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.

As some of you know, we had to assign quite a few members of the Elemental team to help with Demigod after it was released.  Most of them are back on Elemental but a couple of our developers are still attached to Demigod to refine the multiplayer system in that game.  It’s been particularly challenging since initially there was virtually no “Stardock code” involved and now it’s thousands of lines.  So we have definitely “gotten involved”.

The good news is that it will likely benefit Elemental in the long run.  While Elemental is being designed to focus on the single-player experience, there are some multiplayer features that we feel Demigod must have that we’re going to develop that will be put back into Elemental too.

For example, personally speaking, I’m convinced that the only sure-fire way of totally making these games 100% reliable online is for us to just host the games.  I’ve asked our guys to look into finding ways to do that for Demigod in a future update that won’t require Gas Powered Games to change their code (so it will seem peer to peer to Demigod but it’ll actually be our servers doing it all).  This will be helpful for Elemental because we’ll have a lot of additional experience in this area.

Another feature we’re going to look at developing is letting groups of friends join into randomly generated skirmish games.  Right now, in Demigod, you can’t get a group of friends into skirmish games.  We want that to change in there and in turn it will be available for people who want to play Elemental.

Another idea we’ve had is for Elemental to have various game modes.  Basicially, vastly increase the number of winning conditions that people can put together in order to set up games that could be played in less than an hour. 

Some of the aforementioned flexibility is only possible because of the way the computer AI is being designed for Elemental.  Like in Galactic Civilizations, I’ll be coding the AI in Elemental. But this time, it’ll be moddable and I plan to make a lot of this available to the community during the beta to see if they can do certain game modes better than I can.

All in all, I’m definitely looking forward to all the options.

Wow. I mean, wow!

San Diego county is demanding that people stop inviting friends over to their home for a bible study on the grounds that they do not have a permit.

This is why, I don’t care where you stand on most political issues, I fear government power.

A lot of people view politics as either liberal or conservative.

I view it as the tug of war between those who push for anarchy and those who push for tyranny.  We live in the relatively comfortable area in-between.  However, in the past 50 years, we have seen a pretty steady march towards tyranny brought on by both political parties.

The Republicans invite tyranny in the name of “Security” and the Democrats invite tyranny in the name of “Fairness”.  But no matter how you spin it, tyranny means a loss of liberty for the individual.

I’m not religious but it’s none of my business what my neighbors do in the privacy of their own home as long as they are not infringing on the rights of others.

When people think of 3D hardware and its benefits, they usually think of first person shooters and RPGs.  But ever since Galactic Civilizations, Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire started popularizing strategic zoom the possibilities have really opened up that 3D acceleration, now mainstream, let us do a lot of amazing things.

In Black & White, players could zoom out to see the world or zoom in to see individual villagers living their lives.  It gave us a taste of what could come. 

One of our biggest goals for Elemental is that we want players to feel like they are affecting the world. It’s a pure strategy game that happens to have elements from RPGs and adventure games in it simply because it enhances the strategic depth of the game.

When you start the game, you have no army. No city. Nothing. It’s literally just you.

And by you, I mean, literally a single man (or woman) wandering the world. When you’re looking at the map in its normal mode, you’re not seeing an icon representing you. It’s more akin to what you would expect to see in a third person RPG or action game.  When you found a city, the people don’t just appear out of thin air. They come from the countryside to live in your town.

A major element of the strategy is getting people to come to your villages, towns, and cities. It’s not merely about cranking out enough food (though that is obviously a very important factor – people need to eat). It’s about making your civilization more attractive to those who are scraping by in the wastelands. 

The founders of each faction are channelers. They have the ability to channel magic from the elemental shards of the world. One of the first moves of the game is to use that magic to bring life back to the world which in turn will quickly attract enough people to build up your first keep which in turn will let you start to build farms, housing, barracks, black smiths, mines, libraries, universities, pubs, stores, and so forth.

Pretty soon, you have a bustling cities researching new technologies, researching new spells, producing things for your kingdom that you will need, raising armies, farming lands, and so on.  And while players can choose to look at this in the abstract, we’re going to do our best to make sure that players can also zoom in and enjoy the fruits of their labors in as much detail as we can muster.

Hi everyone!

So as some of you know, Gas Powered Games has sent us v1.01 of Demigod.  We've been testing it for the past few days and sending back bug reports and such to make sure v1.01 is a great release.

The big things in v1.01 include:

• Reduced bandwidth requirements so people with ISDN and low end DSL have a better experience.
• A more robust system of handling disconnects
• Better system for detecting the difference between someone who quits and disconnects
• Significantly better computer AI
• Fix for the Sedna type multiple cast issue.
• More robust system for sending game data