Starting next Monday, we begin work internally on the Elemental combat system.  It won’t see the light of day for months (tactical combat part anyway).  But this is the place to discuss how you would like it to work.

Right now, a unit has Attack, Defense, Hitpoints, and speed.  It’s very straight forward. When in battle, other factors come into play too (range of attack, height, and cover).

But obviously there are a lot of other factors that could be looked at.  Blunt weapons vs. Cutting weapons for instance.  My personal inclination is to stay away from damage types because they add a lot of complexity without really giving back a lot of fun (in my opinion).  I’m sure there are those who will disagree but we’ll have to agree to disagree there and perhaps damage types can be made something available to modders later.

I would like to see experience be used more than as simply a modifier to attack and defense and HP.  I don’t mean when you train your units (which gives them more HP) but I mean real combat experience causing them to simply be better at combat but we have not yet come up with a way to convey this well in the game.

I would also like to see Mobility be taken into effect somehow in combat.  The Mongols conquered much of the known world because they were strictly a mobile army that could easily outflank their infantry-heavy opponents. How to convey this to players is again, a challenge that would have to be dealt with.

What would you guys like to see?

It’s been several years since WindowBlinds has added a new skinning format.  For those of you who are techies, WindowBlinds has UIS1 and UIS2 (User Interface Specification). 

UIS2 is extremely powerful and lets users go wild with the design. 99% of skins use UIS2.  The downside is that skins are very hard to do (and even harder to do nicely) and there can be compatibility issues with programs that don’t adhere to the GUI conventions of Windows.

UIS1 is a lot less powerful but faster.  The borders and title bar are a fixed size and the title bar buttons can’t be moved. They’re a bit easier to make but still involve quite a bit of work. They have essentially perfect compatibility but most skinners don’t do UIS1 because they’re nearly as hard as UIS2 and and lack the power.

With WindowBlinds 7, a new skinning format gets introduced: UIS0.  The idea here is to make it very very easy to make skins and the skins only apply to Aero (which means for XP users this won’t apply since there’s no Aero to apply to).  Since the Aero design can’t be “touched” skinners can’t really easily hang themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, you CAN make an ugly Aero skin with UIS0.

Besides being easier to create UIS0 skins, UIS0 skins are Aero which means that any weird program that makes the assumption that Aero is running will be fine.

  vs.

The biggest goal, however is to make it a lot easier to make skins again.  Terrific skins like Aero Metal and Aero Midnight (by Vstyler for Stardock Design) are designed to look just like Aero but with metal textures or be pitch black.  It’s just as hard to make those skins (actually even harder since people are going to be comparing it to the default Aero) as any “original” skin.

Now, people who like the Windows Vista/Windows 7 default look but simply want to enhance it in some way can do so with a minimal of fuss.  Textures, colorization, and other new WindowBlinds 7 effects can be applied to Aero just like any other skin.

The beta of this is due out this week for Object Desktop users.

Aero Metals (brushed): UIS0.  Time to do ~5 minutes.

Aero Metal: UIS2. Time to do: Several days.

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2009/10/court-upholds-.html

I’d say this is a good call by the court even if I think the law itself to be foolish for California (talk about incenting people to leave).

It’s been awhile since DesktopX got the kind of love it deserved. And with the new Object Desktop in development, it’s getting some love. 

First, DesktopX is going back to its roots – desktop eXtension.  Specifically, adding objects to the desktop that can be made to do interesting and useful things.

This will have some consequences and opportunities.

On the consequence side, we’re going to pull out features that are rarely used, hard to support, and are just generally not part of the core product.  For example, creating system trays. That was something we hacked in years ago that really shouldn’t have been in there.  In the early days when there was ObjectBar vs. DesktopX there was the desire to have these two programs be all things to all people.  In an age of Windows 2000/XP, we could get away with that.  But with XP/Vista/7, you really can’t, particularly in a world populated with the UAC where many many battles take place that users never see.

On the opportunity side, it sets up DesktopX to support new technologies like WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). Picture being able to take an object and apply 3D effects to it even if the object itself is static.  There’s a lot of “good stuff” in Windows 7 that we want to make sure DesktopX is positioned to take advantage of.

A big area of change that most people, sadly, won’t notice (though power users might) is the under the cover work to make DesktopX not just work on Windows 7 but actually make use of the “plumbing” of Windows to do things faster, more robustly, and use less memory while doing it.

The target is to have a beta of DesktopX 4 in the next 2 weeks.

The two new Demigods are getting close finally. And we’re very excited to start playing with them.  Since we’re going to want to do some “play testing” to nail down the balance before they end up being foisted out on everyone, we’ll be releasing an update to Demigod in the next couple of weeks that will allow us to add these new ones to a person’s Demigod account.  They’ll be able to play it online in regular games with others and we’ll see how they work out.  As we nail down balance and such we’ll expand out access to it until everyone who has Demigod can access it.

Hi guys, 

Myself (Frogboy) and Alberto (lead developer on DesktopX) will be playing Demigod tonight if anyone wants to join our games.

Let me cut to the bad news right off.  Beta 1B isn’t ready to go yet. It needs to be pushed.  But for your convenience, I’m going to walk through the problems with the current internal build.  Now, before someone who isn’t paying attention closely sends me a flame PM, please read this: I work at Stardock.  It’s my job to be critical of the game. The only thing unusual is that I’m airing our internal dirty laundry to the public – but there’s a point to that too and that is so that beta testers can participate in those discussions.

So let’s walk through the things that are in our current build that need to be addressed before we release a public beta 1B which is known as the “economic” beta.

The Good

Bees and wheat are in.

Or more specifically, we are starting to add a lot more resources into the game.  The reason this is important is that we want to begin populating the world with resources that can share city improvements OR have their own improvements.

Info Card system is in

A UI convention pioneered in Sins of a Solar Empire by Ironclad is in Elemental now. If you hover over something of interest, an info card comes up – except here we have decided to go with an actual playing card motify ala Magic the Gathering.

The City UI is cleaned up

Managing cities has gotten a bit easier. the buttons have gotten moved over.

A lot of under the covers stuff has gotten fixed/improved

Performance is vastly better. The economy is technically in there.

The Bad

While the economy is in there now, it’s no use to the beta testers if the user interface doesn’t convey the information to them.  As Tom Chick would say “show me!” and right now we’re not and without that, beta testers can’t give feedback on whether they think the economic system is worthwhile.

Economics are hard to see in action.

Besides the fact that the info cards are way too big, they don’t convey useful information presently.  Why does it take 5 turns to complete an Inn? I dunno. What could I do to make Inns build faster? I dunno.  Why does the Inn cost $100? I dunno.

Under the covers:

The time and money to build an improvement = Labor + Materials.

The cost of the labor and materials determines the cost and the time to gather the materials and for the labor to execute determines the time.

Now, the card doesn’t need to display all of that.  But it should display how much wood is required.

The info card (not shown here) should display what the Inn does and what it requires to be built.  The player should be able to see the city data on the right (not a duplicate of the Inn here) so that they can decide what improvement to build and what resources they have on hand to build them with.  How much wood do they have? How good is their labor? Do they need the benefit the chosen improvement provides? Without this information, the player is left guessing.

There’s been a lot of overall progress. But Beta 1B is a specific milestone for the economics so we have to be able to display this kind of “stuff” very clearly to players.  So it’s looking like it’ll be another week.

Of course, that also buys me a little more time on the AI (which has been improving with these builds as well though it’s all C++ right now and not Python yet).

Stay tuned.

Every so often I get a flame private message from a fan of one of our games telling me to “give Stardock a break” because they see one of my posts as “flaming” Elemental or Demigod or Sins or Galactic Civilizations.

Just as a head’s up. I work at Stardock. I’m one of the developers on some of these games or am the product manager. It’s my job to complain about the games and to make them better. Please don’t PM me telling me that I need to be “nicer” about the games. 

Thanks!