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

Working late into the evening, GPG has sent us an updated v1.01 build based on recent feedback on the forums.  Yes, GPG is reading the forums in case you were wondering and have put together some exciting stuff.

Here are some of the additional new features that will be in v1.01:

Here is a quote from the log:

· Fixed chat history and announcement text overlays interference with mouse clicks.

· Switched order of data calls after hosting.

· Teleportation effect failure handling.

· AI

1. Adjustments to caution and hazard detection and avoidance.

2. Adjusted health level flee percentage.

3. Demigods do not use minions when fleeing, may summon minions in combat.

4. Improved teleportation

5. Increased Demigod planning frequency

6. Improved item usage when endangered.

7. Tower tag improved.

And last but not least:..

· Moving targets in Ability task now properly handled (the famous “Sedna bug”)

This was finally isolated by bman654 who went beyond the call of duty to actually track down the specific lines of script that call the function.  Special kudos to him.

Although we didn’t use his “patch”, we did edit the exact functions he had isolated, and cleaned up quite a lot of surrounding script. The forums are expecting this fix, and we would love to encourage more excellent sleuthing like he did.

We’ll be testing this tomorrow. I can’t promise we’ll be able to get it out tomorrow though (and there won’t be any updates either way on Friday as that’s just playing with fire).  But we are going to try very hard and enlist extra QA from the apps QA team to expedite.

A very interesting video on media bias.

http://www.pjtv.com/video/Afterburner_/The_Cost_of_Media_Bias/1736/6337/

Greetings!

we get letters… And so here are some answers to some frequently asked questions:

Q: When is the Demigod demo coming out?

A: Soon.   Stardock and GPG are working on it.  Probably in the next 3 weeks.

Q: What will the demo have in it?

A: It will be online only (but you will be able to play AI players). It will have 1 map and 4 of the Demigods is what we’re thinking right now. Should be enough to get a taste of the game and make sure the online experience works well for those players.

Q: Speaking of online, so where does that stand?

A: Pretty good.  For custom games it’s fine.  For pantheon and skirmish less fine.  The proxy servers have helped tremendously.  We are nearly done with a rather cool (well I think it’s cool) smart proxy server chooser thingy (that’s a technical term) where, based on your IP address it figures out your latitude and longitude and then maps it to the nearest proxy server.

You still have some people who just will not, cannot talk to each other. I’ve personally seen it.  They can connect to other people but they can’t connect to each other.  Bear in mind, this happens in most RTSs. The difference with Demigod is that we have the connection dialog and we let people in the lobby as soon as they connect to the host.  If this were a different RTS, what would happen is you’d be in the lobby just waiting for more people to show up and thinking no one liked your game.  Anyone who’s ever played an RTS has certainly seen that.  Now you know one of the reasons why.  But in Demigod, it was decided that the host should be able to decide who stays or goes if someone can’t connect to someone. There’s pros and cons either way.

Now, in Pantheon and Skirmish, it’s a different story. There isn’t a “host” per se so if someone can’t connect to another for whatever reason, that’s a problem.  We’re working on a different way to create skirmish/pantheon games to resolve that.

But overall, at this stage, if you’ve played RTS’s before, you probably won’t have a problem with Demigod.  At this point, I would say that (especially for custom games) more people can connect in Demigod than in most RTSs because most RTS’s don’t have proxy servers.

However, that brings me to the next point.

Q: You say Demigod’s online play is fine now but I have a problem.

A: For that I say go to http://www.speedtest.net/ and check your upload speed.  Demigod requires a broadband connection defined as at least 256 kilobit upload and download to reliably play a 5 on 5 game.  A 3 on 3 game requires about 120 kilobit (about twice what an old phone modem does).  v1.01 should reduce this well below the threshold of low end connections.  But if you get a speedtest rating of less than 256 kilobit, you should stay with 3 on 3 games max unless you know how to make sure you’ve turned off other sources of uploading.

For example, it seems like everytime I run into someone whose complaining about “high in game ping even though it was fine in the lobby” it turns out to be someone with a DSL line that has 128 kilobit upload who also has a torrent seeder going on.  Don’t do that.

Also, we have not given up on “edge” cases.  The team at Stardock and GPG keep coming up with clever ideas to help more and more people. 

Q: When is Demigod v1.01 coming out?

A: Ideally Thursday but no promises as this week is a shortened week in the United States (Memorial Day was on Monday).  There’s a lot of changes in v1.01 so we have to do a lot of testing with it.

Q: When are more Demigods coming out?

A: We are discussing that topic this week with Gas Powered Games. Obviously we would like to see sooner rather than later.

Q: How are sales of Demigod?

A: The coupon we sent out has kind of muddled the stats since obviously sales were off the charts this past week digitally.  At retail they’re pretty close to what Sins of a Solar Empire did but the digital market has continued to grow which is making it harder to do apple and apple comparisons.

Q: When will Demigod be released in <insert country here>

A: Atari is handling Demigod outside North America. I’m not sure what the specific country data is.  You can visit Atari at www.atari.com for more information for your specific locale.

Q: What about more maps?

A: This is something we’re particularly interested in too.  I would personally like to see some duel maps (1 on 1).  I’ll have more info on this soon.

Q: <Demigod that beat me> is overpowered.

A: No it isn’t.

Q: <Player who beat me> is cheating.

A: No he isn’t.

Q: What are some things YOU (Brad) think Demigod needs to continue being popular long term?

A: I’m just speaking for myself here but these are some of the things I’ll be pushing for:

1. More Demigods, more maps.
2. Better community features. Ways to make it a more positive community.
3. Ways for pros to play pros and casual players to play casual players
4. Networking diagnostics built into the game to improve online experience for non-techies.
5. More items that provide strategic depth.

One of the things we really want to drive home in Elemental that we think will make it stand out is that a well equipped army is a big deal.

The Roman armies dominates much of Europe not because Romans were inherently better warriors but because they were well trained and well equipped.

Contemporary fiction tends to trivialize the significance of a non-industrialized society being able to train and equip 10,000 men with swords, plate mail, steel helmets, leather boots, etc.  But in reality, being able to do that is an incredible achievement.

In Elemental, your first turns will not be about designing and producing fully armored troops. On the contrary, when you see mounted units equipped with plate mail and swords we want it to give the same feeling as when you see the Mongols in Civilization show up with tanks on your island. It’s a big deal.

Because people in Elemental are a resource, it creates a lot of interesting choices on the type of civilization you want to build. You can, for instance, focus on having mass armies of poorly trained and poorly equipped peasants. These hordes might be able to conquer the world or they might meet a civilization that has a much smaller force but one that is exquisitely trained and equipped. That battle, which players can optionally fight in full tactical detail, should be breathtaking.

And of course, what I jut describe doesn’t even touch on the fact that we are talking about a world with magical items and beasts of almost unimaginable might.  As I’ve mentioned previously, someone gets ahold a dragon (and by a dragon I mean 1) that is a huge deal.  Nobody is going to be running around with a “throng” of dragons.

If you’ve ever read Tolkien’s Silmarillion you get an idea of just how mighty some of the beings in Elemental will be.  For those into that kind of thing, if you’ve ever wanted to know one of the inspirations for the Arnor and Dread Lords you can think of them as Maiar.

There are things lurking in the world of Elemental that are just breathtakingly powerful and rare. And rare, I mean that you may only encounter or hear of one maybe after months of playing the game.  We’ll talk about that more later though.

The point being, the armies of Elemental are truly going to be yours. You will have ultimate control over what kind of army you want to have. We’re very excited.

Life has been pretty interesting these past few months.

Besides the Demigod melodrama of having to basically assign my guys to take over Demigod’s multiplayer connectivity and stay there with them into the wee hours, I’m supposed to deliver a manuscript to a major publisher for a fantasy novel by the end of June.  I’m hoping to get an extension until the end of July.

Swarms

On Friday, one of my bee hives swarmed. I’d never seen that before.  Me and my friend Phil tried to get them but they took off before I could go into the Stardock storage area to pick up some bee hive nucs. 

On Saturday, I spent part of the day playing Demigod online.  I’m still pretty dissatisfied with v1.0.  I don’t trust the stats yet.  I look forward to v1.01 being out there so that I can play a bit more competitively.  I’m still working with my friends at GPG to make it so that if someone quits, their Demigod is gone and not replaced with a bot.  If people quit, they should be gone. AI should only take over if someone loses their connection for some reason.

Trees and Demigods

On Sunday, some of the guys  wanted to come in to work on code that we could insert into Demigod to make it smarter on handling proxies but I had to forbid anyone from coming to work.  One of the problems of working crazy hours is that it can become addictive.  And at this point, the only people who have connection issues with Demigod either have crappy ISPs or crappy routers (or even more commonly, can’t be bothered to turn off fort Knox level firewalls).  The proxies are taking care of them but the guys need to take a day off.

I spent Sunday getting more up to speed on a new weird hobby (because bee keeping isn’t weird enough I guess) and that is forestry.  I have a property with 13 acres of woods on it and there’s a lot of trees on it.  There’s various types of apple trees, yellow poplar, walnut trees, maple trees, and a number of fairly rare trees that certainly don’t seem very impressive but my Forestry friend from the university was very excited about.  It’s going to cost an arm and a leg to rehabilitate those trees though.  But I think in the long term it’ll be worth it (well not financially but for posterity).

I researched how to try to catch some of the swarms and found out that Lemongrass Essential Oil 2 dram in a box will help. We’ll see. I ordered some and maybe I’ll pick up some bee swarms. I also went ahead and bought a bee keeping veil for my son since social services says it’s “cruel” for me to have one for myself while my son gets stung when he’s helping me at the hives. I try to explain I’m building character or something. 

Power tools and police scanners

On Monday I started reading up on power tools. Now, I can’t build anything. When I’ve leveled up in life, I put all my points into increasing my nerd skills. So I’m a level 20 hacker, coder, spread sheet jockey, economic analyst, and flame war artist.  But I have no clue how to use the whacker to put spikes into wood.  I did some research on electric saws, drills, and nail guns. I didn’t buy any since I should probably up my insurance first.

Also today I ordered a Uniden BCD396XT Handheld TrunkTracker IV Digital Police Scanner as I’m ridiculously nosey and not brave enough yet to get into ham radios. This is what happens if you spend too much time on the Internet. Everyone you know is someone online and so human voices have to come through an expensive box. Plus, having gotten multiple tickets on I-75 up near West Branch I’ve gotten a bit fed up with the speed traps.  Yes, I could just go the speed limit but it’s straight, open roads, middle of the day no cars, and the 911 Turbo forces me to do things against my will.

Coding is life

When the book is written, I mean to get back to C#. But first I have to pick up and learn Python since I promised the team and fans that I would put a serious effort to let people mod my future AIs and since Elemental supports Python this is a good opportunity.  I’d love to also start modding Demigod, I don’t know LUA but it can’t be very hard.  I think its AI could be improved just by having more awareness of damage per second it’s taking and a few triggers to know when to flee to a safe spot to recover.

If I had more time, I’d like to learn how to make Demigods and Demigod maps. While the game’s launch was a total disaster, I feel pretty confident that its sheer excellence (Dota zealots not withstanding) will ensure it has a long-term audience that will only grow as long as we keep supporting it.

Hiring

This is the time of year we usually hire people. Michigan is at its best in the early Spring. But with all the crazy hours lately, we haven’t had a chance to hire.  A missed opportunity.  We’ll have to revisit it later in the Summer and see where we’re at.  There’s so much to do. 

It’s hard to believe, given everything Demigod has been through, that it’s only been available for about a month!

This week we’ll be putting the first significant update to Demigod through QA to see if we can get it out this week. v1.01 has all kinds of improvements to make the experience AFTER you get into a game much better.

But there’s some things we’re going to be looking at doing to improve the online experience before you get into a game.

Here are some examples:

1. We’d like to have the connection information dialog also display a performance rating. This is an issue that people are familiar with all the way back to the Total Annihilation and Starcraft days.

2. We’d like to display the skill rating right in the connection dialog. This will take a bit of doing on our part but I think it’s worth doing. That way, you get into a game where it’s 4 buddies ready to keep crushing 4 random guys and you can see what you’re getting yourself into.   It will encourage much more even games.  Few people like an imbalanced game experience.

3. Net connection quality.  Games usually just display ping.  But ping isn’t enough.  As we’ve seen from the Speedtest thread there are a surprising number of users who have incredibly poor connections (think barely better than 56k modem).   Some DSLs have 1megabit downstream but less than 150kilobit upstream.  There’s no way that person is going to have a good experience in a 5 on 5 game. And they’ll bring down everyone else.  So we need to find a way to calculate that and display it.

4. Karma.  Okay, this is a controversial thing to have so we’d love to hear from you guys on the best way to find out if a particular user is a griefer.  No system is perfect but I am sure we can think of  a way to make it so that people can do something about that.

Connection info in game

Another thing we’d like to do is have a way to easily make people in your games friends so you can grab them later.  We’ll be doing a lot of things in the coming months with the friends system. We hadn’t originally intended to deploy the Impulse friends system in Demigod at all as it was being designed as an Impulse Phase 4 feature but it became apparent in beta that we needed some way for people to interact. So you’ll see that sort of thing evolve a lot going forward.