As I get older, I am becoming more aware of how the body seems to change from a position of “must make sure this organism lives so it can reproduce” to “meh”.  At 38, I am definitely seeing the transition from “must live” to “meh” which is not uncommon for people my age from what I’m learning.

Being the ungraceful kook I am, I’m learning about dietary supplements that might provide if not a reversal of the negative trend at least some sort of decreased in the rate of decline.  Of course, there’s a lot of info out there and a lot of it falls well into quackary in my opinion.

Having spent quite a bit of time online there remains a considerable amount of debate over whether dietary supplements are worthwhile or simply create “expensive urine”.

I haven’t gone whole hog on dietary supplements from from simply using Juvenon and Fish Oil I can say with certainty that yes, they have a  noticeable effect and it is a good one.

After having to go on Statin drugs for Cholesterol I decided to look further into this and ended up taking a few more supplements and the difference, again, is significant and yet subtle.   The most noticeable change (for me) is that my flexibility is noticeably better which is not something I had anticipated but is noticeable enough that I can’t attribute it to anything else.

So I fall firmly in the camp that yea, dietary supplements can be beneficial. But I also am very skeptical about how much impact they can really have since there’s a lot of nonsense out there.

There’s plenty of people that think it’s all nonsense such as this guy. While I think the jury is definitely out on supplements for cancer prevention, I think they can be very useful for cardiovascular health.

So where to start?

In no particular order:

Phosphatidycholine. General cellular health.

Policosanol. Lowers LDL cholesterol and raises HDL cholesterol.

Read Yeast Rice. Improves cholesterol.

phosphatidylserine. Improves memory.

CoEnzyme Q10. Useful if you’re taking a Statin drug.

Vitamin D.

Vitamin E.

Vitamin B12.

Resveratrol.

DHA.

Grape Seed extract.

Melatonin.

Juvenon.

Alpha Lipoic. 

These are just the tips of the iceberg.  I am only looking at this. Some people, like Ray Kurzweil, take over 200 supplements per day. I don’t think I could even remotely imagine consuming that many supplements.

But as try different things, I’ll let you know what I find.

Ones in bold. I am trying presently.

We’re going to organize these online better but in the meantime..

The next build is scheduled to be called v1.19 since it’s not quite v1.20 in features but has made substantial progress.

For the past few weeks, various builds have been internally in beta as kinks and tweaks have been made by the GPG/Stardock teams.

Here are some of the notes (this is by no means the whole list, just what’s passed into this particular build):

Replays:

· Replays can now be:

o Chosen from Front end

o Deleted from Front end

o Created at end of multiplayer or singleplayer skirmish game

· Slider added to adjust game speed during replays

· Skills, inventory, HUD, and citadel upgrades visible while in replay

· Added version matching for replays, will only display valid replays

· Added observer as a replay choice to remove shroud

Other:

· Decreased turn speed on minions

· Tweaked flight variables for angels to increase hit frequency, also dropped damage to compensate.

· Adjusted long distance repulsion

· Minions ignore 50% of the repulsion from buildings and land units.

· Blueprint loading enabled only when corresponding mod has been enabled.

· Fixed unable to join dialog/tooltip.

· Fix for active cooldowns adjusting when a cooldown buff/debuff fades.

· Fixed a potential threading crash.

· Fixed the Valor Flag buff/debuff bug.

· Fixed the underlying system supporting Ring of Might, Hex Scroll, Horn of Battle. Those items reactivated.

· Login screen now sets password field to blank after logging in.

· Prepend timestamp on error logging

This build also should address some stability issues some people have reported.

More to come.

At last we're being unchained by our marketing masters to start being able to publicly speak about Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy.

We (and by we I mean Ironclad and Stardock) can't talk about all the other cool stuff that's been happening behind the scenes. Mainly, it's because we're afraid of our PR manager Stephanie (if you knew her, you'd be afraid too).

But as I type, Blair at Ironclad has her distracted talking about something or other so I'm free to write here to tell you a little bit about what's going on. 

So...

Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy.  What's the idea here?

The idea is to have a secondary way to win the game other through sheer conquest.  In the current diplomatic system, AI players give "missions" to players.  Human players can't do the same back.  

With Diplomacy, this system is being heavily revamped with a new technology tree. The technology tree could be views as a diplomatic arms race because diplomacy includes espionage and counter-espionage in there. How far it goes will depend largely on the beta testers and their preferences.

Then there's the balance and new game modes. We'll be putting our head together this week to see what can reasonably be put into a $9.95 micro expansion.  But balance and tweaks you guys would like to see in Diplomacy you can freely post them here and we'll make sure to look at them.

There's also a whole new diplomacy system that lets players have a much more tactical view of why your relations are what with a given player. If you've ever played Civilization IV you can see some of the inspiration. The idea though is that relations shouldn't involve excessive guess work.

The official season has now officially started though for Diplomacy.  

Those of you with Demigod have priority access to the Ready to Play beta. Highly recommended you sign up.

https://www.stardock.com/products/readytoplay/

Back when I was in college when I first started Stardock to help pay for school, I never would have guessed how much money is spent on useless crap just to have a business that deals with consumers.

Here’s some stuff that we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on that I think a lot of people would be shocked about.

#1. LAWYERS.  I’ve been in a number of lawsuits over the years.  When I was in college (15 years ago), I’d never even met a lawyer.  Now, 15 years later we spent well into the 6 figure range every year on lawyers.  Why? Because nearly every day, someone threatens to sue us over some item or other. Occasionally we get sued for something.

The most obnoxious lawsuit I’ve ever been in (that I’m still bitter about to this day) was with Entrepreneur Media who sued us because we made a game called Entrepreneur and they believed that they owned the name Entrepreneur in all forms.  We ended up settling because, well, 10 years ago, we couldn’t afford the lawsuit.  If it happened today, well, it would have been a different story for them.

But every couple of weeks I get a summary of the various legal work that went in. Everything from company X arguing about a trademark, patent, or whatever that I’d never heard of to some user saying that they should get paid for “lost time” because a given program or game didn’t work the way they thought it would.  Then there’s the people who claim that a given program or game “damaged” their computer and want compensation.

We tend to take a hard line on that kind of thing (I’d rather pay lawyers to fight something than to give in on some frivolous or baseless thing but it’s expensive).

#2 COMPLIANCE.  When we were smaller, this wasn’t a big deal. But once you hit the magical 50 employees, all kinds of obnoxious state and federal regulations come in that serve no use other than to drive up costs. 

As I watch the healthcare debate and see the vilification of insurance companies, I have to wonder how many people realize that a lot of that cost is due to state and federal regulations. Things like “tort reform” get mentioned a lot (which would help – see #1) but time spent complying with the government has always struck me as very wasteful. I mean, we make computer software that we sell. How much regulation hassle is there? As soon as you sell a product or service, the government is involved in a big way.

#3 EMPLOYEES.  Of course, if you’re going to hire people, there’s going to challenges there. That’s not a surprise.  What is a surprise is just how much time gets expended on “employee issues”.  Ones perspective on a whole range of issues changes dramatically once you’re hiring and firing people as well as simply managing people. 

Let’s face it, we humans are complicated. Each of us has our own “issues”.  Like I said, it’s not a surprise that there are these issues. We can, in the academic sense “imagine” the kind of junk people have to deal with. But there is no substituting real world experience with it.

That’s why companies, even small ones, end up having to hire a HR manager (Human Resources).  There’s always someone who just can’t manage to wake up in the morning or someone who’s “just going through a tough time”, someone who “broke up with their boyfriend”, and so on.  There’s always something.

When you’re a small company, there’s a lot of flexibility. But once again, once you hit that magical 50 employee threshold, the government gets involved and is there to “protect” employees from us evil, money grubbing capitalists who might want to find out during an interview whether a potential employee is “trying to have a baby” or has a medical condition that requires them to miss a lot of work. Because you can’t ask those kinds of questions because, “it’s none of our business”.

Anyway, none of this is meant as a complaint of running a business. Rather, it is all interesting stuff that someone who never intended on starting a business but accidentally got into it has learned on the journey.

Too often people only hear one side of these issues without really considering the ramifications of “solutions” to problems in the work force.

So as some of you know, Demigod v1.2 is in private beta.  On other games that we have published, such betas have been available to the public but with Demigod, this tends to split the MP community.

So here is where things are at:

Replays.  These basically work but need some polish and some additional bug fixing.  We are going to try to release this feature along with accumulated fixes and tweaks in the next few days.

Now, before I go further I want to point out that I get estimates from the teams and I relay them to you. Some people in the community take a missed date as me “lying”. We’re not lying, we’re simply trying our best relay to players what we’ve been told.

Modding. Modding is another feature that is pretty far along. The next update is likely to be called v1.19 and won’t include the modding because more polish and security needs to be added to the system prior to it being made available to the public.

Balance, Fixes, etc. I’m not as up on what’s happening on that end. Some people on the forums say the game “crashes” on them a lot.  The big question we have is what is different about those machines versus everyone else’s?  I play every day online and it doesn’t crash for me (i.e. the infamous “works on my machine”).  Luckily, plenty of users have sent us crash reports and so a lot of work has gone into addressing this.  With any luck, the next update will include these fixes.

The New Demigods

The two new free Demigods are being worked on. The art assets appear done but they still have to be scripted, tested, and hooked up.  I had hoped to see these by the end of August in time for PAX but as with many things in game development, things can take longer than expected.

Ready to Play

The beta for this is rolling out today.  It’s going to a select group of beta testers first and will expand from there was we gauge the robustness of the backend once it’s out in the wild.  This will be a big deal for Demigod players since there’s hundreds of thousands of Demigod players out there but getting them together in a fun experience online with what is in the game is not always as easy as we’d like.

Future of Journal entries

I don’t plan to stop making journal entries but I do plan to stop letting people comment on them. Simply put, it’s too aggravating dealing with trolls so it was either blocking comments or just not creating journals.  The phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” can only be said so many times. 

There are people out there, particularly from certain competitive communities, that clearly have a different vision of what Demigod is or should be (i.e. a clone of some other game).  As someone who plays (and gets crushed) online every day, I love Demigod. It’s a great game. It works well, it’s well balanced and I know most people feel this way too.  But it’s not for everyone.  There are other games that are much better suited for hard core competition than Demigod.

We had much the same issues with Sins of a Solar Empire. If you read the forums at certain points, you would think that the fact that Sins of a Solar Empire isn’t designed for the “competitive scene” somehow meant the game was doomed.  I can also say, right now, that those people who are hoping Elemental will be targeting the competitive scene will be disappointed as well.  Our job is to make games that are FUN to play in their own right.  In that, Demigod succeeds, spectacularly.

There are few games out there that you can get a game going on the LAN with a bunch of buddies and be able to get them up to speed in a short amount of time. I.e. the counterstrike of MP.  It was never our intent to have Demigod be a game that would require an hour or more of time to show people the basics of the game. The whole point is that it’s fun within minutes of sitting down and playing it.  The skill (as I’ve learned the hard way online <g>) is subtle. Knowing which parts of a given arena to control or how to “build” your Demigod for a particular situation or a particular team. 

Future of the Demigod forums

One of the things we’re going to become more assertive about is behavior on the forums.  We have an access group called “visitor”.  People with that access cannot post or comment.  Those users aren’t “banned” they simply don’t get to participate on the forums.

One of the most commonly requested things we got at PAX from Demigod players was that we get rid of the toxic users on the forums more aggressively. This is something I agree with and so we’ll be more vigorously policing the forums. If you are angry at the world or can’t control your hatred of another person, the game, GPG, Stardock, ducks, or whatever there are plenty of forums out there that will cater to that but not our forums.

The Future of Demigod itself

We’ve said this before but it’s worth saying again, from Stardock and GPG’s perspective, Demigod is a long-term thing for us.  We’re very happy with the game and we plan to support it and enhance it for the long term.  The pacing of its evolution may not always be to the liking of some users but as we develop new things for other games, we’ll find ways to bring it back to Demigod as long as we think there’s sufficient demand for it.  Things like Clan Wars and the like will make their way in from Elemental or other projects (for example) as long as people still want them. 

But at the same time, we reserve the right to alter course based on our perception of what people want. So if the consensus of the community is they want feature X then we might do feature X and put feature Y on the back burner (which is what happened explicitly with clan wars versus modding). I’ve seen users say “They promised feature Y!!! Where is it?” without taking into consideration that feature X came up as a higher demand feature and was given priority.

In the meantime, I’ll see you guys online. I have games up nearly every night now as “Frogboy’s 3 on 3 fun!”.  Feel free to join me. I only win 40% of the time so I’m not that good but it is almost always a lot of fun for all.

In Galactic Civilizations, we had minor races which players had relatively little control over their existence.  In Elemental, 32 players will be the maximum number of major factions that the game will start out with but that doesn’t take into account of minor factions and vassals.

In Elemental, one of your abilities will be the governing ability. The more cities under you control, the more overhead cost there is to run your ever growing kingdom. At some point, it may become advisable to turn some cities into vassals. A vassal state is a city (or group of cities) that is originally founded by the player but has been made independent by that player. It becomes its own independent faction controlled by the AI. Initially, as a vassal, it is allied to you. But being independent, all bets are off of what happens in the future. It may join up with someone else, combine up with other vassals to form a new kingdom, or even go on its own to try to become a major faction in its own right through a path of conquest.

One could picture a large game where there might be dozens of vassals who form ever changing alliances throughout the game.

A year ago if someone would have told me that Impulse would have become nearly as popular as it has I wouldn’t have believed it.  The growth of digital distribution has been explosive across the board.

Impulse Phase IV, launched today, is a major overhaul for the popular digital distribution platform in more ways than one.

First, there is the client itself.  While some users have requested more visual options (like darker backgrounds and such which are in the works), the big change with the Impulse client is performance.

A year ago, developer Stardock had to have a “fast load” option in order for the pokey client to load at a reasonable level. It did this by having part of itself launch on start-up which was objected to (rightly so) by many users.  Fast-forward a year and Impulse loads quickly and uses very little memory.  Even when web controls are used, the amount of memory used is still far less than many commonly used programs as the screenshot above makes apparent.

In addition, a year ago Impulse’s content included basically Stardock’s plus a handful of indies.  Now, a year later pretty much every major player in the PC game market is on Impulse.  This week EA’s flagship titles go up and most new games arrive on Impulse at the same time as anywhere else with its prices being typically lower and its download speeds being higher than elsewhere.

A year after launch, Impulse now boasts most of the top games at launch day and supports applications and utilities as well.

The original Impulse store was…painful.  The new one allows per category featuring.

The new store catalog is quick to browse

Now, that isn’t to say that Impulse represents perfection.  There are still several things that need to be added in my view to Impulse:

1. For Gamers. Ready to Play needs to get out there as soon as possible.  Users who go to http://readytoplay.stardock.com and sign on for the beta which will start getting out there in the next few days.  However, Stardock does not intend to bundle Ready to Play with the Impulse client at this time in order to keep the base download size of the package as small as possible.

2. Community Features. These remain an area Stardock will need to focus more on if it hopes to see it be more competitive with entrenched players like Steam.  That is, groups, clans, developer support features, third-party support for Achievements, rankings, and match making are all things Impulse needs to improve on.  Still, Phase IV of Impulse sets up a good foundation to get there.

 
Impulse’s Common Virtual Platform (CVP) supports achievements, rankings, and match-making but it isn’t expected to be made available to third-party developers until this Winter. Since it’s .NET based, developers can support it with virtually no code changes to their games. But it’s not out yet for third parties so it’s academic.

3. Catalog. Catalog. Catalog. While Impulse has done a good job in catching up to other players in this space in terms of getting new third-party content, there’s a huge back catalog that Stardock needs to get onto Impulse to make it compelling.

Right now, Impulse’s biggest advantages remain very “bread and butter” (i.e. boring): Stuff on it tends to be cheaper, its download speeds higher, and  you don’t have to have it running to play your game. 

The last part above is going to be a defining feature.  While Impulse tries to componentized itself (with a separate tray application and Ready to Play) other players are increasingly putting more and more into a single ubiquitous client. Both strategies have their advantages and disadvantages and it will be interesting to see how that plays out.

Of course, the real winner in all this have been the gamers. Anyone who has purchased a game in one of the “weekend sales” online can attest to the importance of competition.