Greetings!

So where do things stand with Demigod as of mid June with our favorite action RTS/RPG game?

Let's dig into this with some frequent questions I get messaged.

Q: Who are you?

A: Frogboy  = Brad Wardell, President & CEO of Stardock

Q: Who makes Demigod?

A: The award-winning developer Gas Powered Games is the developer of Demigod. However, as some may have noticed from Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod, Stardock gets very involved in the games it publishes.  The most recent example being when Demigod's MP connectivity was problematic during the initial launch, we assigned our own developers to fix it. 

Q: What is the status of on-line connectivity.

A: Pretty much perfect now in custom games. I.e. as good or better than any RTS out there.  That said, we can't control what happens in-game with people who disconnect or have shaky connections. We take the data and send it to Gas Powered Games to see if there's anything that can be improved.

Q: How good is the online experience now?

A: I'm highly biased but I would say it's generally pretty awesome IMO -- now.  That said, I have a long list of complaints:

1. Rage quitting.  v1.1 will let teams concede and we're going to start rating people based on the % of games they complete/concede ([good],[fair],[poor]) so other people can choose to play with them and in pantheon/skirmish games it will be biased towards those who complete a game (or at least concede as a team).

2. "Random" disconnects. These don't tend to be as random as they look. There are people who have, to be put mildly, non-ideal Internet connections. I had almost forgotten the term "ISDN" until playing online.  This happens in every game but it is still something on our list to work with GPG in making better.

3. Pantheon / Skirmish quitters. Biggest problem here is where people quit pantheon games before they start. I mean literally quit. The solution I think here is to let people join as groups which is something we're talking to GPG about doing in a future update.

But as some have observed, I tend to be a glass is half empty guy. In all honesty, I'd say that Demigod is the funnest game I've played online in years - since Total Annihilation for me.  YMMV.

Q: How are sales?

A: Mixed.  Digital sales are great.  Retail sales need work.  We are hoping word of mouth on the game will encourage people to go to their local retailer and pick up the game. 

Q: Where are the two new Demigods?

A: We're still working out the details with GPG.  They're heavily into Supreme Commander 2 but they are working on more Demigods.  We are leaning towards having both Demigods being assassins since they are, statistically, the most popular. One good, one evil.

Q: When is v1.1 due to be released.

A: Next week.

Q: What are the next updates beyond v1.1 going to focus on?

A: Modding & clan support are at the top of the feature list. Beyond that, it will depend on how sales continue to be honest. 

Q:Why isn't Gas Powered Games on the forums?

A: They are reading the forums, I can assure you. They're just extremely busy working on the actual game. I don't code on Demigod so I have the luxury of being able to hang out with you guys and actually play on the game.

Q: I get confused over developers and publishers. Could you explain this more?

A: Sure.  Stardock develops and publishes games.  It developed, for example, Galactic Civilizations I/II and The Political Machine.  It published Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod. 

When we publish, we get heavily involved on the game design to a very large degree (in Sins we worked closely with Ironclad on everything from what each frigate and cruiser did as well as the economic system, in Demigod, we were heavily involved with the flags and citadel upgrade concepts) but we don't write any code for the game itself but ultimately (after the initial release) ended up writing a lot of the connectivity code to replace the licensed system we had used.

The next game we're developing ourselves is Elemental. That's one we're developing and publishing.

Q: When are you going to fix "the balance" in Demigod.

A: You losing a game to someone doesn't imply an imbalanced game. V1.1 will be tweaking things like Heart of Life and numerous other things but no, <Insert Demigod here that ticked you off in last night's game> is not over powered.

Q: How do you plan to keep the community growing?

A: We're now close enough that I can tell you have a new feature that will be going into beta. It's called ReadyToPlay(TM). It will help you get groups of people together for games.

We are also going to have official tournaments after v1.1.  The rankings you see today are going to disappear after v1.1 now that the early cheese issues and data reporting is taken care of better.

Overall, the community seems to be growing pretty steadily in terms of # of games played per day.

But the main thing about the stats is that MY stats will get reset because I can assure you any time I lose it's due to the other guy's demigod being over powered, the other guy cheating somehow, or some bug. There is no other possible reason as I think you would all agree...

For those of you not familiar with game development, most of the development is spent designing the engines and technologies that will be used by the game. In our case, about 2/3rds of the time is spent on that kind of thing. 

In many respects, this time is much like developing a traditional software application.  Elemental uses a graphics engine that has been developed over the past couple of years for Society.

Our previous games used an engine called Pear that was developed in the late 90s and enhanced over the years.  The new engine, called Kumquat, has all kinds of goodies (as you'd imagine).

One of the big differences in Kumquat from my personal coding perspective is its use of Python for scripting.  Our old engine wasn't scriptable so everything was written in C++.  Now, Stardock is a bit unusual that we don't tend to use scripts in our games. In Elemental, the only reason we're using scripting is to make it easier for other people to mod the game.

Anyway, now we're starting to put the pieces together to actually make "the game" as opposed to a series of technologies.  That means I finally get to start sinking my teeth into AI.

With Galactic Civilizations, I only got a couple of months to work on the AI and I had to do it basically on my own.  This time around, our team is large enough that I get to work on it longer and I have help.

Not that I don't mind writing functions like get the distance between two points or whatever but having others who can write the worker functions will save me a lot of time.

One other difference in Elemental was the decision to have multiplayer support. There's a single player reason for this - I want to see how people play the game before the game is released so that I can incorporate clever strategies into the AI.

Those of you not familiar with Stardock developed games know that from my personal perspective, the only point to these games is the AI.  Personally, I think it's great that humans want to play the game too but I'm in it for the computer players.  My fun on GalCiv was always watching the different AI personalities fighting each other to see who would win.  But then again, I'm a pretty weird guy.

Just thought I'd mention unofficially here that we plan to have a hard cover book available at retail that takes place in the world of Elemental at around the same time the game is released.

One of the conclusions both Stardock and Gas Powered Games have come to is that modding is going to be absolutely key for Demigod’s long-term success. To that end, we have been trying to come up with a way to do modding in such a way that, to be candid, doesn’t involve a massive amount of work just for Demigod.

The solution, it seems, may come from the modding support we’re building into Impulse that was originally scheduled to debut with Elemental. This wouldn’t be the first time that a feature being developed for Elemental has found its way into Demigod. The in-game Friends stuff in Demigod may seem a little weak because it was originally intended to show up a year later for Elemental but was decided it needed to be available in some basic form in Demigod.

So how would these mods work?

Basically, users would control what mods they want to use via in-game overlay.  Then, when someone hosts a custom game, it would automatically download whatever mods were needed and enable them when a person joined the game.  The mods would be hosted and moderated by Demigodthegame.com and would support basically anything cool that people wanted to make.

So when would this show up? Well, right now GPG is putting the finishing touches on Demigod v1.1.  So this wouldn’t show up until at least v1.2 which would be sometime this Summer.

Hopefully this will definitively answer the question: Will Demigod support modding? The answer, it seems is yes.

I come home, hoping my new book “One Second After” has come in. My wife says, nope, no deliveries. I jump onto Amazon to look for my package. It says it arrived today and was on my porch. So I run to the front door, open the door and there it is, on the porch.

See, the Internet has the answer for everything!

The Elemental alpha continues to move forward now that the team is back on it full time.

The first alpha that any users will see will look a bit like this screenshot. It's the game's cloth map (the strategic zoom mode). The idea for the alpha builds will be to nail down some of the basic game mechanics.

Elemental is primarily a single player game. However, our intention is for the first public alpha to have Internet multiplayer in it.

This may seem odd but we are thinking that there may be quite a few ways for the game to be fun in multiplayer mode too. One mode we're very interested in is called Duel. This is where you start on a relatively small world with only 1 other human playing. There would be AI players in the game but there would be only tactical battles in this mode when attacking other humans. This way, players don't wait around very much.

This is my ThinkPad T400 laptop with an Intel 160GB solid date drive.

The solid state drive combined with a 64-bit OS with lots of memory will beat out processor speed in most daily tasks every time.

I’ve long been an advocate of migrating to a 64-bit OS and then getting as much memory as you can reasonably afford.  If you have a choice between a solid state hard drive (SSD) or lots of RAM on a 64-bit machine, get the RAM. But if you can do both, even both. 

My beloved ThinkPad T400 is outrageously fast with the combination.  It’s been a long time since I’ve used a PC that felt this fast.  It reminds me of the days when I’ve gone back and used Windows 3.1 on modern hardware where everything is so snappy. I highly recommend it.

Hi guys!

Well I had a blast tonight playing online. Gave me a lot of ideas to pass on to the team in terms of making Demigod more fun in terms as an online thing.

First, we absolutely positively gotta make it a lot easier to get friends in. That is, the current people in your game should be able to be popped up with a hot key and be able to add them in. I had a lot of fun with the games I played tonight. No rage quits, just a good group. I'd love to be able to get together with them more.

Second, we need to be able to establish groups easily ala Steam or Xfire but within Demigod.  I need to be able to call out to them even if they're outside the game to see if any of them want to play a game.

Third, the first two items need to be available for Demigod in the next 30 days IMO.

What? You thought because we released Demigod and are working on Elemental we’d forget our beloved GalCiv players?  GalCiv II is barely 3 years old.

So specifically, what’s in the pipeline?

In the next week or two (depending on marketing scheduling) we have a new build of GalCiv II coming along (no particular order):

• Fixed bug where creating a new planetary governor when another was already assigned to a planet would cause the planet to not be able to access it's governor's info, causing a crash somewhere along the line.
• Fixed a bug where a different governor than selected for deletion in planetary governor manager window was deleted.
• In the lower-left corner of the main screen, clicking where empire income and population are displayed will now take the user to the civ manager screen instead of the research screen.
• Dark Avatar and Twilight of the Arnor intro videos now only play before the first mission of their respective campaigns in the Ultimate Edition.
• Changed how fleet rally points handle putting ships into fleets
• Now, ships that can't find a fleet to join at the rally point will attempt to create a fleet with any ships at the rally point that are also not in a fleet, and any leftover free ships will attempt to join that new fleet, as wel
• If a new ship still can't find a fleet to join, it will just stay a single ship (until another fleet opportunity comes) This prevents fleets of only one ship being formed when there are no fleets to join, and fixes a disappearing turn button bug caused when  fleets were disbanding when they didn't need to.
• If a civ's saved tech tree can't be found, a new tech tree is created from the default tech tree def instead of looking for an actual tech tree named "default."  This prevents a crash while loading a save that lost its races' tech tree names.
• In Ultimate Edition, now checks that a scenario is a campaign scenario before trying to load one of the campaign intro videos.  This fixes a crash that happened whenever a custom, non-campaign scenario was started in the Ultimate Edition.
• The "Set rally point" window that pops up from these screens now shows whichever rally point is currently selected for that ship/planet.
• Game won't try to calculate which techs are race-specific in UIBeginGame() if there is only one major race playing in the game.  Before, in some campaign scenarios where only the Terran and the Dreadlords were playing, every single tech was restricted to the Terrans because they were the only race whose tech tree was being looked at. This caused the Dreadlords to have no techs, so they had negative tech scores. 
• Changed range checks for race number in GetDialogue() and SetDialogue() to make sure the race number isn't greater than OR EQUAL TO the max number of races. This caused a crash if a conversation file mistakenly specified a race number exactly equal to the max number of races, since the index was too big for the dialogue matrix.
• Initialized selected governor in planetary governor manager window to NULL in OnStartNewGame() to prevent crash when starting a new game without quitting the app.
• When filling the build queue, now checks whether an improvement on the queue is a galactic achievement, super project, trade good, or one-per-planet improvement before adding it to the queue.  Prevents an exploit where the user could build many of these improvements by correctly timing when they added them to a planetary governor's build queue.
• AI smarter with regards to friendly players moving through their territory (not seen as threatening as before).

Nothing particularly exciting there.  But development continues.