When I was a kid, the Amiga could multiask on 512K of memory and run some pretty darn good games.

My Commodore 64 was a blast to play and required less memory than a typical modern icon image.

Today, we live in an age where the resolutions are so large, the textures do detailed that we need lots of memory.  I think most people recognize this.

But one thing we really tend to focus a lot of attention on is performance.  Readability in code is important but so is performance.  This week, we’re doing a lot of work on making sure our algorithms are efficient to ensure that the game runs well on lower end systems.

It’s not just a point of pride. It’s not just dealing with a pet peeve. But there’s a good business justification – the better the performance, the more PCs it’ll run on.

We are pleased to invite you to participate on the new WinCustomize BETA site.

www.wincustomizetest.com

The actual launch of WinCustomize 2K10 is not due until mid March but we want to let users on to start getting feedback on the new site. There’s still much work to be done but this should give you an idea of what we’re going for in terms of design.

The main new design features are:

• Web 2.0. The goal is to greatly reduce page views and instead make the site much more interactive.
• Skinner Centric. The new site features popular skinners and their works much more than the existing site does. Popular skins get a lot more attention on the site too.
• Cleaner. The new site has a lot less “stuff” on by default.
• More Efficient. A lot less clicking to get to the things you want. There are too many examples of this to list here.

But like I said, there’s a lot more to go still. Customization of the site isn’t in yet (which libraries you want to display). Uploading and personal pages aren’t in yet (you are taken back to the existing sites). And it has not really been optimized for performance yet.

Hope to see you there! We’re really excited to hear what you think.

Did you watch the most recent “This Week” on ABC?

You get a real idea of the bankruptcy of the political left through the dishonesty and pettiness of its advocates.

 

http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=9585338

As reported elsewhere, Elemental will not be released next month but is tentatively scheduled for 3rd quarter 2010. Those of you who have been reading these journals of course have known that since last Fall but we had neglected to change the update on the store page.

So that we can refer to this journal entry later, we are not committing to any particular date. “When it’s done” is basically our time schedule.  That doesn’t mean we’ll wait until every feature we can possibly imagine is stuffed in there before we release it but it does mean that we aren’t going to let an arbitrary date determine when it’s done either. This is our baby. It’s your baby. It’s something we’ve all been waiting for for a very long time and it won’t be rushed.

So what are the basic things we feel have to be nailed down? I.e. what are things that we absolutely essential? These are the things that would cause us to delay the game if we aren’t satisfied with them:

1. A rich world. The world the player plays in feels almost as rich and interesting as a pre-made fantasy world in an RPG despite being randomly generated.
    
2. A fun and interesting story-driven campaign. I love sand box mode but I want to make sure the game comes with a campaign that tells the story of Elemental.
    
3. An incredible single player experience. This kind of goes with #1 but what we mean is that when playing the game, the player feels like they are the center of a great epic story.
    
4. 32 player multiplayer. This is a big one and will take a lot of work but it we are requiring that the game handle up to 32 players playing together. To make this work, it also means that games need to be automatically saved (to our servers regardless of whether it’s on a custom modded server or ours) so that stopping and starting games later is easy.
    
5. Fun tactical battles. The tactical battles have to be enjoyable enough such that a person might just want to play a tactical battle as a stand alone game but be flexible enough so that players can control how long they take (i.e. everything from instant resolve to epic tactical battles).
    
6. Fun civilization building.  That means an economic system that is enjoyable to play by a wide range of player types which means a LOT of time to play test this once it’s mature to let us figure out what parts could be automated by users who don’t want to micro manage while letting other people micro manage if they want.
   
7. Beautiful on the high end, playable on the low end. This means that on that latest greatest AMD/nVidia setup you’ll be able to see amazing things visually. But it also means that on low end systems (like Netbooks) a player could also play it in purely cloth map mode if they want.  The goal is to present different ways to play the game rather than crippling the high or low end experience.
    
8. Modding. Built in editors to let people create their own factions, maps, conversations, items, and other goodies as well as make sure more technical people can go hog wild on it. While I’m not promising the next part for release, my goal is to be able to take Elemental and create a Temple of Apshai game(a totally different game type) using Python.
    
9. Crazy magic battles. Rather than the late game being about mopping up, it’ll be about great powers doing insane things with magical spells. World changing things (think Populous).
    
10. Unique factions. Early on I made the stupid mistake of saying there are only two races in Elemental. There are lots of different races but they only come from two canon sources: Natural beings (like Men) and unnatural beings (The Fallen).  The creature you see on this page would be a type of Fallen creature but is clearly not humanoid.  While we won’t have elves, orcs, unicorns or fairies in the game, we intend to let people easily create their own (i.e. if you want your Half-men race complete with its own body, tech tree, magic spells, ability to farm faster, etc. you can do this). I imagine eventually players will have hundreds of different “races” (species) to play against. 

That’s just 10 quick things right there. 

The best way to know how things are going is to keep an eye on what public beta is out there.  Use THIS POST to keep track. We won’t go to BETA 3 until we are happy with the game mechanics and general fun potential.

Note: This doesn’t mean all players will agree with us on what constitutes “fun”. I guarantee there will be posts that will point to this very entry claiming that we agreed to have “fun civ building” but we went back on that because “fun” to that person means mining ore, smelting it, sending it to a shop to be turned into a sword, having the sword shipped somewhere else stored in a warehouse and then equipped (hint: we don’t stockpile resources in Elemental).  So we aren’t trying to be all things to all people. But the above should give you an outline of some of the things we think are very important. 

If you think I left something out, post below and I’ll either answer YES. NO. Or some lame cryptic marketing answer.

We had a mouse in our attic.  My wife, who grew up in the country, hates mice and wanted me to kill it. But I convinced her to let me capture the mouse.

So I put up this special mouse trap in the attic and this morning at 5am I heard noise in the attack. I leaped out of bed, went up in the attic and got my mouse and took this video.

Then, I took the mouse downstairs into the kitchen and put him in a fishbowl to transport him to the field near the office.  Then I went back upstairs to gather my stuff.

When I returned…the fish bowl was empty.

Turns out…Mice can jump really far.

So now the mouse is somewhere in our house. Probably in the kitchen.

Update 1:

Update 2:

We’re getting a steady stream of new objects in.  Back when DesktopX was first made, we included a bunch of cool objects made by Paul Boyer.  That was 10 years ago.  So for DesktopX 4 we really want to revisit this with what can be done using today’s technology.

Stay tuned.

Okay, I've been reading a lot of different interpretations of forum comments that I or mods have made on the release of Oculus (which officially was announced today).

First, I want to give a big hand to Gas Powered Games who did an incredible job on Oculus. He is amazing! Make sure you read up on his story which you can view by clicking on the arrow button in the Demigod selection screen by his portrait.

As was the case with Demon Assassin, Gas Powered Games didn't take the easy way out. They could probably have gotten away with just reskinning existing Demigods with a mix of powers and called it a day.  But they didn't. In both cases, they made sure they got new and interesting abilities that add strategic depth to the game.

The Demon Assassin's swap ability is just killer (often literally). Oculus's chain lightning is extremely fun.

Second, I want to address some of the flame wars that came up on the forum. As some of you know, in order to release Oculus we had to release an update to Demigod. That update included directions on how to add him to your account manually.  In hindsight, that shouldn't have been put in the release notes but rather simply waited until he was officially announced.

The confusion some users had in trying to add him to their account prior to the web page being updated created considerable angst on all sides.  The original idea was to have a store page where users would "buy" him for $0 in order to determine the level of interest in DLC content that may not always be free.

However, it was decided that we would just let users add him to their Demigod account by logging into multiplayer (after that, they can play him SP as well).  We can, with that, still determine the number of active users there are to determine what opportunities there may be in the future.

Third, with regards to future DLC, as I said previously, these two Demigods are the two promised free demigods. They represent the last two free ones Stardock will be paying to have developed. Future content in the form of maps or demigods would have to be paid for.  On in other words, we ponied up to have GPG make these two, but future ones have to be paid for by players if it is determined there's a sufficient market for them.  I realize some people are upset and clearly the easier path is to just not say anything but part of what makes Stardock what it is is that we try to be transparent on such things.

Fourth, As the North American publisher of Demigod (Atari is the worldwide retail publisher of Demigod other than NA), we will continue to forward to GPG all player requests, problem reports, etc.

Fifth, It is our intention to lobby to have player created mods integrated into the game for future updates to choose from.  There have been some outstanding tweaks and changes made to the game by players that we would really like to see in the game but the ultimate decision goes with the owner of the game -- Gas Powered Games.  But having worked with them for over a year now, I can say that GPG is very customer focused and so I don't foresee any issues there.

So go have fun! I'll see you online.

Fear his thunder!

We are pleased to announce the release of the second free Demigod: Oculus!

Oculus uses the powers of lightning to aid his friends and punish his enemies. His powers include chain-lightning, the ability to re-charge the mana of friendly demigods, and the lethal capability of launching himself down on his enemies from his throne.

To add him to your account, simply load up the latest version of Demigod, logon to Multiplayer and after that, he should be available to you both in single player and in multiplayer.

Come Beta 2 (end of February), multiplayer should come to Elemental. 

Multiplayer in Elemental is going to be done in an unusual way for a strategy game. In fact, Elemental’s multiplayer is more akin to what you would typically see in a first person shooter.

Here’s how it works:

Option 1: Play on the Stardock servers:

Player loads up Elemental, chooses Multiplayer, selects “Host” (or Join). If they select Host, it will find the nearest (geographical) Elemental server run by Stardock and put them in the lobby. From their point of view, it’s almost exactly like any other game. But in reality, the player is now part of a client/server setup where Stardock provides the servers.

If the user chooses “Join” they instead get a list of “Worlds”. These are servers that have at least 1 human player already in them. The display will include the map name (random or a specific name), host, and ping time.

Next to each of these worlds will be a symbol. Stardock servers will have a Stardock logo. But third-party servers will have their own symbol (a checkbox at the bottom will toggle whether third-party servers are displayed or not). This brings us to Option #2…

Option 2: Play on Custom servers:

In the Elemental folder will be a program called “Elemental Server”.  Launching this will add a custom server to the list of available “worlds” for people to play on.  By default, it’ll be just like the Stardock servers.  But these servers, run on third-party machines, can be highly customized.

Players can mod their servers with custom content, custom rules, and lots of other things that we’ll get into later.  If you ever played Stellar Frontier ( a game we made a long time ago) players created all kinds of different server mods and set up entire star systems with custom planets, custom ships, etc.

The video below outlines the strategy below:

Elemental Beta 2 is due at the end of February.  The modding features won’t be supported until release (we won’t stop people from modding but we won’t support them as we’ll be constantly changing the data formats as the game progresses).

A note to people not in the beta: You’re not missing anything. The betas are NOT fun. These aren’t demo betas. These are real, painful, boring, ugly betas.  The graphics engine is disabled in both beta 1 and beta 2.

The suffering of beta testers:

What is the best way to have a civil online community? There are lots of opinions on this.  My position has always been to eliminate toxic users as quickly as possible. Ban them.

Debating a topic: Good. Personalizing the debate: Getting onto thin ice.  Attacking people in the debate: Over the line.

Over on Neowin.net, we’ve been trying to find ways to clean up the forums. News comments and forum posts there are pretty rough and much of that is, I believe, because of the light hand given to punishing or eliminating users who are, well, jerks.

Like most discussions, it is HOW a point id expressed that leads to trouble. 

Most people who get moderated/warned feel they were unjustly picked on - even users who just got done using a string of profanity to describe someone's mother.

From a discussion on Neowin.net:

Certainly, I realize that. However, the onus isn't on me to accept abuse. 



I would submit that a user insulting themselves is not a violation of Neowin's rules. 

However, again, *any* time you turn a discussion away from the topic and onto a person you are treading on thin ice. We can rationalize the validity of the personal discussion but at the end of the day, moving from discussing a TOPIC to discussing a PERSON is a move from green to yellow.



This is why making it personal is a bad thing because people naturally want to respond in kind.

In your previous message you said "Don't throw a tantrum if you don't get your way." I can tell you that's a pretty provocative thing to say. 



Then don't be surprised when you're not welcome at said house. If you can't behave in a way that is acceptable to the owners and moderators of a site, then you're not going to be welcome there.



Except, no, I really don't. And more to the point: Neither do the users of Neowin. 

The answer is NOT for people to get a thicker skin. The answer is for those people who like to make discussions personal to tread carefully. 

Discussing the topic: Green.
Discussing a person in the conversation: Yellow.
Attacking the person: Red.

The issue of "consistent moderation" boils down to someone saying they didn't really go through a red light but an "orange" light whereas someone else was clearly going through a red. The best route imo is to simply avoid the yellow light.

(original http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=862112&st=345)