If you don’t already have Impulse Ready to Play’s beta definitely sign up. People who have Demigod are going to be getting a copy of it added to their Impulse account this week. It’s just a beta but holy cow, it makes a huge difference in getting games going.
Some of you in the beta are probably starting to recognize the influence you now have and why we had the beta be so primitive – so that your ideas can really REALLY go into the game.
So let’s talk about how units should be designed in the game.
Here’s how it works:
Players design their own units. It’s not like Civilization and such where you have knights or warriors. You start out with a person.
The key traits of that person involve their attack (how many HP damage in an attack they can potentially do), defense (how much of an attack they can potentially deflect), their health (how much HP they have), and their speed (how many attacks they get in a round).
These traits come from giving the unit weapons, armor and equipment.
It’s in what you equip your unit with that things get..interesting.
Let’s look at a late game unit that a player might potentially design (and none of this is set in stone as beta testers will have a lot of say on this):
I have created a unit called “Dread Knight”.
Equipment:
Weapon:
Armor:
Now this may even be a simplified unit design depending on where the beta takes us. The point being, the creation of this unit may hinge on several different resources being under the player’s control.
Now, in say Civilization IV, if the player didn’t have oil, they couldn’t build tanks. A unit would have a single resource requirement total.
But here, because players are designing their units, there may be several resource requirements. Which begs the question, what happens if you lose control of one of them? How should the game handle it?
I can think of a few different options:
I’m a little biased for option C because I’d like to see the resources treated as bonuses rather than as pre-requisites. We keep the armor and weapons as straight forward as possible and have the “power” be in a large number of optional equipment the player can add on.
This next week we’ve got a ton of things to do. Most of what we’re working on doesn’t show up in the game.
In no particular order, here are some things on the high priority list:
1. Gotta expose the AI to Python. Need that so that I can start doing serious surgery on the AI without constantly having to recompile and re-run the game.
2. Nail down what resources we want to have in the game.
I keep thinking that it’s better to have more resources than fewer. I’d love to hear how others feel about this.
I also am of the opinion that controlling a resource shouldn’t be a pre-requisite for building something but rather controlling the resource acts as a bonus.
For example, if I research metal weapons then I should be able to build metal weapons. metal deposits will be displayed on the map which can be controlled but those should act as a very large bonus.
I.e. every city produces say 0.1 metal per turn no matter what. If you control a metal resource then that amount goes to 1. If you control 2 then it goes up to 2. And the city that actually has the resource gets another bonus.
This is scheduled for the next beta.
But what we haven’t decided is how many resources should be in the game.
I was thinking there could be resources that give bonuses to research, prestige, along with resources that let you add equipment to your soldiers that give them more hitpoints or increase the speed of their attacks or increase their healing rate or how fast they level up and so on and so on.
Obviously, the more you add, the more micro-management you potentially expose yourself to.
For instance, let’s say we have a “twilight honey” which is a resource that is displayed on the map when you research it. It is a type of equipment that increases a soldier’s HP by 10%. Now, if you have the resource, equipping it adds no time to the time it takes to produce the soldier. But if you don’t have the resource and have a design that uses it, then it would add say 3 more turns.
So you can see some of the problems that this could introduce if it’s implemented that way.
With enough UI work, you could also have an option to make it so that a given piece of equipment can be picked as “required” versus “optional”. That is, if it’s optional and you don’t have the resource, it won’t use it when constructing the unit.
There are many different ways to address the issue but each one has its own pros and cons.
How would you guys like to see this sort of thing done?
One of the things that I’m surprised isn’t offered up on the desktop version of Windows 7 more easily is telling the PC to go to sleep after N minutes.
A high end PC can eat up quite a bit of power if left on 24/7 – which I do.
But over the last couple of versions, Windows has gotten pretty good at coming out of sleep mode really well.
Below is step by step on how to set up sleep mode on Windows 7.
Oye. Pew.
Beta 1B, which will be out next Thursday, will be much much better. It'll still suck, but yikes.
So beta 1A does have a lot of new stuff in it but it's not well integrated yet. Beta 1B, the first economic build, will start to show the direction of the game is going.
Now, I've been getting email on when I think people should start making gameplay requests versus compatibility requests.
The answer to is the tail end of Beta 1 which will be around Thanksgiving. It's at that point that the game, while still primitive, should start coming together as an actual game as opposed to a bunch of loosely collected assets and techs put together.
Organize your desktop icons by creating fences and moving your icons into them.
Double Click on the desktop and it will hide your desktop icons, double click again and they come back.
If you put your mouse over a particular fence (like Temp Junk) you can see all the other things in that fence that were hidden.
It’s time to have a very candid discussion about the future of Windows customization.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been focusing on other parts of the company. Users on WinCustomize.com and related sites have no doubt noticed that my activity has dropped a great deal for awhile.
Focusing on Stardock’s games unit and the Impulse unit required a lot of the time I used to devote to the desktop enhancements group. Starting Monday, I’m back – somewhat anyway.
And today I spent time looking over the state of desktop enhancements and in particular Stardock’s desktop enhancements and I don’t like what I see.
First, third-party customization seems totally dead. For all the grief we used to receive about how “open source” and “freeware” would rule the world (how those uxtheme patches working out these days?) it’s pretty clear that that development crowd has moved on to other things.
Let’s face it, Windows Vista and Windows 7 in particular look awesome. Microsoft has done a great job improving the experience for Windows users. Why on earth should people pay money for programs that often make Windows look worse? Or make things behave flakey?
Does this mean that customization is dying? No. It means that desktop enhancements have to adapt to the OS people actually use. We’re a long ways from the days of Windows 2000 or Windows XP now.
Sure, lots of people still use Windows XP. But it’s a dying market. It came out 8 years ago. It’s time to move on. You can’t focus making software for legacy operating systems if your overall audience are cutting edge power users. I know that might upset some people but it’s true.
In two weeks, Windows 7 comes out. I’m running it right now. It’s awesome. And if desktop customization is going to move forward, it needs to start looking at customizing the things that today’s users want to customize even if that means starting from scratch.
Keep an eye on Object Desktop starting today and going forward. You’re going to see some pretty rapid changes coming.
From an email:
Noah, the Dove
These little bunnies, about 6 days old, were attacked by a dog and orphaned. Two out of the litter of five did not survive, and these three were not doing very well. Noah is a non-releasable, one-legged homing pigeon that we have here in rehab. Noah kept going over to the bunny cage and looking in...even sleeping in front of the door to the cage.
Then, 2 days ago, I only counted 2 bunnies in the cage, so I hurriedly picked Noah up from the front of the cage so I could look inside. To my surprise....there was the tiny bunny...,.under Noah's wing.....sound asleep! The bunny had crawled through the cage...,.preferring a featherbed, no doubt.
Now, they are all together, and the bunnies are doing GREAT. When the bunnies scoot underneath Noah's feathers, he extends his wings out to surround them...and they snuggle. When one of them moves and they start sticking out here and there, he gently pushes them back under him with his beak!!!!! This is amazing!!!
Okay, here's our latest thought process on the sovereign.
First, let me say that the sovereign dying is a non-negotiable thing to us. It's an important core concept.
That said, we do not want users to have to play defensive with their sovereign. The idea is to give players the option to gamble it all if they want.
So here's what we're thinking:
Heroes will have a skill called Evade. The evade skill determines the odds of them escaping a disaster (lost battle, taking of a city, etc.). When they escape, they are transported to the nearest friendly city.
Players will be able to put points into evade when they design their character.
There will be major evade modifiers. For example, if your sovereign is in a city when it's attacked, odds are, he'll escape. If he's in a large army, he'll probably escape too. But if it's a 1 on 1 encounter, odds are, he wouldn't escape.
The entire system would be automatic and players worried about losing their sovereigns can simply put some points into him and park him in a city and not have to worry.
Beta 1A of Elemental has arrived (or will in a few minutes). It’s still incredibly primitive but a lot has gone on under the covers thanks to feedback from the beta testers from the initial beta.
First, a lot of bugs got fixed. There’s still a lot more to go at least but the CPU frying issue, the hard disk corruption issue, and of course the video card overheating problems have been mostly taken care of so we are pretty sure that the odds of the game physically damaging your computer are way down now (probably less than 1 out of 3).
Secondly, most of the profanity has been removed except from the technology descriptions and tool tips where we are still working to reduce that to a level where at least the expletives form a grammatically correct sentence.
Third, the root kit and spyware that beta 1 had in it has been mostly taken out. While the game loading will still make a complete file list of what is on your drive, it no longer uploads .xls and .doc files to our spam affiliate servers in Asia. I know several people had mentioned or were concerned with seeing their personal photo albums and home budgets ending up on the net. We are still looking into the issue of it submitting Quicken and MS Money data files to third-parties but we are hoping by Beta 2 that will be mostly resolved.
Details
Now for the actual, for-real details:
Beta 1 was basically about compatibility. With Beta 1A we have started to insert actual “game” stuff along with bug fixes. Below are some of the details:
+ Saved Games Working!!!
- Issue fixed where loading a game would bypass some of the core cloth map initialization code
+ Caravans now show up on the map when a road is completed
- Caravans will travel back and forth on a completed road between any connected roads
- If a road is connected via a proxy city, new caravans will be created to traveled between the newly connected cities
- Caravans will deposit 10% of the home cities stored resources upon reaching the destination city
- If a caravan is killed, it will not respawn for 5 turns
+ 'Advanced' versions of the Race Setup and Opponent Selection Screens made to display more than 6 factions at a time (for when custom races are added)
+ Kingdom data and Charts show up on the Main UI when nothing is selected
- left side shows basic kingdom data, such as settlement count and income
- right side shows chart with the treasury, population, and overall might of the races you know about
+ Decresed startup time
- game only updates sectors that have been exposed by FOW
- core XML and game XML separated to load in a thread
- various functions optimized for efficiency
- /fastload param added to allow even quicker loading performance for those whose systems are already working perfectly with the game.
+ Fixed Family Tree Wnd to keep users from having to manually delete it
+ Action Icon for Auto-Explore now updates immediately when toggled
+ On Foreign Relations Wnd, dead races be indicated as such
+ Dynamic Map textures (blend maps, etc) now regenerate on Alt-Tab
+ Double Clicking an improvement icon (in City Construction mode) Auto-Places it
+ City Details screen shows a rundown of basic Info related to that city
- Shows time to next level, road connections, etc.
+ Goodie Huts that display unknown/hidden cities and sovereign units
+ Game Skeleton internally implemented, with key AI functions added and various event handlers hooked up
- AI functions include logic for Rally points, Waypoints, battle Strength Comparison, finding resources on the map, etc.
+ Various Spelling and Grammar fixes made
+ Formatted Text bugs fixed
+ Added code to propertybucket and xmlutil to handle 64 bit integers (if you're interested)
+ Factions chosen in the opponent setup wnd are now properly placed into the game
+ Fixed some bugs when saving selected factions out to prefs.ini
+ Font handling code updated so everyone should get the proper fonts when playing
+ Technology status bar on Main UI colorizing based on the Tech being researched
Next Week:
Economic system and base tech tree get in.
BETA Schedule
BETA 1
BETA 2
BETA 3
BETA 4
BETA 5