So Microsoft has relaunched and rebranded Live Search as “Bing”.

First impressions:

Layout:

Like most things Microsoft makes, Bing has too much unnecessary junk on it.  The background idea is clever but distracting.

I also don’t like the layout changing when you go to one of the categories. If the categories are on the left side, keep them there.

Basic Search

Again, Microsoft’s stuff always feels like it had to get approval by 50 committees. Why does MSN need a link? Why does Windows Live need a link? Why is there a “Web” image in the top corner?  Ah because that shows what I’m currently viewing. But on Chrome it looks weird.

How does Google do?

By default, it’s much cleaner.  If I want more, I can click on “Show options”

The quality of the search is hard to judge.

On the one hand, Microsoft has put in more effort into finding people on Facebook and other engines.  But the overall quality of Google’s searches seem better or at least have more depth.

I’m going to call it a tie though because it’s close enough that it’s purely subjective.  Live Search was clearly inferior but Microsoft seems to have really upped their game.

Verdict: Tie.

#2: Questions!

One of the things I wish search engines were better at is answering questions. They are getting better and Bing seems to be quite good at it:

vs.

Another:

vs.

and one more:

vs.

Verdict: Bing (by quite a bit)

In test after test, Bing was significantly better at handling questions and getting quick answers to facts.

#3 Images

vs.

Verdict: Tie.

This is a tough one because Bing’s image gallery is just much better to use in most respects but the Google image gallery is vastly larger.  Google’s use of drop downs is nice but the screen space used is crazy and the options limited.

#4 Videos

vs.

Verdict: Oh this isn’t even close. Bing blows Google away here.

First, Bing lets you  mouse over videos and they play right in the search. Very impressive tech.  Second, it gets much more on screen. Third, Google now uses half the space to spam users with irrelevant junk.  Which surprises me because Google has YouTube to back it up.

#5 Shopping

vs.

Verdict: Tie. They both do a great job here. I wish I could combine the two. The Bing cashback feature sounds interesting though.

#6 Finding locations

vs.

Verdict: Google by a mile

Other

News: Google by a mile

Efficiency:

Certain search items are categorized and give additional information which is very interesting.

If Google has something like this, I’m not aware of it.

Overall

Overall I am leaning towards Bing which I am surprised. I had a bit of a bias going in because let’s face it, Live Search wasn’t that great. I remember in the early says of Live Search I would type in Stardock and it would bring up some magazine review of WindowBlinds on ZDNet or something.  But it’s come a long way and Bing is very close to being pretty ideal.

Microsoft still needs to get rid of some of the pointless clutter and they need to index a lot more. The news section on it is pretty basic and it copies Google so unapologetically that I feel a little dirty for using it.  Windows may borrow concepts from the Mac but Bing is basically Google done as a web 2.0 project.

The real winner is all of us.  I like Google a lot (I use Google Chrome) but I wouldn’t want them to be the only game in town.  Bing is a worthy competitor and I find myself in the odd position of having Bing be my default browser for Google Chrome. How backwards is that?

It looks like tonight there will be an update from GPG that addresses some of the in-game issues introduced in v1.01 (mainly chasing down opponents and such).

Next week, we should have an update that improves connectivity further for people with multiple IPs, intelligent proxy server handling, and better interaction with the pantheon.

In the meantime, Gas Powered Games is working on version 1.1 of Demigod which is scheduled to have:

1. Concede option
2. Random Demigod setup option
3. Improved pathfinding

I will say that I've instructed the moderators to take a somewhat harder line on the forums regarding rage posting.  Especially since most often users have no idea what they're talking about and since I'm not likely to write a tell all book any time soon, they will continue to not know what they're talking about.  

The team got us a minor update today that improves connectivity. They also identified an issue in the lobby where a user exiting the lobby can cause a game error. We consider it pretty serious. It’s been there for awhile and it revolves around timing and the type of connection and various other things but in a mixed gaming environment it happens enough to be a major issue IMO. So now that we’ve identified the cause, it’s gone up the priority list.

GPG also got us an update tonight (that wasn’t able to go in the build) that improved some of the command queueing and following a demigod. I haven’t got to try it yet. There’s a lot of moving parts as you can imagine that kind of thing. 

But the big thing about tonight’s update is improvements in connectivity between a user who is using the proxy server and users who are not.

For next week, I am hoping we have the intelligent proxy handling in in which it will choose the proxy server closest to you.  Once we do that, we’re going to seriously evaluate whether to just have it proxy by default (right now, it only uses proxy servers if you set /serverproxyonly as a parameter in the short-cut) since people are reporting that proxies largely eliminate connectivity for people who have problems.

The Elemental team having a night out. 

As some of you know, the Elemental Beta 0 got nixed due to us needing to throw developers onto Demigod to help GPG and Raknet with the online experience.  The team is starting to migrate back and we’re all glad to be back on Elemental but we did lose some time.

But we are still pushing to have an Alpha build on June 25th to give out.  It’ll be cloth map only (so what you see in the above screenshot won’t be in the alpha series and the betas will look a lot better than what you see above too). 

For the alpha series we’re only going to select around 100 people to be in it.  It’ll be a lottery.  Picture a big hat with players getting for each Stardock game they' have – GalCiv, Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod who have also pre-ordered Elemental.  The team is also pre-selecting about two dozen people who have been really helpful in the past from the community to be in it as well. 

We’re pretty excited because we plan to do this somewhat differently than other builds.

Developer Gas Powered Games and publisher Stardock are working on version 1.1 of Demigod which we hope to be out in the next few weeks.

Next week we’ll have a more formal preview of v1.1 but one of the things we’re going to be focusing on is the issue of rage quits.

Here is how we plan to handle them:

Team Concede

A team can concede the game. If the majority of a team chooses to concede, the game ends. No harm no foul.

Rage Quits

If a person quits the game without the team concede and the game lasts more than 10 minutes longer, that person gets a rage quit. In the connection dialog, that person’s rage quitting percentage will be displayed as “Disconnect %”. Players with a high Disconnect % will likely get booted in lobbies and will be put further back in line for skirmish and pantheon games.

Early Quits

Games that last less than 3 minutes aren’t counted. If you get into a game where it’s lagging or you have an obnoxious partner or opponent or someone has a very slow sim speed, you can quit in those first few minutes, no harm, no foul.

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/05/dealergate-statistical-evidence-that.html

Evidence is mounting that the Obama administration is closing Chrysler dealerships based on whether or not they donated to Republicans or not.

With v1.01 out, the Demigod connectivity issues are pretty much behind us.  

What? You say you're having a problem connecting to people online? We're here to help you.  

First, make sure you are doing this:

1. Open ports 6112 to 6200 on your router and point them to the PC IP address you're playing on.  This isn't generally necessary but it can help.

2. Make sure you don't have some firewall blocking out Demigod. Some router firewalls prevent UDP traffic from getting through.

3. Have you tried the parameter /serverproxyonly in the Demigod shortcut as a parameter? This will have us host your connection for you.

4. Make sure you don't have a firewall or packet blocker on your own machine as they are designed to block p2p connections.

Now, if you are still having problems, let's walk through what we need:

#1 Who is your Internet Service Provider (ISP)?

#2 What brand and make of router are you using? 

#3 What kind of connection do you have? Cable Modem? DSL? ISDN? ADSL? VDSL? Something else?

#4 Post your impulsereactor.log file in your comment. It's in your my documents\my games\gas powered games\demigod directory.

#5 Describe clearly and specifically what problem you are having. What were you trying to do? What did you see on the screen? What did the connectivity dialog say? The more information we have, the better we can help you.

Thanks!

Edit by kryo: Important! Please use pastebin.com or paste-it.net to post your logs, do not put them directly into your replies so that the thread stays readable!

It’s hard to believe that the updates we’ve done so far have all been on the v1.0 series.  v1.01 is the first update that GPG and Stardock consider significant enough to give a new version number.

Of course, that means testing and testing and testing and if we’ve learned anything in the past month is that the on-line testing procedures were inadequate.  So on the one hand, we want to get these updates out quickly because there are so many important improvements and on the other hand, we don’t want to put something out that has glaring problems for some people.

For example, one of the things we’re struggling with today is that occasionally Skirmish won’t start games. That is, the players will be connected and it’ll send the message to start the game but it won’t.  So we are trying to figure out what causes that.

On the other hand, other key things are working so much better. In-game connectivity is vastly improved. The handling if quitters and disconnects is improved. The stats are far more robust. The AI is noticeably better. A lot of command queuing issues are resolved. The bandwidth use is significantly reduced which should have a pretty big impact. So we have all those things nailed down and yet, we have the issue where skirmish games just get stuck about 25% of the time which is simply a show stopper.

Last night I played a game with just AI. It was the first time I’ve played against AI since shortly after release that was “fun” since before, the AI’s were just cannon fodder – throwing themselves at towers and just being ridiculously easy to manipulate.  I can still see areas for improvement with it but kudos to GPG for taking this stuff seriously.

Now all that said, we have a list of things that we think need to be focused on in the coming weeks – both from a business point of view and from a game play point of view.

1. Finding ways for friends to get into skirmish games on the same team. 
2. Dealing with “rage quitting”.  v1.1 (not v1.01) will have a concede option so hopefully that will help.
3. Finding ways to provide more free maps and Demigods that doesn’t break the bank.
4. Coming up with new powers that are fun and increase strategic depth.
5. Finding ways to keep retail sales up.  Sales are good now but let’s be real here, updates are fueled by new sales. If you guys have ideas on what it would take to get more of your friends to buy copies at retail and on Impulse let us know.
6. Building a system where we just host the games. Demigod would think it’s “peer to peer” but we would actually make it client server with Stardock hosting all the games ala Elemental. 

But right now, we’re working on the skirmish issue still. I’ll keep you guys up to date on where that is. I’ll be on the chat area too today.