Greetings!

The first update for August has arrived. 

Here are the highlights:

• Fixed an exploit regarding minions and the citadel that cropped up recently.
• Fixed the Sedna Healing wind buff with High priests issue that has been discussed.
• We’ve temporarily disabled hex scroll, ring of divine might, and the horn of battle until the timeout conflicts are dealt with. Stay tuned.
• Fixed a bug that was causing a LOT of statistics not to be saved accurately. We are hoping, and you be the judge, that the statistics are now robust enough that we’ll be able to move towards official tournaments and Epoch 3.
• Updated the algorithm to find the best proxy server for people who need them.
• Lots of other little things.

Next on our list are the rematches, LUA decompression crash issue, Alt-Esc issues, and replays.  No promises on an exact date but (fingers crossed) in the next week or so depending on QA.

Tomorrow, I am going to really try to get up a preview of the first of the new Demigods up on a journal so you can start discussing him.  We’ve also been discussing with GPG new map ideas and new item ideas and have started work on the modding guide.

Cheers!

We’ve picked a tiny handful of the pre-order group to become alpha testers based on how many other betas they’ve participated in, forum karma, and a number of other criteria.

Those of you not in the alpha, fear not, you’re not missing very much. The beta is scheduled to come out around PAX (Penny Arcade Expo).

Be forewarned, we plan to close the beta shortly after PAX and it will remain closed for some months. Those who want to get the beta can pre-order the game.

I am leaning towards beta 1 being only cloth map in order to let beta testers have more input on the game mechanics (fewer assets to change if we accept a suggestion).

There will be an Alpha tour later this week (possibly tomorrow). Stay tuned.

Did people think they’d have to wait until the August to start getting the meaty goodness of Demigod v1.2?

I don’t know about you but I just don’t have that kind of patience.

So instead, GPG and Stardock have decided to release the updates as they are completed.

Internally, we’re doing testing and work on Replays and Rematches. Rematches are where your game ends and you just want to play again without all the fuss.  Replays are where you can go back and look at the game you just played.  This first update is also designed to fix a LUA decompression bug that is causing some people to get instability when playing online. Plus, it fixes (I hope) the lingering issue with stat tracking. Plus it fixes an exploit issue with Erebus.

With the demo out, I am hopeful we’ll see this in the next week or so. No promises of course. There’s always the unexpected but that’s what’s happening internally right now.

In my mind, the fun of Elemental resides in the fact that you’re not just trying to conquer some fantasy world but the world itself is designed to be so organic and unique from game to game.

A lot of the difference between games is a result of things like a tech tree that has different techs in it, a huge library of special content that is integrated into map generation randomly each game, quests, integrated community content, and the divergent paths to victory.

Now, as some of you know, Stardock’s bread and butter isn’t from game development.  Our desktop software and enterprise software have always given us the luxury of being able to take as long as we want to develop our games as well as take “risks” on the way we release our games (no copy protection for instance – which, in case people are wondering, the retail version of Elemental will not have copy protection).

And that brings me to a question I wanted to pose to you folks.  Would you be interested in us extending the beta?  Since anyone can join betas by pre-ordering, we could try something that really hasn’t been done before as far as I know – make the beta experience something truly outstanding unto itself.

Right now, the schedule is this:

• Beta 1 in August
• Beta 2 in October (adds tactical battles)
• Beta 3 in December (polish)
• Gamma (private) in January
• Release in February

This is pretty much the same schedule we’ve been doing since Galactic Civilizations I back in 2003.

But imagine this kind of beta instead:

• Beta 1 in August
• Beta 2 in January
• Whatever

So what would be the point of this?  The point would be to make it a lot more fun to develop the game with the beta testers.  Rather than have v1.0 come out in February and then have v1.1 in say April and so on, we simply keep working on the game with the beta testers.

Then, when we release the game, it’s got a ton more stuff. 

Here are some thoughts that come to mind:

How many players should/can we allow in a game? 8? 12? 32?

How sophisticated can we make dungeons in the game?

How sophisticated can we make quests in the game?

How sophisticated can we make tactical battles in the game?

How big of a scope can we give the campaign?

We don’t have the financial pressure to release the game in February and because of that, we have an opportunity to try something we’ve not done that we think might be really special and that is vastly increase the contribution of the beta players into the game than what we’ve done before.

The end result would, I think, be a game that could very well be a classic. A year’s worth of player input before it was released to the general public. 

Tell us what you think.

WindowBlinds 7 is really coming along.  If you have Object Desktop, which is our flag ship suite of programs to turbo-charge your Windows experience, you’ll be getting beta drops of WindowBlinds 7 which adds Windows 7 support along with a ton of new features designed to make customizing Windows a snap.

So we're starting to put together stuff for the alpha. 

This week we're putting together the list for the private alpha group (basically a lottery).

The exact day of the release of the alpha remains to be seen. Part of it depends on the weather up at Higgins Lake (where I'll be on vacation until early next week). If it rains, I'll be going home sooner which means the alpha will likely come out a bit sooner. If it's nice, I'll be staying a bit longer and the alpha will have a couple more days to bake. Kind of a reverse groundhogs day.

In either case, we plan to start making public to those interested in seeing the sausage factory that is game development our internal bug reports.

Those of you not used to a Stardock beta will find these quite...something I suspect.  Most people don't realize how games are made. 

A game, at the end of the day, is a piece of software that is tuned to be "fun" where fun is a debateable concept.

On a new property like Elemental, that means the software is taking a bunch of technologies that have been developed over the previous year or two and integrated together.  

If a game takes say 3 years to make, 2.5 years of that time will be spent on the underlying tech. The lsat 6 months spent putting that tech together into a working "game".  That is where we are now, taking the techs and integrating them together.

You'll be able to see all our foibles in the journals area starting next week as the good, bad, and ugly of the game's develpoment starts to come together. 

So if you have any questions for the August FAQ, post them here. 

Cheers!

So we're starting to put together stuff for the alpha. 

This week we're putting together the list for the private alpha group (basically a lottery).

The exact day of the release of the alpha remains to be seen. Part of it depends on the weather up at Higgins Lake (where I'll be on vacation until early next week). If it rains, I'll be going home sooner which means the alpha will likely come out a bit sooner. If it's nice, I'll be staying a bit longer and the alpha will have a couple more days to bake. Kind of a reverse groundhogs day.

In either case, we plan to start making public to those interested in seeing the sausage factory that is game development our internal bug reports.

Those of you not used to a Stardock beta will find these quite...something I suspect.  Most people don't realize how games are made. 

A game, at the end of the day, is a piece of software that is tuned to be "fun" where fun is a debateable concept.

On a new property like Elemental, that means the software is taking a bunch of technologies that have been developed over the previous year or two and integrated together.  

If a game takes say 3 years to make, 2.5 years of that time will be spent on the underlying tech. The lsat 6 months spent putting that tech together into a working "game".  That is where we are now, taking the techs and integrating them together.

You'll be able to see all our foibles in the journals area starting next week as the good, bad, and ugly of the game's develpoment starts to come together. 

So if you have any questions for the August FAQ, post them here. 

Cheers!

One of the things that will make Elemental different from anything Stardock has developed before is that we will view the release date of the game as the beginning of its life rather than the climax.

The reason for this is that a big part of our objective with Elemental lies in the engine underneath it.  It is our dream to slowly evolve Elemental to be so modable that a user familiar with Python 3.x will be able to use Elemental to create virtually any kind of land base computer game.

One of the things that some of you probably suspect but we can confirm from bitter experience is that while there are plenty of good 3D engines out there (Unreal, Gamebryo, Source, etc.) there aren’t really any modern engines (that we could find anyway) that are specifically designed for top down where there’s lots and lots of units on screen.

What I am hoping will happen is that over time, more and more of Elemental will cease being C++ and be moved into Python scripts.  The AI and some of the game logic will be first but eventually as much of the code that we can economically justify taking from C++ will be moved to scripts.

In this way, users would be potentially able to create all kinds of new games using the Elemental engine.  For first person shooters, this is nothing new.  Civilization IV is extremely moddable too.  Our goal here is to take an engine that was designed from the ground up as a 3D engine with full strategic zoom and a multi-threaded graphics engine and make it as generic as possible.

To learn more about Python visit http://www.python.org/

In Elemental, there are two types of mana that are not held within shards: Life and Death magic.

Life magic makes use of the energies created by living things.

Death magic takes something that is living and harvests the energies created from the transition from life to death.

The reason why the lands of the Empires look so mangled is because the natural ecosystems in their territories have been totally perverted.

Men can choose to take the path of death magic just as Fallen can choose the path of life magic.  But the pre-made factions are based on the game's lore (canon) and only the men of Krax have taken the path of death magic and part of that is because it was an adapt or die situation during the final days of the war of the Titans (that led to the cataclysm).

Right now we have N people with insurance and Y doctors.

Obama’s plan would be N+40 million with the same number of doctors.

That doesn’t sound like a good deal to me.

The counter argument is always that we’re already paying for those 40 million people.  Well, if that is truly the case, then problem solved we don’t need to provide them with health insurance.  But in reality, no, those 40 million uninsured don’t have even remotely the same access as those with health insurance. They may get emergency care abut not much beyond that.

So what do you do if you don’t increase the supply of health care providers but do increase the supply of health care consumers? You get rationing. 

The second big problem has to do with who is paying for it.

Right now, people who have health insurance are overwhelmingly paying for it themselves – either through their employer or on their own.

But if we hand over this to the government, then we get back to the top 1% paying for 40% of it.  Sure, it’s a good deal for people who barely pay taxes but for the rest of us, do we really want to get into a situation where “society” is deciding what care we need or don’t need and paying for fundamental personal responsibilities? What’s next? Housing? Food? Clothing?  Why stop at health care?

There are so many other reasons to object to universal health care but those are a couple of the most basic reasons I oppose any government involvement in health care.