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

1. Initial Build: Basic Compatibility
2. Beta 1A: Initial Gameplay Skeleton
3. Beta 1B: Initial Economic system Implemented
4. Beta 1C: Initial AI system Implemented
5. Beta 1D: Initial Diplomacy system Implemented
6. Beta 1E: Initial Dynasty system implemented
7. Beta 1F: Initial Magic system implemented
8. Beta 1G: Initial Quest system implemented

BETA 2

1. Initial build provides basic multiplayer (player hosted – client/server)
2. Beta 2A: Persistent stat tracking
3. Beta 2B: Stardock hosted option.
4. Beta 2C: Stardock hosted persistent games
5. Beta 2D: Stardock hosted persistent universe game (persistent dynasties)

BETA 3

1. Initial Kumquat3D engine build of Elemental.
2. Beta 3A: Introduction to Dungeons
3. Beta 3B: Introduction to Magical Spells

BETA 4

1. Introduction to tactical battles
2. Beta 4A: New multiplayer mode: Arena
3. Beta 4B: Customized tactical battle options
4. Beta 4C: Super-Duper AI Update to tactical battles
5. Beta 4D: Polish Beta (extensive and ongoing)

BETA 5

1. Introduction to integrated modding
2. Beta 5A: Persistent universe mods
3. Beta 5B: Third-party Maya/3D Studio importing beta
4. Beta 5C: Modding group testing

One of the features that we expect to get into Elemental Beta 1B is the Sovereign "hide" option.

Right now, if your sovereign dies, the game is over.  

The downside of this, long-term is that in single player, you'll have players figuring out ways to assassinate AI players (i.e. crazy amounts of AI time will end up getting spent countering assassination strategies) and in online play it'll be "kill the sovereign".

With the hide option, when the sovereign is on a city, the player can choose to hide the sovereign at which point his player piece is no longer accessible.  If the city he's in is taken, a dialog comes up and tells you that your sovereign has successfully fled to the closest city.

But at any time, the player can also have their sovereign come out of hiding and the player can then have them go do their thing, give bonuses, cast spells, etc.

The objective of the sovereign unit isn't that you are supposed to have to worry about protecting him but rather that the player can "gamble" it all if they choose in the form of making use of a single unit that is extremely powerful (potentially) but also could spell doom if that unit actually gets killed.

I miss doing PowerUser.TV but I got to do a podcast with a group of indie podcasters yesterday that was loads of fun.

Check them out

http://www.multiplaying.net/2009/09/29/multiplaying-009-09-29-09-stardock/

One of my pet peeves on games has to do with how long it takes to get the game loading.

For Elemental Beta 1A (tomorrow) I’m working on adding /fastload as one of the command line parameters. This skips things like DirectX detection (only for people whose systems are already perfect with Elemental as it doesn’t print out the user’s hardware info in debug.err).

It’s amazing how much “stuff” we have to load. That’s because even though we’re not displaying the “full game” during the beta, the engine is still all there under the covers, it’s just disabled.

The BlacX eSATA dock is just wonderful. I can buy a regular SATA drive and just carry it back and forth between home and work as my main “coding” drive.  Now I can work around the clock easily.

It’s amazing how the working conditions on programming have changed (at least for me).

When I was programming Galactic Civilizations back in the day (for OS/2) I sat in a lab chair that had gotten tossed out by the geography department (I was still in college), it was a 14 inch monitor and a 386SX-16. 

Because compiling on such a setup was so painful, I was really careful about using headers and such and would only do a rebuild if I absolutely had to.

Now, I code on a 30 inch LCD at high res on a system with 12 gigs of RAM, a portable drive and a really good ergonomic chair.

I wish I could say I was more productive but my back feels better.