1: Altar

They picked a farm to build right away.

AI 2: Umber

They too chose to build a farm.  They’re not hard coded to build farms, they just both decided this.

TURN 20:

ME: Malice

On turn 20, I’ve got my Beacon of Hope done, farm is built, I’m building a hut and I have a workshop. I’ve trained 1 defender and I have a Pioneer in training.

AI: Altar

 

So here I have my first problem.  The AI is not constructing anything.

They’ve got a farm, a hut, a study, and a workshop. So they look pretty good.  The city is lightly defended.

AI: Umber is doing better, they’re already level 2 on their city and they’re building their second labor pit.

So let’s go look at the code…

What is Altar…thinking?

Altar isn’t building because it’s saving up materials to build their highest end soldier.

Now, the thing is, that’s probably not necessary this early on.  The problem is, the AI isn’t looking at threats very closely, it’s just “preparing for the worst”. A smarter strategy would be to have it scout a little bit better, find out the level of threat. If no threat, build up the economy. If only a minor threat, built a weak soldier and if the threat is significant then build up.  Right now, it’s basically prepping to get “rushed” by either people or monsters.

So I’m going to work on this…

…

[3 hours later]

Side note, why do saved games take a long time to load on bigger maps?

Answer: All those fancy city improvements use 95% of the load time to regenerate. Going to see what we can do about that in the future.  If you have a quad core (ahem) it’s much faster. But still, if we’re ever going to have sick sized, 64-bit maps, and we are, we’ll have to optimize this.

…

Now what does the AI do?

Better.

Let’s move forward a bit.

…

Learning spells.  I always got for alchemy. Early on, money is an issue so I tend to try to get that right away.

I do think that the amount you get should be based on your intelligence and it should get more expensive each time it is cast by someone of your faction.

Turn 50

On turn 50 let’s see how things are going.

ME: Malice

The bear has me a bit nervous. I have a couple of guards in the city. I’m sending out my pioneer (escorted).

AI: Altar

They have 3 cities right away. Impressive if they can hold them.

AI: Umber

Here’s an issue I’ve been trying to resolve, the overdefense of a city.

No nearby threats and they’ve got a defense of 40. Let’s see why…

It just determined that it needed those units. I could quibble, but I will keep an eye on it.

TURN ~100

So Umber thinks they can take me.  Let’s see if I can steam roll them still.

I have 3 good cities.

Umber has 4.

 

And here is when things get problematic.  First, the unit’s weapon is pretty weak.

Second, it’s building individuals.

So we have some questions here:

1. Could the AI be training better units?

2. Is this the best possible design the AI is capable of on turn 100?

3. Could the AI build the war council and thus train multiple units? If not, why not?

So let’s look at those 3 questions…

 

To the question of whether it can build a war council, it does have the tech.

The problem: The War Council requires 35 citizens.  As players know, that’s a lot of citizens and will take several turns of doing nothing empire wide possibly to get to that many free citizens. And that’s one of the big challenges – delayed gratification.  It’s one of the things I’ll be working on that will make a big difference coming up.

If only the AI could cheat, it would be so much easier.

So let’s try steam rolling them with my squads…

Ok, lost that battle.

They are building squads (teams?).

But they’re in no condition to go after me yet.

…

After much AI tweaking…

[5 hours of coding later]

Umber is closing in on me with their army but I have a pretty formidable defense.

Now, I could have taken them out earlier but I kept updating the AI. Tweaks here. New API there. Bug fix there.

I haven’t decided the best way to have the AI “save up” in order to build more powerful improvements yet when it requires several turns.  In GalCiv, the AI simulated future turns and thus could just wait. Here, I have to come up with something different. Strategically (from a military point of view) this is the AI’s most significant weakness.

As you can see in the above screenshot, the AI will build groups of units. It just doesn’t do it when it really should.

I also need to get the AI to be far more aggressive about combining up.  It has 6 armies in my territory but it would do well to combine those into 3 major army groups.

One of the big tweaks has been the AI taking a larger view of the battle field. It’s a more expensive calculation but with threading, it doesn’t’ slow the game down.

As a result, the AI is willing to send its forces much further away from home base.

[Another 3 hours of programming]

The AI is starting to get its act together on forming a more cohesive military strategy.

Combat rating of 155 means they’re ready to conquer.

Sadly for me…

Umber is fighting two wars at once as they slowly crush Altar.

So after many tweaks, the AI was victorious. But could it win without me giving it lots of second chances to get it right? Not in this game.  The question will be, can it do it better in a fresh game?

We’ll see.

 

## UPDATE ##

The AI has gotten better at storing mana for future…use.

As some of you know, over the holidays I like to use my vacation to program (my day job is running the company). 

As a result, I have a private .EXE replacement of Elemental for those who want to try it.

The main differences are:

1. Significantly better AI.

2. I think I fixed that crash issue some people have reported

3. More resources

4. AI better at using magic strategically.

5. AI much better at waging strategic war.

6. Resource placement tweaked.

7. Monster spawning favors better over quantity.

Here's a URL for the most recent one:

!!UPDATE!! 12/28/2010

 http://draginol.stardock.net/files/Elemental-v11d.zip

Just unzip this EXE into your existing Elemental directory to replace the one that's there. You'll need v1.1 for this.

 

On behalf of everyone at Stardock, Merry Christmas!

For those of you who are not familiar with the #elemental chat channel on Impulse (Impulse->Community->Chat and then /join #elemental) I've been making available little test builds for anyone who wants to try one made on my machine. Definitely not official but I was able to reproduce the crash some people had and worked on eliminating it as well as made some AI tweaks.  Feel free to hang out with us on the channel during the holiday season.  I'll try to put up some of the test versions on one of the Stardock servers for those who think betas are too official.

Hope you have a great day!

I'm not so much living in the Mac World but really visiting.

I'm a PC guy through and through. Not out of any particular love of the PC but because historically that's where the best tech was.

Sure, if you're a Mac user, you tend to get hung up on style over substance -- in my opinion. I was an OS/2 user from 1992 to 1999 and there's no way you'd ever convince me that System 7 through OS 9 was as good as OS/2 was.

From 2000 on, I've been a Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 user. Windows isn't elegant. But it definitely gets the job done and while I occasionally dabbled with each iteration of MacOS X, I found it quirky enough to put me off.

The one area that Apple really blows away the PC is with laptops. Apple has really nailed laptops in ways that Lenovo and the rest can only dream. I love my Thinkpad T400 but I've yet to have a laptop that is painless to bring out of sleep or to have it reconnect to wireless quickly or navigate around as easily as you think it should.

By contrast, my MacBook Pro (15 inch, 2.66 Core I7 with SSD, 8 GB) is a dream to use. Even its touchpad has won this Trackpoint zealot over. I'd still prefer a Trackpoint if I could get one but the touchpad on here is much nicer than anything I've used before, particularly because of the multi-touch.

In a nutshell, Microsoft needs to get off their duff. Windows 7 is a good recovery from Vista but it's still remarkably creeky in the connectivity area. Moreover, given how universally bad PC laptops are at basics like waking from sleep (something every version of Windows promises to fix) combined with how long they usually take to get back on a WiFi connection I am convinced that Windows has some fundamental sloppiness in that regard.

So would I switch to being a Mac user full time? Not a chance. There's just too much stuff available for Windows and when properly tuned, Windows 7 (with Object Desktop) is an absolute power user's dream. But I have to say, I am loving my Macbook Pro.