Galactic Civilizations II still sells amazingly well. Both at retail and digitally.
As a token of thanks, I was thinking of working on an update in my spare time after I turn in the book manuscript next month. Are there any small updates you guys would like to see in there? Mind you, it would be just be me. On a couple of cold weekends doing this.
I don’t like creating friends lists.
I also don’t like having to remember a bunch of different logons but that’s not nearly as annoying as having to deal with multiple “social networks”.
The good news is that in another couple of years, it won’t matter. Your virtual you will be one entity rather than having it all divided up amongst Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Live, Impulse, Gmail, Steam, AOL IM, whatever. The reason: Federated IDs.
Here’s how it works: User enters in their UserID and PW for a service that supports federated IDs. It then talks to all the other services you belong to that also support federated IDs and gathers up your “friends” list, achievements, status updates, etc. and puts them together.
So you can picture logging into Impulse with your Live ID or Facebook ID or what have you and have it use your Facebook friends that also have Impulse and so forth.
Right now, Facebook is, not surprisingly, leading the charge. Between them and Twitter, an embryonic federated ID system is already in place. And because of them, others will follow suit – are following suit because not supporting such a system puts those who try to keep their ID system proprietary and closed will be at a significant disadvantage.
Federated IDs are win-win-win: Mutually beneficial for social networks and beneficial to users as well.
I’m a Shacknews junkie and was reading about Valve’s announcement of Steam’s growth last year. I was pretty jazzed at the news as it means that the trend to digital is continuing and widespread. Impulse’s growth, not surprisingly due to its relatively smaller size, was much higher than 205% but that’s only because Impulse is still in its early growth phase, it hasn’t reached maturation like Steam – that’s why Steam’s strong growth is such good news – the market isn’t even close to saturation.
I suspect Direct2Drive, GOG, GamersGate and the others have experienced similar levels of growth too. It’s a good time to be a PC gamer. Regular sales, competition. Do they have weekly sales in the console universe?
So I’m sitting here blogging, surfing, etc. from my cumfy chair in our bedroom and I hear the 3 year old singing from the bathtub. She makes up these songs as she goes along. All 3 of our children have always loved taking long baths and playing with toys and singing. Love the sound of it.
I can only speak for myself on this but Stardock is my “happy place”. People often ask me what it’s like to work at Stardock. The answer I give them is to imagine being back in college where you hung out with your friends talking and doing cool and interesting things. That’s what it’s like at Stardock for me and I suspect many others there as well.
In the morning, I’ll walk by the QA and support team. Any fires? One nice thing about Stardock is that based on what I’ve heard from people who have worked in support elsewhere, we have awesome customers. There is something to be said about making software for your own demographic. People “like us”.
During lunch, people played board games. The cafeteria seemed to have each table with a different board game going. My new planner, Betsy, found the mouse that had escaped from the cage. A sad end in the building’s basement. We still have one mouse left in the cage. I think that Kay, one of our amazing new graphics designers and resident critter expert took care of cleaning it out but I could be wrong.
After lunch, the part of the Sins of a Solar Empire team at Stardock was debating on how powerful pirates should be. An internal beta – that had gone out to some reviewers – had the pirates able to wipe out planets. A bit too powerful. But their lively debate and rationalization of why pirates should have this or that was highly interesting.
A typical early evening will include plenty of people who are still there for various reasons. Maybe they’re on a deadline or maybe they’re playing some new game or doing something else entirely. Tonight some people were playing Star Trek online which is about to come out – possibly the best MMO I’ve ever seen. One of my coworkers/friends I’ve known for 10+ years was sketching out UI designs for some future software on his whiteboard and talking to a few others who were around about where he thought user experience was going to go. Downstairs, a couple guys were playing TF2. Sometimes they’re playing Demigod or Sins or L4D2 or WoW. I suspect there will be a lot of Star Trek gaming going on during the evenings based on what I’m seeing.
While I was doing a code review of Elemental tonight, Toby came by to show me some cool new stuff on the new WinCustomize site being put together. It’s really pretty awesome stuff.
Then Jeff came by to show off the new APIs for Impulse Reactor v2 (there’s a sneak peek) that we’re introducing in a few weeks. I’m humbled by how much easier it is. I love working with brilliant people.
As I headed out, I tried to shoo Sarah to go home. She was insisting that she was “this close” to a breakthru on the Dynasty screen in Elemental. Jacob was also there getting in all the new clothing the artists had made for people to customize their Elemental sovereigns and their children. No more bald, bearded women in game I guess.
Usually the last person I see or talk to is our VP, Kris Kwilas. Phish blaring in his office. He’s usually figuring out some clever way to make something a little smaller. A little faster. Last week talked about the merits/problems with the iPad. Others will hear our discussion and join in. Sometimes he’ll give me candid feedback about a chapter in the book I’m writing. Today we talked about the joys of Mass Effect 2.
And tomorrow is another day.
Just a note on the upcoming Magic & Spells beta of Elemental so that people are prepared: The beta will be about bug testing the spells not about game balance. As a result, feel free to indulge yourself on doing very very bad things in the world.
Here are some of the spells we’ll be testing:
a. Mass Heal
b. Raise Land
c. Lower Land
d. Raise Forest
e. Raise Desert
f. Raise Swamp
g. Charm Monster
h. Teleport to friendly territory
i. Revive Land
j. Imbue Hero
We plan to give most of these spells to players very very early on so that we can make sure that they’re working as designed. Obviously, being able to raise mountains and exile an enemy city onto its own island are not things that are going to be just doable willy nilly in the final game.
So for a couple of builds, players will be able to just go nuts with magic without consequences. 
The beta us due out a week from today but it is possible we may delay it an additional week for more polish and get more assets in (we’re juggling a lot of balls right now).
Seven years ago I blogged about why I was unhappy with tablet computing.
Here’s the article: https://forums.joeuser.com/540
As i wrote back in 2003:
But the suckitude of Tablet PCs is a team effort. It's not just Microsoft fault. They all have worked very hard to create an inferior product that doesn't meet the needs of the market the claim to want to support.
First, they're too heavy. That kills them right away. This Tablet PC is over 3 pounds in weight. 3 pounds isn't a lot until you try lugging it around like a notebook (real notebook not a laptop) for an hour or two. Us geeklings have weak arms you know. The OEMs are to blame for that. Until they can get the weight down to 2 pounds or less, they should just not bother.
Secondly, they're tedious to write input into. Microsoft's hand writing recognition doesn't work. I mean that. It's not just bad, it basically just doesn't work. If you are one of the 47 adults on earth that still use cursvive to write, then it works fine. But the other 99.999% of us write our characters in print and for that it fails dismally. Microsoft can be blamed for that.
Thirdly, the voice recognition flat out doesn't work in any useful way. I even bought an expensive headset to train it. I went through the lessons and trained the thing. It's unworkable. I've used the products from Dragon and IBM and they work pretty well (at least on the PCs I've used them on). What's built into the Windows XP Tablet Edition is just junk.
What it basically boiled down into is that the early tablets were too heavy and too tedious to use. Weight. Means of Input.
Apple’s iPad seems to address all three issues – almost:
When I got a tablet PC back in 2003, I was hoping to use it as a great way to read the net while sitting in a comfy chair without having the bulk (or form factor) of a keyboard. Right now,I just use my ThinkPad T400 for that or, more commonly, my iPhone with its tiny screen. Assuming the 1.5 pounds doesn’t make using it tedious after hours, this is a useful thing.
That said, it also has some big big negatives:
- No Flash support. That really cripples modern web browsing.
- No camera. I mentioned this in my other blog, this is a pretty poor choice. I use Google Voice to send all my calls to my cell phone and my Skype #.
- No multitasking. Not that the above matters though since no multitasking means no Skype running in the background.
- The weight. Again, 1.5 pounds… we’ll see.
- No SD card support. I wasn’t expecting it necessarily but again, it really diminishes the utility if I can’t stick in new pictures easily.
Yea, I’m going to buy it. But bear in mind, I also bought the crappy tablet back in 2003.
The beta group has had an immense amount of influence already on the course of the game’s development.
One example of this has been in the way we’ve been thinking of implementing magic in the game. Often times, users don’t necessarily make specific suggestions but instead get us thinking on a different track than we previously were.
With Magic, originally players had 5 different types of mana – life/death, earth, fire, water, air. Controlling a shard would, each turn, put mana of the appropriate type into a sort of mana bank.
So what’s the problem with that? Plenty. First, it means that the guy who sits on the shards is going to win the game. It really aggravates our biggest pet peeve in these kinds of games – the game being won in the first 10 minutes and then spending the next 2 hours going through the motions.
Then there was the spell research. Originally you would research spells much like you research tech. You’d build academies and the points would go into whatever you were researching. Besides being boring, it took away a lot of choices.
So instead, your academies generate spell knowledge (spell points) which you can then spend, at any time, to learn a particular spell. Much much more fun.
THIS is why the open beta works so well though. Without all the discussions and brainstorming here on ElementalGame.com we might have gone down the original path we had designed and then been committed to it (i.e. – once the expensive visual assets are produced, you’re pretty much stuck with it, that’s why we’re doing the cloth map and such because it’s cheap to make radical changes).
Update: Just realized that I didn’t talk about what we’re doing with the shard systems.
Spells require mana to cast but will also need certain shards (earth, air, fire, water) as well. So a spell may require 200 mana and control of 2 fire shards and an earth shard.
Short answer: Yes. I’m going to get one.
Why? Well, for me, two main reasons.
One, I currently use my iPhone to browse the net in the evening and its tiny screen is a bit of a bummer at times. I have my beloved ThinkPad T400 but it is a bit too heavy to just have sitting on my lap to surf the net and its form factor doesn’t lend itself to reading.
Two, I use my iPhone for watching movies while I work out and it’s small screen is annoying for that. I don’t use the laptop because, again, the form factor doesn’t let me easily put it up on things.
I kind of feel bad for people who bought the Kindle. This thing will kill that.
I am quite bummed it doesn’t have a camera. I could imagine this thing being super useful for Skype video chatting but oh well.
2010 will be the…
BEST
YEAR
EVER