Many of you have played Age of Wonders. It’s a fantastic series of games.  I was noticing today that our lead composer (both on Galactic Civilizations II and on Elemental) is the same lead composer from Age of Wonders.

If you have a WinCustomize subscription the site should look like this:

If it doesn’t, let us know.

Normally I’d send these privately but since WinCustomize is a community site, I figured I’d make my report on the forum.

#1

#2

Where comments start there should be a separator labeled “Comments”

#3

#4

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#6

Article view still uses evil old code that isn’t friendly on Chrome and is just generally flaky.

campaign finance “reform”

healthcare “reform”

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.