If you're interested in getting Ready to Play visit:
http://readytoplay.impulsedriven.com
On the download page, you can sign up. We pick people from that list to join the beta. Right now, the number of people invited in is kept very small so that we can monitor bugs and network issues on a per person basis. But as the beta goes on we will be adding more and more people.
If you have either Sins of a Solar Empire or Demigod and play online, make sure you sign up for the Ready to Play BETA. Next week, we intend to sent out invitations to the second wave which will be drawn from the signups.
Right now, we have approximately 500 people in the beta. Wave 2 should extend this to around 2,000.
What is Ready to Play? It is a new program designed for every single person who has ever had a horrible online gaming experience in multiplayer.
I think I can confidently say that Ready to Play really does transform the online experience.
Here’s how it works:
You download and install it. It asks you to prioritize the types of people you want to play online and answer some questions. It takes this information and from that and recommends people you might want to play with.
From there, it’s unbelievably easy to get a good game going.
Step 1: Pick your game.
Step 2: Pick who you want to send the invite to (official friends or ones the system thinks you would get along with)
Step 3: Send the invitation
The results are just awesome. You get games going very fast with people who are likely to be compatible with you online.
Now this is still beta so it has kinks, polish issues, and algorithm tweaks that it needs. So you won’t want to sign up if bugginess and such is an issue. 
Based on player feedback, we’ve already started greatly enhancing what it will be able to do (voice over IP is in the works for instance).
You can discuss it more here:
Yesterday I talked about how I added some additional resources into the game. Today I’m going to talk about modding the tech tree.
But first, I want to answer some questions I got from yesterday’s article.
First, the age old issue of multiplayer came up. If I mod what is on my machine, how does that affect multiplayer? The answer is, it doesn’t. Our solution to this age old issue is, in hindsight, so obvious that I feel shame for our industry (and myself in particular but that’s just my default stance anyway…) for not having done this sooner: When you play multiplayer,the data all sides use is server-side – the data you have locally is irrelevant. So you can mod your game all you want without worrying about multiplayer.
Second, there is, at this stage, a significant issue with hard coding still that will need to get zapped as we go along. Kingdom, Fallen, etc. should not be hard coded into the game.
Third, gameplay itself will slowly migrate to Python 2.x But it will be a gradual process. Early on, our modding will focus on adding and modifying Elemental. Later, I’ll walk you guys through how someone could use Elemental with Python to make a new game. My goal (and this isn’t a promise because it depends on how long it takes to do) is to make a Temple of Apshai mod (a classic RPG) using Elemental and give out to people complete with source so people could see what I did.
Next…
The tech tree…
This weekend I’m trying to see how much I can do to the game without having to have access to the source or, for that matter, without having art skills.
Right now, for beta testers, there’s not much modding possible because there are is no documentation and the data is streamed from our servers so that we can do real-time updating.
Here’s how modding works:
First, you have to think of everything in the world in three parts:
1. The data that explains what the thing you want in the game is.
2. The image that represents the thing you want in the game.
3. The 3D object that represents the thing in the game when seeing it in 3D.
Right now, we’re lucky because the 3D engine is disabled in the beta and in the final version, there will be a huge pool of 3D assets that modders can make use of or use the built in mod tools to create without ever having to crack open Maya or 3D Studio.
So for tonight, I decided to make a new resource called twilight bees. This would be a food resource.
Step 1: The data
The biggest load hog on Elemental right now is because of the way we do our XML. We will have to optimize it but it was done to make modding easier. The idea is that you can toss in any XML file in the data/<your language> directory and voila, the game will read it in.
This way, modders don’t have to worry about modifying existing files. They can easily add their own files.
So I created a file called twilightbees.xml
Using the “stuff” I found in coreresources.xml I reversed engineered how resources were put in (yea, if I was at work, I would just ask but I’m at home so I have to figure it out or worse, look through the google docs on the project).
The stuff I highlighted is the stuff I couldn’t figure out and think it needs to be either taken out entirely or have a pretty important point for existing because they don’t seem to matter except rarity but what does “3” mean? I am going to ask that rarity be simply a percent 0 to 100% odds of the item showing up in a given tile.
Step 2: The image
I found a bee hive image on the net and copied it into the gfx/tacticalicons directory.
In the game
They I ran the game and was greeted with this:
One thing that was nice is that I didn’t have to worry about sizes. Old modders reading this know what I speak of. The game took care of sizing it properly for me so I didn’t have to make it some 128x128 image or whatever.
Once I had farming tech, I could build a farm on the twilight bees. Why a farm?
Because I kept the <Type> as fertileland and in the file k_farming.xml is where the “farm” improvement is.
One thing I learned is that there is a lot of XML possibility already in the current beta. For example, there is also a f_farming.xml for the Fallen farm. What resources show up is all data driven and what improvements, how they look, what they do, is all data driven.
So for instance, I could create a race of dwarves with their own tech tree, their own improvements, but could act on the same land in different ways. Maybe Dwarven mines, for instance, could be more productive than the standard mines. Or maybe there would be resources that only dwarves could even see on the map.
My main complaint right now though is the sheer amount of clutter that I’m not convinced is necessary. We’ll have to be careful not to let too much legacy XML stay in there.
Now, the question rises, what should be in the game by default in terms of “stuff”? It’s always a challenging question to answer. For instance, having spent years playing games from Dominions to MOM to Civilization and HOMM and so on, each game has its own take on how much “stuff” the user needs to deal with.
I’m of the opinion that I’d like to see quite a bit of different stuff on the game map that does interesting things even if it makes the map a bit more “cluttered”.
Tomorrow, I plan to start digging into the technology trees for the game.
Yesterday Object Desktop Ultimate users were treated to the latest build of Tweak 7.
There’s been a lot of work with this under the hood and I’m still not sure what the ultimately direction for this program should be because I don’t want it to become full of snake oil tweaks. We want to focus Tweak 7 on useful features, ideally ones that can be put into the new version of TweakVista as well.
One of the new pages is called “Usability”. This is one of the areas I’ve been pounding on for the past few months here and we’ve tried lots of different things with varying degrees of success.
Let’s walk through the usability tab for this blog:
Context handlers are one of those things that drive many users nuts. They’re the system tray clutter of 2009 – everyone wants to get their crappy thing into the right-click menu. There are plenty of programs out there that can manage them but they often seem really cryptic. Our goal is to make this a very easy and safe way to control what gets put into those menus.
The Profile location is still a work in progress but the idea here is to let you put your “stuff” on other drives. My C drive is an SSD and my D drive is a huge conventional drive. I don’t want all my stuff on the C drive. You can move some of your folders over from Windows explorer but many others you can’t easily do so and it’s a pain.
The idea here is to let people put their stuff wherever they want rather than being forced to use the C drive. It works extremely seamlessly.
The third tab includes the confirmation options. This is an area that will be growing and growing and growing as we find new ways to get rid of the “Are you sure?” dialogs that Windows seems to love. We’re just getting started on this but you get the idea.
If you don’t have Object Desktop Ultimate, you can get it here: www.objectdesktop.com.
If you do, make sure you have chosen to see betas in the Impulse settings.
Ever wanted to see what people who actually bought a given game or application truly think of something? Impulse now supports customer reviews – from within Impulse, users can rate their games and applications on a scale from 1 to 5 stars.
Rate the games and applications you have within the Impulse client
The explore page on the ImpulseDriven.com website as well as within the Impulse explore tab will now display customer ratings.
Because of the ease of rating, the developers of Impulse believe that the programs will receive a much more accurate rating than what has traditionally been possible and in addition ensures that only those who actually have the program can rate.
Someday, someone is going to do a round up of digital distribution platforms and get around to comparing one very important feature: How FAST they download.
That’s one of Impulse’s biggest advantages. It’s got crazy fast download speeds whether you’re in North America or Australia or Germany or wherever.
Here’s a little video I took from my relatively humble home Comcast cable setup.
As some of you know, I live on Blue’s News and Shacknews along with a few other sites so when I saw the Impulse top 10 sales list on there I thought that pretty cool. So here are some random thoughts on digital distribution, numbers, and retail.
These are just my personal opinions take them for whatever you think it’s worth.
1. Retail still dominates compared to digital distribution on PC games.
2. Individual retailers don’t sell that many units a week. I.e. I would say that Steam outsells an individual major retail chain on a new release and that Impulse probably outsells the typical individual smaller retail chain.
3. Retail will continue to dominate as long as digital distributors don’t come up with a standardized digital format for games (i.e. standardized installer). I don’t have to make different boxes for every retailer but if I want to put my game on various digital distributors, I end up having to do work on each one.
4. Many hard core gamers I’ve noticed think that it’s all or nothing for digital distributors. It’s not. Gamers should want as many choices as they can competing for their hard earned money.
5. My guess is that digital distributors represent around 25% of the PC games market for games also sold at retail.
6. My guess is that Steam currently has around 80% of the digital distribution market. Impulse probably has around 10% and all the others have the remaining 10%.
7. The entire combined active online community of Steam, Impulse, etc. is less than the Halo 3 community on the Xbox 360.
8. The market penetration of digital distribution is probably at around 10% on the PC IMO.
9. The top 10 sales numbers on Steam and Impulse are easily as statistically valid as the top 10 PC games sales on Amazon.com (in terms of actual units sold). Or to be even more clear cut with my opinion, I believe, based on having seen numbers, that a random game on Impulse or Steam will outsell same game on Amazon.com. This isn’t a critique of Amazon.com (where I do an insane amount of shopping) but more of the numbers that Impulse and Steam (particularly Steam) are capable of doing and their specialization.
10. Most games in digital distribution sell terribly. However, those same games would simply be unavailable at retail. The onus is on the providers of digital distribution services to make it easier to get games on their services. It is not the responsibility of publishers to do this. Digital distribution offers the opportunity for game developers/publishers to turn their games into long-term assets.
As discussed yesterday, I’ve retaken the reigns on Object Desktop after a 3 year absence. And the team has some very cool stuff that is now coming together in rapid fashion.
Today I’m going to talk about something that I think is a pretty big deal: DeskScapes 3.
For those of you not familiar with DeskScapes, it is a program that applies animated wallpaper. It’s effectively the only animated wallpaper program available for users of XP, Vista, and Windows 7.
One of the first changes I wanted to see made to DeskScapes as part of the “new regime” is for it to be a lot more practical. I like animated wallpaper as much as the next person, which means I’ll load it up for a bit, check it out, and slowly get tired of it like any wallpaper. But what we really wanted to see with DeskScapes 3 is for it to be even more useful to a wider population.
DeskScapes 3 (v2.91 beta) will be going out tomorrow for Object Desktop users. What’s in it that’s new?
Well the most obvious new thing is the support for your existing static wallpapers. But more importantly, that you can now apply the same kinds of effects to your existing wallpapers that you could once only apply to Dreams.
In the above example, I’ve taken a very colorful image and applied a Sepia filter to it in order to make (for me) a better background.
The new DeskScapes beta also introduces a pretty big new technology that has been discussed previously but now we’ve actually finally got it together: Hybrid Dreams
The idea is to make it so that people can take an existing image (a static one) and animate a part of it. So in this case, only the trees and the lights and some sky elements change and it’s very subtle. But because it’s such a small part, it uses virtually no CPU. The idea is to be able to make it so that animated wallpapers need not be obnoxious but merely a natural evolution beyond the static pictures we’ve had for the past two decades.
If you don’t have Object Desktop you can get it at http://www.objectdesktop.com. The final version of DeskScapes is due out on October 28th.
If you’re feeling lucky you can try out the beta of an updated overlay.
https://draginol.stardock.net/files/impulsereactor-100609.zip
Unzip the files into your bin directory. This is a beta, so back up the files you’re overwriting. If you’re non-technical and don’t know how to do this then wait until the official update.
Very useful (like in my game, NeptunePisces, rage quitted in our game after insulting our team because he died, now I can make a note of that <g>).
To write notes about players, go to their profile and go to the notes tab. Here’s the one for me: