First, I’d like to apologize as we had promised that the betas would suck until Beta 3.  Oh, they still suck. But because we need to get this feature in earlier than later, something fairly cool is getting in early.  I will say that we will make an effort to avoid any cool features getting in early in the future.

So in today’s beta update, players can design their own units.  But in Elemental, units are represented by cards from a UI point of view.  To make this a useful feature and not just cosmetic, players can design their cards.  The reason this is useful is because players can change the background and pose of the unit. As a result, we can shrink the cards down very small in the UI where we need and players will still know what they represent because they were the ones who designed them.

To see it in action click here:

http://screencast.com/t/zgacEgNmRwMq

We’re not trying to torture anyone with these sneak peeks. 

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been playing with new builds of Demigod sent over from developer Gas Powered Games.

Now, since I work at Stardock, the publisher, I’m biased. I make no bones about it. But as the designer and one of the developers of Galactic Civilizations and the forthcoming Elemental, I do have some perspective on the work GPG is doing with these demigods.

As someone who is biased a bit towards quantity over quality, I have been somewhat skeptical about the effort involved in making these demigods. If I were the designer of Demigod, the players would simply create their demigods from scratch at the start of the game rather than “pick” one.  That said, seeing GPG’s work has given me a real appreciation of the craftsmanship at Gas Powered Games.

The Demon Assassin will be an exciting addition. He plays very differently than any other demigod I’ve played and yet he also feels natural to the game play. He’s incredibly powerful but also very fragile.

I normally play as either Oak or Lord Erebus. In either case, I don’t tend to die often because I quickly amass a lot of HP.  The Demon Assassin, by contrast, is (obviously) not a general which means no monks to start out with and he has much lower armor and HP than most of the demigods.

On the other hand, he’s lethal.  By the second level, a fully mana’d DA can inflict 650HP of damage.

Here are the powers that I think people will find exciting:

1. Warp Strike.  You target at enemy and he will warp in and do 250 damage (it’s expensive at 500 mana so early on it’s not something that will happen much).  The range isn’t huge but it’s enough to make him a real force early on if you’re running away.
2. Spine Attack. Yes, he also has a ranged weapon. A rather nasty one. It’s short-range but it’s range nevertheless. For 550 mana you can do 400 damage. First level.
3. Elusiveness. This is a passive ability but holy cow, it’s so cool. It’s a dodge ability.
4. Demon Speed. Another passive ability but simply put, you can make him go faster and faster.  By default, he’s actually pretty slow.
5. Precision. This is a critical hit passive ability that you can crank up during the course of the game.
6. Warp area. This is his area effect. It doesn’t show up until level 5 but it lets him do damage to nearby units for 250 damage each (eventually at level 10 he can do 500 damage to all nearby units). 
7. He also has a shadow ability. This is the one that will be controversial and we’ll be discussing with players. He can exchange places with a target demigod.  The range is limited but it’s very powerful. You’ve just capped that portal flag, you’re running away. You’re going to make it.  No. No you’re not. You’re going to die. Because the demon assassin has just exchanged places with you and now you’re back at that portal and he’s out in front of you.

He is incredibly dangerous – in the right hands. He’s also a massive feeder in the wrong hands.  At level 4, with HP giving armor and such, I had 2275HP.  With Erebus or Oak I’d be at over 4000 at that point. 

What? Give him Blood of the Fallen? No problem? Except he’s fairly slow at the start.  He is almost begging for Swift Ankle Bracelet.

Here’s a video of his skills.

Status report:

Tomorrow we expect to send out an email to those of you who have signed up for Ready to Play.  Once we have that, we plan in the next week or so to begin sending out invitations to people (it won’t be everyone, sorry, but we want to “beta” these guys before we unleash them on everyone) to people via Ready to Play.

In the meantime, here’s a quickie video of me playing the Demon Assassin.  

 

If you find YouTube too slow, I have it up on my FTP.

Someone who is only casually into gaming asked me what battles in Elemental will be like.  I said if there was a game called Magic: Total War, then you have a pretty good idea of what the scale of battles would be.

Now, for lots of people (and myself included most of the time) auto-resolve will be the preferred choice.  One of my biggest pet peeves as a gamer is feeling like I have to fight through every battle myself.  So this is an area that beta testers and us will be discussing a lot and one of the reasons why the tactical battles are getting so much public beta testing time this Winter.

…

But let’s talk about numbers.

Battles

Early battles might have 5 soldiers involved.

Late battles might have 10,000 soldiers involved.

Economics

A citizen produces gold and research points.

The default rate is 0.10 gold and 0.10 research points per citizen.

Players will be able to change those rates based on what they build in their city.

Prestige

Buildings provide prestige.

Prestige determines population growth because you’re really trying to attract people into your towns from the wastelands.

Resources

An improvement will produce N resources when played on a resource (farm on fertile land).

Some types of resources give bonuses to whatever is built on them (a farm on a wheat resource produces more food than fertile land)

All cities in your kingdom will receive 1.0 of a resource per turn when any city is using it.

A city will receive an additional 1.0 of that resource per turn if it is connected by a road.

This amount will be able to be modified through technologies and improvements.

A caravan is sent to each city in your kingdom that is connected by a road and will deliver N (typically 10.0) of that resource when it arrives at a destination city temporarily adding to whatever projects need it.

* We don’t currently like how roads are being built but don’t want players to be forced to building “workers” to build the roads. If anyone has any suggestions we’d like to hear it.

Populations

Populations start out in a city at 1 and can rise to tens of thousands late in the game and possibly higher depending on player feedback.

Armies

There is no such thing as just building a unit. That unit has to come from your population. If you plan to have mass armies then you better have massive population. If you plan to have small armies that are very well equipped then you better have the resources to do it.  If you plan to have fight with elite forces of magic users then you better have access to the shards and magic spells or have completed quests.

2010 Preview

What it is

Object Desktop is a suite of desktop enhancement utilities designed to enable users to turbo-charge their Windows experience. It has been described over the years as a “third party upgrade to Windows”.

With Windows 7 arriving on the eve of the 10th anniversary since the initial Windows release of Object Desktop, this year’s version is particularly special.  This article will walk you through the basic elements of Object Desktop, what’s new since last year, and why it has remained so popular with power users.

Anyone who gets Object Desktop today will automatically get Object Desktop 2010 plus everything we release for a year from their purchase.

The Goods

There are many programs that make up Object Desktop but a few of them are the real-stand outs and have gotten the lion’s share of the effort this year. 

The featured programs of Object Desktop 2010

Below are just a few highlights…

 

WindowBlinds 7

Since its initial launch, WindowBlinds has been the star of Object Desktop and in November, WindowBlinds 7 gets released on its own and is already in late beta on Object Desktop as I write this. Having been involved on WindowBlinds since the start, I can safely say that this version is definitely the most significant update ever.

Here are some highlights:

 

 

WindowBlinds 7: Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 users get a massive upgrade.

 

Native support for Windows 7

 

WindowBlinds 7 can skin Windows Aero.

 

The new WindowBlinds configuration screen

 

Remember all those skins made in the Windows XP era? No problem, they will work natively on Windows Vista and Windows 7 and can now be modified in the program to be better than ever.

 

 
Apply textures your skins to create your own custom look. You can even create your own textures right from the program.

Aero skinned.

 

 

Fences Pro 1

Fences is a brand-new program that lets people organize their desktop icons easily. It can also, with a simple double-click, hide all your icons at once. It’s quickly become one of the most popular programs on the Internet.

 

Fences makes it easy to organize your desktop.

 

A fence can hide a lot of clutter.

 

Double-click on the desktop and all your icons will disappear. Double-click again to bring them back.

 

Creating a fence is as easy holding the right mouse button down and dragging

Fences Pro goes beyond what is in the free version and allows users to have Fences collect new icons based on type – auto organizing their desktop.

 

DeskScapes 3

DeskScapes is the world’s most popular animated wallpaper program.

The first version allowed users of Windows Vista to apply a new type of wallpaper called “Dreams” that were either video or rendered animation dynamically.  The second version added support for Windows XP.  The new version, Version 3, adds support for “Hybrid” dreams which allows users to take a static picture and animate it.  In addition, it also supports adding effects to your existing wallpaper gallery.

Here’s an overview in pictures:

DeskScapes gets a new, easy to use configuration screen

 

Your existing wallpaper library gets a whole new life thanks to effects. All effects are done on the fly without ever effecting the actual wallpaper.

Got a cool photo that is too colorful as a wallpaper? Use the DeskScapes Sepia effect to tone it down.  Doesn’t touch the actual file, just the wallpaper in memory.

 

Hybrid dreams allow users to integrate animated pieces into static images. As a result, a subtle, interesting animated wallpaper can be made that isn’t distracting and uses virtually no CPU. Users can even pick and choose which animated elements to use.

There are thousands of high quality animated wallpapers (Dreams) available on the net already and with DeskScapes 3, you can apply effects to them as well.

 

Got a large screen monitor and your wallpapers are a lower resolution? Then you will definitely want DeskScapes 3. It has options to take those wallpapers and apply effects so that they look good at higher resolutions. DeskScapes even provides options for handling wallpaper on multiple monitors.

 

 

DesktopX 4

DesktopX is a program that allows users to add true “objects” to their Windows desktop.  DesktopX 4 is the long-awaited update that adds full support for Windows Vista and Windows 7 and streamlines its user interface. Here’s a sample of what it can do:

Now adding an object is as easy as right-clicking on the desktop.

 

Users can make their desktop objects and size or shape. JavaScript or VB Scripts can optionally be used to give them function.

Users can export their creations as objects (to be used within DesktopX), widgets (programs on a system that has DesktopX), or as a Windows sidebar gadget.

 

Users can gather their objects together and build desktops and then save them as a .desktop.

 

IconPackager 5

IconPackager is a program that enables users to apply packages of icons to their Windows system to change all their icons at once or individually.

IconPackager gets support for Windows 7.

Windows 7 specific icons can now be easily changed in one spot.

Right-click on a data file and IconPackager 5 will allow you to change the icon for that file type and can even sort through different icon packages to find just the right icon.

 

The Impulse Dock

Object Desktop 2010 now automatically includes the Impulse Dock. This simple dock snaps to the taskbar and can be set to auto-hide.

This simple and powerful dock makes it easy to organize the programs you regularly run and complements your existing taskbar.

 
Customize the look of your dock with the included high-resolution icons or use your own.

 

Tweak 7

If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, then the new version of Stardock’s premiere tweaking program (TweakVista and Tweak7) will help you get the most out of Windows. Here’s some of what’s new:

 

Tweak7’s simplified interface makes it much easier to find out what’s running on your system and help get rid of all the junk that gets loaded safely.

Fine tune the UAC even beyond what Windows 7 can do (even on Windows Vista).

Windows tends to try to force you to put all your “stuff” on the C drive. Tweak7 allows users to safely and seamlessly move those directories to other partitions – without even having to reboot normally.

 

 

Theme Manager

Theme Manager helps put it all together. The new version of Theme Manager refocuses on .Suites.  A suite includes everything you need to change your desktop – a WindowBlinds skin, an icon package, a DeskScapes dream, DesktopX objects, etc. all put together and applied from a single UI.

 
The new Theme Manager includes several new suites right within it along with some exclusive animated wallpapers for DeskScapes users.

 

Conclusions

This is just a quick summary of some of the work Stardock has done on Object Desktop these past few months. There’s a lot more to it than this and there’s a lot of great stuff cooking in our labs for the forthcoming year too.

If you don’t have Object Desktop, you can get it here: www.objectdesktop.com. 

On December 2, 2009, Object Desktop and Object Desktop Ultimate will be merged into Object Desktop. Users with Object Desktop Ultimate will get a full year added to their account (so now is the ideal time to pick up Object Desktop Ultimate). 

Object Desktop: It’s like getting the next version of Windows today!

For those of you who aren’t game developers I thought I would write up a quick article on how modern games are made.

In the old days…

You would code up the game.  There was simply “the game”.  The development team would code their largely from scratch.

Now…

Games are broken up into many different parts. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll divide it into the two main parts: “The Engine” and the actual game.

Civilization IV licensed Gamebryo for its engine.  Demigod uses the “Forge” engine (which Supreme Commander was built on).  Sins of a Solar Empire is powered by the Iron engine.  Galactic Civilizations used Pear. Virtually any modern game you look at has an engine that is fairly separate from the game.

The Development of Elemental

The biggest challenge we had for Elemental is that we needed to create a modern game engine designed for land-based strategy games.  This is a non-trivial endeavor.  Much of the initial work had been done with Society but that was really just the tip of the iceberg.

A modern game engine isn’t merely about displaying graphics in 3D. There’s the editors and tools to support content for it, the scripting language to interact with it, the user interface tools, multiplayer tools, etc.

For Elemental, before we could even consider writing “the game” this engine had to be built.  That’s where 90% of our development time thus far has gone.

The BETA of Elemental

The first two betas (beta 1 and beta 2 – which won’t be out for months) don’t include this engine.  If you were at PAX, you saw the engine connected to the game.  But for the beta, it’s stripped out so that we can focus exclusively on the game design in such a way that the beta testers themselves are involved in the actual design.

What Beta testers don’t get to see yet

When we play Elemental, below is what we see:

And these screenshots are actually a month old – the engine is being developed at the same time as the “Game” betas (if you critique the screenshots you can see all kinds of flaws still such as places where shadows aren’t yet working and lighting and bloom flaws and temporary graphics and textures, etc.).

So why are they so separate?

The obvious question is, why not have both be tested at once? The reason for that is that once you start tying “the game” to the engine, you lose a lot of flexibility in making game play changes.

For example, this week we put out the Elemental beta 1B which has the beginnings of the game economy.  Users have concluded, and we agree, that resource inventory just isn’t that fun.  Because the game isn’t part of the engine, it’s literally a 2 hour change and balancing is all data-driven.  By contrast, if the engine had been hooked up there would have been the temptation to display resource inventory visually (piles of wood or stacks of wheat bags for instance). That’s just one example.

That’s why what beta testers in Elemental see right looks like this:

I’m in pain!

The objective

The motivation to have the beta be drawn out like this is that for us, creating the game, with you guys, is very important to us – as gamers.  It has been many years since a new turn-based strategy game was made that wasn’t tied to the limitations (both hardware and design-wise) from the 1990s.

And there are a lot of people in this beta who, like us, have been waiting a long time for a game like this to get made and have a lot of good ideas.

Personal perspective

There are many outstanding strategy games out there from Civilization IV to Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic to Dominions 3 to Heroes of Might and Magic to the grandaddy of this sub-genre: Master of Magic.  What I am looking for us to do is create a PC game that has the kind of depth that is found only on PC games these days but at the same time isn’t bogged down in detail and minutia. 

The delicate balance – making sure the game isn’t dumbed down or “consolized” and yet not so complicated that it feels like work is the journey that we’re hoping to make together with you guys and the best way we believe to do that is to have the on-going game “prototype” not be merged with the game engine until the game is fun to play in it’s current “fugly” look.  Because if it’s fun with Commodore 64 type graphics, then it should be amazing when it’s played with a state of the art game engine behind it.

Don’t get excited. It’s still primitive. It will still randomly corrupt your boot disk, kill random pets, and make small children cry. But here’s what’s new:

------------------------------------
Change Log - Beta 1b Update (0.25.015 on Impulse)
------------------------------------
[Refreshed 0.25.014 build to fix an intermittent crash bug on launch and to change unit costs to 1 gp per turn.]
- New Features -
+ Info Cards Displaying rollover data
- Game objects, such as Units, Cities, Caravans, Goodie Huts, and Resources all send mouseover messages to pop up the info card
- Caravans will show their destination, goods carried, and time to reach city
- Units will show their stats, current action or destination, and unit count
- Improvements show time to complete and required materials
- Resources list what tech or known improvement is needed to harvest them
- Cities show net income and basic stats (still needs to show resources coming in)
+ 'Turns to build Improvement' Calculations implemented
- Improvements can now require resources to construct (though none do ATM)
- Gold Cost to Build = Labor x GoldCostPerLaborPt
- Time To Build = Labor + Difference in Resources Available vs. Resources Provided
- These calculations should be displayed in the InfoCard when you roll over an improvement in build mode
- Improvements are now built in a queue
- Gold to build an improvement is instantly removed from the treasury
+ City Context ACTIONS Tab now lists all available actions for a city
- Medallion buttons hidden
- Train Unit action now listing in the TRAINING tab
- Construction action now listing in the BUILDING tab
- images made for city actions
+ Cleaned up Internal City Resource management
- made it easier to tell what is going on, both code-wise and for display in the UI
- City Details now lists details on how to reach the next level
+ Smarter Caravans
- Only one caravan per city link
- That caravan will drop off goods from the home city, then bring back goods from the destination city...rince, repeat
+ New Resources
- Twilight Bees and Wild Wheat are rare resources can be build upon by a farm but provide more food than a Fertile Ground tile
- Twilight Bees' 'Apiary' improvement added
- Forests can now harvest lumber with a Lumberyard
+ New 'Save Unit Design' dialog
- lets you set up a scene to (eventually) use as that unit's medallion image
- background can be flipped
- stance for the image is used for the pewter pose
+ Map Generation is now Data Driven
- Maps are moving towards a system where all generation options are moddable, right now only the main features are hooked up
- Maps should no longer look like big blobs, but may end up looking like big spiders instead (it's a work in progress)
------------------------------------
- Tweaks -
+ Texture Atlas: Forces generated texture to a smaller size to help with cards that were struggling on startup
+ Research Screen: Time to unlocked milestone changed from PERCENTAGE to TURNS
+ Lowered the speed of units
+ Evil Factions disabled as opponents until we get more of their assets ready
+ Tweaked Tech costs
+ Logrithmic representation of Techs
+ Roads take 5 turns to build per segment
+ Citizens only produce 0.01 research pts (used to produce 0.05 RPs)
+ Iron Deposits visible right away
+ Most 'Negative Treasury' logic implemented, so if you dont have enough gold, you can't build more Cities, Improvements, or Units
+ More Art Assets Implemented for Tech Tree and UI
------------------------------------
- Fixes -
+ City Build Mode: Improvement Icons stay flat to the Terrain (they were floating 50 units above)
+ Grid lists fixed to properly display dangling entries
+ Players History daa gets Saved and Loaded
+ Changed advanced choose faction screen and advanced choose opponent screens to use shorter strings for the filter buttons
+ Various Typos

 

We plan to do an interim update next week to finish out Beta 1B.

I’d say have fun but…well, you know…

 

Possibly the most significant update to WindowBlinds in years has occurred today.  WindowBlinds 7's new beta on Object Desktop can skin Aero itself.

View: YouTube Video

Visit: www.objectdesktop.com 

Skinning Aero!

 

If you have Object Desktop, you can get it now.  If not, you can purchase Object Desktop here.

IF you have Windows 7 THEN you should definitely get Object Desktop RIGHT NOW (though it’s pretty awesome on XP and Vista as well).