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!

As some may recall, back in August we decided that v1.2 was going to be a much bigger project than originally believed and thus would be released in parts.

Those parts included (but were not limited to):

• Replays
• New AI options
• In-lobby stats
• Balance tweaks
• Modding
• Various bug fixes

Since then, the replays have been added, there’s been various balance tweaks, various bug fixes and today the in-lobby stats have been added.

That still leaves quite a bit of work left to be done before we’re ready to call it v1.2 – and that’s not including the two Demigods in development.  Modding still needs to be finished, the modding SDK is still in the works, there’s some balance and bug fixes that have been requested. Gas Powered Games is working on all of them and then some.

We have internally a beta with the new demigods but they are works in progress.  GPG is hard at work perfecting them.

In the meantime, I’m pleased to show the new Demigod in-game overlay with the stats.  Developed by Stardock, the Demigod in-game overay is designed to let us extend the in-game experience without having to change the actual game itself. To do this, I asked the WindowBlinds team to find a way to inject what would become the overlay into the game and then skin it so that it visually was compatible with Demigod. It’s not actually part of Demigod but looks like it.

Then, I asked my lead engine developer on Elemental to work with the Impulse team to get data about each player and display it inside Demigod as if it were part of the game natively.  The result is pretty cool I think and something that I think can be used on future games.

The overlay for gamers…

As a gamer, the overlay has some pretty significant benefits. 

First, you can make far more balanced teams online because you can see the winning percentages and number of games played. 

Second, you can tell what % of games a person completes. We make no judgment over why someone leaves a game early, only what % of the time it happens.

Third, you can see how familiar the players are with other players – how many of their recent games  have been played with other people in the game. This is a big deal since many players get frustrated to be randomly put together on one team and be facing 2 or 3 guys who are up on ventrillo as a pre-made team.

And last, you can read notes you  make on the player. You can enter notes about a player by clicking either on their profile on the Demigod forums OR going to the pantheon.  I make notes by going to the pantheon, finding my games and then making notes from there.

Screenshots:

If you click on the player info area in the lobby you will see this window come up.

If you click on the info button, you can see the stats on that player as well as how familiar they are with the other players and any notes you might have made.

From the Pantheon, you can look for yourself and games you’ve played and make notes on players for future reference.

The last tab on a player is where you can enter notes that you can then view in game for future reference.

We hope you guys like this update as much as we enjoyed making it.  I don’t have ETAs on the next updates yet but I am in regular contact with Gas Powered Games and new builds come into our internal QA process every few days.

Have fun!

Once hooked in, Python is very nice for coding.  Where it is NOT nice, so far at least, is the work having to expose new APIs to it.  I must be doing something wrong because it seems like there’s a lot of work to expose methods and such.

And worse, even once I do that, IDLE (the Python shell I’m using) doesn't seem to have any intellisense for the imported APIs and classes.

Vector-Cell is one of my favorite skins of all time.

Thanks to WindowBlinds 7, it gets a new lease on life…

Texturing the title bar…

Look how good the start menu (this is the Windows 7 start menu) is even though this skin was made back in like 2003.

Here’s my desktop.

Right now running very clean. Windows 7 64-bit, WindowBlinds 7 running a textured Vector-Cell skin, DeskScapes running with a texturized wallpaper, and Fences simply hiding all my desktop clutter for a nice clean desktop.

WindowBlinds 7 (currently in beta on Object Desktop) is the latest version of Stardock’s flag-ship desktop enhancement utility. It is the program that introduced GUI skinning to Windows users back in 1999.

With each new version of Windows, the program has been updated to take advantage of the possibilities of that version.  Since the release of Windows Vista with its “Aero” UI, users have found Microsoft’s new user interface motif both beautiful and frustrating.  Beautiful in the sense that it’s a glass look and feel but frustrating in how inflexible it is compared to say Windows XP’s UI.

With that in mind, let’s walk through the common questions Windows 7 users might want answered:

Issue: Can my XP Msstyles work on Windows 7?

Yes.

In fact, there’s a program that will convert XP msstyles to WindowBlinds:

Direct link - https://www.stardock.com/spencer/misc/MSImport.zip

Here’s a copy of Thallos by Kol, one of the most popular msstyles of all time…

This is running on Windows 7.

Issue: I don’t like WindowBlinds skins, they’re “ugly”. Aero rulez!

I’ll side-step the debate on what determines “ugly” and focus on Aero.  WindowBlinds 7 introduces a new format called UIS0. The idea is to be able to apply different types of textures and skins to Aero itself rather than completely remake the UI.  There is also a new feature in WindowBlinds 7 that allows users to texturize existing skins. 

As a result, even if you just like Aero or Aero-like skins, you can take those and turn them into whatever you want:

 
Changing colors in Aero skins.

Changing textures in Aero skins.

As a result: Even if you don’t even use the thousands of other skins available to WindowBlinds, the new features in WindowBlinds 7 give you an infinite number of possibilities.  The Start button can be raised or centered.

In fact, let’s compare the above screenshot to trying to do the same in Windows 7 using the included options:

The above is the best one can do with the built in customization options in Windows 7 when trying to make Aero “dark”. 

Obviously something like the above is impossible with the built in options in Windows 7.

Issue: What about new skins for WindowBlinds 7?

There’s lot’s of new skins in development specifically for WindowBlinds 7 too.  Here are 3 that are already done.

WindowBlinds: Altitude

 
WindowBlinds: Corporate (texturized)

WindowBlinds: Zenith (texturized)

As the release of WindowBlinds 7 gets closer and additional skinning features come online, more skins will be released both by Stardock Design and the community.

Getting WindowBlinds 7

If you want WindowBlinds 7, right now the only way to try it out is via Object Desktop (www.objectdesktop.com). 

Stay tuned!

What’s that? You got Windows 7 but are wondering how you can skin it?

No problem: WindowBlinds 7 can do the job even with skins made all the way back in 2001.

WindowBlinds 7 is part of Object Desktop.