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.

“Any human being, who accepts help from another, knows that good will is the giver’s only motive and that good will is the payment he owes in return.” –Hank Rearden

It has been my experience whether it be at the nation-state level or on a personal level that good will distributed freely is often returned with disdain and contempt.

I was so hoping to have this to the public this week but there’s various doublebyte vs. unicode issues that have to be dealt with that is total grunt work but has to be done to make sure this works on all languages.

Anyway, this isn’t a mockup but you can see what we’re going for.  In the lobby you’ll be able to learn a bit more about other players from within the game.

Hi guys,

I've been reading on forums of people saying that we're overstating how horrible the Elemental beta is.  While we appreciate that support, we don't want anyone coming into the beta that isn't fully prepared for what a real beta is like.  

Most (nearly all) people are better off waiting until the final game.

The beta program is really for people who loved games like MOM, XCOM, HOMM, CIV  (AND) (emphasis on AND) want to make sure that elements from those games make it into this game and that there's enough time for that to actually happen.

For example, someone already posted the idea of the first player to get one of the tech milestones get a bonus. We like that idea.

We're been combing through the forums looking at ideas and such and hope to follow up with some journal entries discussing this.  But first we want to get beta 1A out (October 1) the door since there's a lot of changes there.

The deadline to get into Elemental Beta 1 ends October 1st.

But lest you think this is a call to join the beta, let me warn you, the beta is a land of horror and agony.  Even now, most of the beta testers are requiring long-term psychiatric care to continue functioning.

But if you are a true masochist, you can pre-order now and get into the beta as we are putting together the game mechanics and help mold the final game.

In hindsight, Notes are such an obvious feature that every RTS should have them. Though, admittedly, I would like to thank the various karma gods that such a feature did not exist in Total Annihilation as I would never have been able to find anyone to play (I helped pioneer such tactics as com napping, flash tank sticking, metal creators being “given” to the enemy).

We only have half of the note system in. 

Here’s how it works:

Go to Pantheon (http://pantheon.demigodthegame.com/ ) and then find the games you’ve recently played and you can click on any user you want and then, by clicking on the new “notes” tab add a note.  Only you can see these notes. 

Now, in the next week or two, we’ll have an update to Demigod in which you’ll be able to see these notes in the lobby (in the connection info area).  So if someone was particularly fun to play with, you can make a note of that.  If they did something really annoying (rage quit, plays only in premades, swears at you, etc.) you can make a note of that too.  Like I said, only you can see the notes you’ve written but they work as great reminders. 

Ready to Play

If you haven’t already signed up for the Impulse Ready to Play beta, do so now.  It’s http://readytoplay.impulsedriven.com.

I’ve been playing with this for the past few days. The number of beta testers has been kept very low (only people who sign up, only people who have multiple games) but we’re going to be expanding this in the next few days and Demigod users are going to be moved to the top of the list. It makes getting a game going much much easier and the actual games are much better.  Don’t take my word for it though, if anyone who has Ready to Play wants to comment here, go for it.

But you combine the notes with Ready to Play and you end up with a significantly better experience in my opinion.

My father in law is the most easy going guy you’d ever meet. He’s gentle. Kind. Thoughtful. But don’t mistake those attributes as weakness. He simply picks his battles because in the apocalypse, this is one guy you’d want to have your back. Politics sometimes is like this. People will rail against "the rich" or corporations and assume wrongly think they have leverage when they don't.

This is typically seen with the American left who gleefully hope for higher taxes on corporations and "the rich". The problem is, those two groups tend to be the people who "do stuff". And people who do stuff are the ones in control. This isn't about what's fair or how things should be. I am talking about how things actually are.

I recently got deluged with hate mail because I commented on Facebook that it annoyed me that UPS was boycotting all of Fox News.  I'm not a Fox fan (I get my news online) but as a libertarian/conservative type, I get pretty sick of the "faux news" stuff. Don't like it? Don't watch it. So I said on my FB page that I'd just have us use FedEx instead. Costs the same.  Naturally, people freaked out and started to loudly pronounce their intention to boycott anything we make. 

Their argument is that people should be held accountable for their beliefs.  Okay. I agree with that.

But as they insist that people should be held accountable for their beliefs financially they absolutely rely that I’ll be the bigger man and not hold that attitude when it comes to hiring and firing. 

The same is true on taxes. People love to tax "the rich" and the corporations and yet assume those people and companies won't alter their behavior.  It's like the person who shops on price but thinks "the rich" and the corporations won't move or find ways to avoid punitive taxation.  

At the end of the day, the people who do stuff are the ones who move history forward -- for good or ill. Action always beats belief.

People who do stuff don't tend to sweat what someone believes. They tend to care about their actions and how those actions will actually affect them. 

Like my father-in-law, they have a thick skin. They don’t react easily. But something tells me that people are going to down the path that will ultimately serve as a stark reminder of just how much of the real world is run by "the rich" and corporations.

My advice: Pick your battles. Consider the unintended consequences when taking action.