Sometime tomorrow we expect to release Demigod v1.1.  This is definitely the biggest update since the initial release of the game. Gas Powered Games has been burning the midnight oil to make a fantastic update!

The full highlights will be released tomorrow but here are a few things:

Team conceding will be in. Random demigod option is in. Updated AI is in. Reduced experience and gold from killing priests and angels is in. Heart of life has been nerfed. Tighter integration with the new online system is in for custom games.

Now, one of the things we read on the forums are suggestions on how to keep the community growing.  Let me touch on that here a bit.

First off, since the connectivity issues have been largely resolved, the number of open games sitting around has dropped dramatically. I’ve seen people post that this means the game must be losing popularity.

Technically speaking, the popularity of a game has no bearing on the # of open games. The # of open games is a function of how long it takes to get a game going. Ideally, a person creates a custom game, it fills up and gets started as fast as possible.

The only change is that now that connectivity actually works right, people can set up games quickly whereas at launch, well, let’s charitably say it took longer to get a game set up…

We are going to put up a page that graphs out the online population so people know when the best times to play are. 

What determines the success of a game online is how many people there are online to play with at a given time. And that number has steadily been going up – at least since connectivity got fixed.

The Road Map

As many of you know, I talk to Gas Powered Games every day.  Now, I have seen it argued that game developers will release a game, put out a patch or two and then abandon it.  I want to assure you that this is not the path for Demigod.  We believe the game needs long-term love and care to keep it growing over time.

While we are pleased to have another sales hit on our hands, we recognize that Demigod is different from other games in that it has the potential to keep selling strongly into the long-term.

This past week we nailed down with Gas Powered Games the plans for Demigod v1.2. The 3 big items are:

• Robust Replay support.
• Native modding support.
• Clan support.

We are also discussing passionately the development of more Demigods. GPG has come up with a really cool modding system for Demigod that would practically make mods be very similar to game options in game. It looks pretty sweet.

My 2 cents

Now, speaking just for myself, not even for Stardock here just my 2 cents as a gamer on what Demigod needs to keep growing. If I were the “god” of Demgiod and budget was no concern, this is what we’d see:

1. New Demigod released every 60 days
2. New map released every 60 days
3. New favor items added every 30 days
4. Pantheon and Skirmish experience enhanced to let players choose team joins
5. Pantheon and skirmish would center around a particular player and add people to that joined game.
6. Maps that support 1 on 1 games.
7. Players could select the team size preference in pantheon/skirmish games (from 1 to 5 players).
8. Ability to grab a group of friends or clan members to get into a game from outside the game.
9. Native voice over IP.
10. Significant game play enhancements every 90 days (i.e. some new game element).
11. A robust way to control who you play with when you’re playing non-competitively.
12. Continual evolution of balance and game play.

Those are the kinds of things I’d like to see. But budgets are finite of course and resources are more finite still.  Sometimes there is “the guy” who is critical to make something happen but he’s not available to do X right now.  I can tell ya, only a network administrator could even begin to adequately explain what mountains had to be moved in order for us to step in and build, largely from scratch, in 30 days a whole new multiplayer connectivity system that handles direct connect, NAT connect, and international proxy hosting on the fly.  We had to basically take our top developers from across all projects and put them on this project. That is a feat that can’t be easily duplicated (and it was why I was so directly involved because I had to “steal” core developers from Impulse, Object Desktop, WindowBlinds, and Elemental to make it happen). 

So one of the things to bear in mind is that recognizing what needs to be done and being able to do it are often two different things. If sales continue as strongly as they are now, I think we’ll be able to do most of what’s listed up there but only time will tell. Like I said, I’m just speaking for myself and looking at Demigod in a vacuum.  But you can rest assured that we’ll do as many of them as we can and push for GPG to get in as many as they can get in or let us take care of it for them. It’s not as straight forward as it seems though.

I’m a big believer in treating games as assets. They can live long into the future. I played Total Annihilation for years after it was released. I’m sure there are people here who are like me in that way.  Heck, I still code on Galactic Civilizations II’s AI on occasion for enjoyment.

So anyway, version v1.1 is about 24 hours away from release. We’re very excited to see how people like it and we hope it’s the first of many updates.

One of the cooler technologies that has really come of age in the past few years is level of detail. It doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves.

But it’s a big, big deal in terms of letting us make a game that scales seamlessly from an old laptop all the way up to a Core I7 system with a monster video card.

Level of detail lets us seamlessly use different models and assets depending on the level of detail a user needs.

To illustrate this, let me use something as simple and basic as the cloth map in Elemental.

Detailed:

A nice simple picture right? You can’t easily tell but it has a nice texture that makes it feel like it’s part of a cloth map (ah, screenshots are so limiting sometimes).

Zooming out, now a different image is used that uses less memory.

Zoom out further and now you can probably tell that a different image is used.  But when zooming out quickly, the transition is subtle.

Zooming out even further yet a simpler version is brought up.

So why do this?

Because by doing this, you can have a much much more complex world and a lot “fancier” graphics than one would expect to be able to have even on slower systems.

Level of Detail as evolved over the years in response to the demand that people be able to have their cake and eat it too – people with high end systems should get beautiful graphics and people with older systems should still be able to play an attractive game at a decent speed.

And bear in mind, this is alpha level here. We haven’t even started working much to make it “pretty”.

In our case, we want to have randomly generated worlds that are FULL of lots of exciting things without having to compromise.

It’s been a tough first half of the year. Now I can finally look forward to some Summer R&R at the cottage.

Got my hands on an iPhone 3G-S.  Didn’t have to wait in line or anything. Just walked in, picked it up, and bought it.

So far, I can only sing praises for how good the iPhone itself is. Very nice stuff.  However, having come from Verizon, I can say that the AT&T service needs a lot of work.  My first impression of AT&T was that when they went to activate my phone at the Apple Store AT&T put a hold on it to do a credit analysis.  This took 20 minutes. Ridiculous.

The area around me has 3G which is nice but having gone up north to Michigan the coverage is extremely spotty despite AT&T’s map showing that I should have edge. And by spotty I mean “no service” at all. That means I couldn’t, for instance, even make a phone call while on the highway. That’s absurd in 2009.  While up here at Higgins Lake Michigan my Verizon connection is still 3G.  Meanwhile, it’s Edge on the iPhone and just barely.  AT&T is clearly the weakest link.

Some other impressions:

I have an iPhone Touch so I was able to immediately notice some improvements with the 3G-S and 3.0:

• It’s a lot snappier. The new processor they use in the 3G-S is definitely worth it.
• The GPS on the iPhone is fairly mediocre compared to a dedicated handheld GPS (like Garman).
• The call quality is adequate but noticeably inferior to my Blackberry on Verizon.
• You can now purchase and download videos from iTunes. Very nice.
• The camera and video features are as cool as they say.
• I made and uploaded a video to YouTube right from the phone. Very nice feature.
• I found the voice control surprisingly nice. We were driving up north and needless to say, I don’t want to be messing with play lists while driving. Now, I could hold down the home button and say “Playlist Brad’s driving music” and voila. It would play.

So far so good.

In my first impressions of Google vs. Bing, I outlined how both services felt in terms of quickie head to head.

Since then, I’ve had time to use both services at length and both have their strengths and weaknesses.

If you want to know specific facts like the capital of Australia or the population of Germany or information on a particular person, Bing has an edge. But in terms of getting to raw information quickly, Google wins by quite a bit.  That is, if I’m actually searching to accumulate knowledge on a particular subject, Google is significantly better.

So why is that?

Well, first, I think that Google does a lot better in thwarting cheese tactics some use to get higher search rankings.  So spammers and merchants that purposely link to a particular article on one of their sites from multiple domains will tend to do better on Bing than Google.

Secondly, it just seems like Google has a lot more “stuff” in its archives. Its spiders seem to be indexing a lot more than Bing’s spiders and of course, Google’s been doing it a lot longer so it tends to have in its archives things that are no longer actively linked to.

I wish I could combine the two together.  Though, until Bing gets rid of the tacky wallpaper background it uses, I will probably stick with Google as my main search engine even if everything else is equal.

Typically what happens with games is that they come out, a community is formed, they peak, and then they die.

So how do we make sure Demigod avoids this fate?

Based on the # of users playing on-line, we're projecting that Demigod will reach its peak community (# of people available) around August. Left on its own, it would follow the path of most other games.

As I write this, there are 3,211 people currently either playing Demigod games online, waiting for games, or in lobbies. During peak hours, it’ll get to around double that.

So how do we make this number continue to grow over time or at least, once it peaks, stay there?

It’s a question we’ve been pondering since the late beta of Demigod itself. We think the answer is to pull forward some of the features we’ve been working on for Impulse that were originally scheduled to launch with Elemental.

The challenges of on-line play

In my years of playing competitively on-line, here are the problems that any such system needs to address.

1. A lot of people who play online are basement dwelling jerks who need a good flogging.

2. It is often hard to impossible to find decent human beings online.  I myself rely on groups like QuarterToThree.com for people I want to spend time with online. That’s what I do with Left4Dead and with Steam. If you want to see community features done well, visit Steam’s community.

3. Even if you find those people, it’s sometimes hard to get them together to play a game as a team.

The solution in Impulse

Now, one obvious gamer question would be, why didn’t we just use Steam. I mean, I use Steam every day for a lot of my games.

The reason we aren’t using Steam is that, as good as Steam is, and it is good, we don’t want it to be the only option. Competition is good for not just consumers but good for us (Steam and Impulse).  Doesn’t mean I’m not going to use Impulse to buy games when there’s something on it I want that isn’t on Impulse or use it for community. I just don’t want Steam to be my only option.

So with Impulse, we’re bringing forward a lot of community features in the next couple months. The clan features some people know about but the idea is to make it easy for people to find other like minded people to play games with (not just games on Impulse) no matter where they happen to be.

I am hoping we can get a beta of this going in the next few weeks so that we can custom tailor this.  But the idea here is that we need to not just have a “lot of people playing Game X” but people need to be easily find the right people to play with.

Stay tuned.

One of the harder to quantify advantages of Impulse IMO is that it generally has the fastest download speeds of anything similar out there. And I don’t mean one of those “faster in benchmark” but I mean faster by such a wide margin that it’ll basically go as fast as your ISP can go.

Our friends in the Demigod community seem to like having journal entries that answer a lot of questions in one swoop so we've decided to do the same in Elemental.

Q: What is Elemental?

A: Elemental is a fantasy strategy game (turn-based) developed and published by Stardock Entertainment. In it, players take on the role of a powerful sorcerer known as a "Channeler" whose goal is to build a kingdom and restore the devastated world of Elemental back to its former glory.

Opposing you are up to 11 other kingdoms and empires who have a similar objective except with the world under their control.

Players can win the game in a variety of ways including achieving the spell of making, completing the quest of mastery, diplomatic victory as well as the traditional military conquest means of victory.

The game puts most of its development focus on the single-player experience but there will be multiplayer as well with clans support (kingdoms and empires) and a series of multiplayer modes (and single player modes) that let people play the game in some unusual ways.

Q: Are the screen shots we see indicative of the final quality?

A: NO! The engine we've developed is still being enhanced. For instance, in the screen shot above, the shadows aren't in yet. There are still a lot of features left to be put in visually.  That said, one of our primary objectives with Elemental is to have a game that has unprecedented flexibility in terms of the systems it can play on: Netbooks all the way up to 64-bit Core I7s with monster video cards.

Q: What about modding?

A: Elemental will support in-game modding where users can create their stuff and submit it in game. It then gets moderated and becomes part of the game world. Players can decide which mods they want to use (ones just from Stardock, favorite ones, categories of them, etc.).

Q: How many factions are there?

A: There are 12 pre-made factions made up of 2 official races (Men and The Fallen). Each faction will play substantially differently. Players will also be able to create their own factions and modders will be able to add more races.

Q: What kinds of other creatures are in the world?

A: Elemental has a large set of species that inhabit the world. They are, however, individually rare and much of the strategy of the game is to recruit some of these creatures onto your side.  You will not be able to, for instance, simply "build" dragons.  The only units you can build are those of your race.  Other races (Dragons, Demons, Ogres, Yetis, etc.) are ones that you have to actively recruit to join you.

Q: When will the "beta" be?

A: We expect to have an alpha out in the next 30 days that will be available on a very limited basis. However, we anticipate launching the beta officially at the Penny-Arcade Expo on September 4th. This beta will be available to anyone who has pre-ordered the game.  Be warned though, our betas are not fun. They're real betas which means they're incomplete and unbalanced. But through these betas, users can help mold the game by working with us online.

Q: I've heard this game referred to as "Master of Magic 2"

A: While Master of Magic is definitely a major source of inspiration for Elemental. A lot has changed technologically since then that we (game developers) couldn't do back then. In an age of multithreaded supporting OSes, we can have much better computer AI for enemy players and game mechanics that benefit from what is possible today (3D engines for doing very very nasty things to the game world when you have enough magic -- think Populous).

Another example is how cities can be handled now. There isn't a separate interface for managing cities. Cities grow on the main map itself. When players click on any part of the city they get the options for the entire city right away on the same main UI. The idea is to keep the user interface out of the player's face and let them concentrate on playing the game.

That said, there's a lot of influence here. Tactical battles, for instance, will have some inspiration from XCOM (though much shorter in length).

I would describe the games as being in the same family of the same genre. But someone looking for a Master of Magic 2 would not likely find Elemental to be similar enough to be considered a genuine sequel.

Q: What are some of the game modes you have in mind?

A: We are looking at having a lot of different ways of playing the game other than simply the classic "start a kingdom, conquer the world".

For example, we are looking at game modes where players can just play an extended tactical battle.  Another example is "duel" where 2 humans play against each other with the AI players as pawns in their struggle. 

The idea being that we want to let players play games that are very short in length if they want or can potentially take months to play.

Q: Will there be native 64-bit support?

A: That is our intention. Right now we are relying on Intel's Havok for the physics of Elemental and so it will largely depend on where its support of 64-bit is.

Our engine, however, will natively support 64-bit thus we want to provide (with the game) both a 32-bit and 64-bit version. 

What: Object Desktop 2010

When: Late October 2009

Details:

Will come in two forms: Object Desktop ($49.95) and Object Desktop Ultimate ($69.95).

Object Desktop is scheduled to include:

• WindowBlinds 7
• IconPackager 5
• WindowFX 4
• Fences
• DeskScapes 3
• LogonStudio

Object Desktop Ultimate will take the above and add:

• DesktopX 3.51
• ObjectBar
• Keyboard LaunchPad
• Tweak 7
• IconDeveloper
• SoundPackager
• MyColors with 5 themes
• BootSkin XP/Vista
• SkinStudio 7
• RightClick

Highlights

1. WindowBlinds 7 is going to be a major change from WindowBlinds 6 and previous versions. Biggest change since its inception.
2. WindowBlinds 7 will include an additional skinning engine being developed for it.
3. IconPackager 5 is targeting to include enhanced live folder support for Vista/7 users.
4. WindowFX 4 is a rewrite of WindowFX and will focus on bringing a lot of UI conventions from Windows 7 back to Windows Vista and XP users as well as expanding on what else is in there. We hope to add a feature that could be described as Expose-like.
5. A lot of cool new stuff is being added to Fences.
6. DeskScapes 3 will add a new type of .Dream type tentatively called hybrid. It will let users have their cake and eat it too – far easier to make animated wallpapers that use a lot fewer resources.
7. Tweak 7 will build off of Tweak Vista.
8. SkinStudio 7 is a major overhaul with the objective to make it easy for pro UI designer to be able to create skins much easier without having to become experts on the intricasies of skinning while at the same time making it much easier for casual users to create simple but attractive skins.

The individual major updates to the programs listed above are expected to be rolled out between now and the end of October.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Object Desktop so we’ve been really going all out this time. We’ve tried to stay quiet about what we’re doing to make sure the ambitious plans we have could really be done. This year will be, by far, the  most significant update to our desktop enhancement techs to date.