We just released Beta 3F of Demigod to the public.

A few important things to note:

1. This build comes off the Beta branch. So this isn't some "near gold"

2. It has a changed connectivity dialog that we're in the process of getting rid of.

3. The new Skirmish  matchmaking is in this build but has not really been tested yet so it'll be hit and miss.

4. There's a bug in the lobby where the slots are all messed up looking. It's fixed in the main branch but we wanted to get this beta out to you so that we can try out the new, faster servers.

In preparation for the release, the beta version of Demigod will cease to work around April 7th.  So there will be about 7 days of no availability.

The other day I got my social security statement in where it shows how much I have made each year since I started working. The amounts are all over the place, especially after I made Stardock my career.

There is something truly unique in the personality makeup of the entrepreneur that founds his (or her) own company from scratch to execute on some new idea and then builds it up to something that involves hiring employees and dealing with significant amounts of revenue.

For one thing, I think it requires a little bit of insanity. Seriously. Let me explain: An entrepreneur’s fortune (or poverty) is based on living off their wits. How much money an entrepreneur makes isn’t dependent on how long they worked or how hard they worked. In fact, many an entrepreneur sees their dream die and their fortunes turn to ash despite working amazingly hard and long. Few people understand “life isn’t fair” better than an entrepreneur.

Most people (as in, nearly all people) go to work and do a job in which they are, at some level, told what to do. Even the recently fired CEO of General Motors was merely a guy working a job.  By contrast, an entrepreneur has to invent their job in the first place and then, later, invent the jobs for others to take.

If anyone takes what I wrote above as “bragging” on behalf of entrepreneurs, don’t. It takes a certain level of mental illness to motivate oneself to do what I just described.

I have a friend named Jeff Schader who ostensibly is a competitor of ours to a degree. Every several months we have a horrific flame war with promises of utter destruction on the other. Then, some months later, we start talking again as if nothing had happened.  It drives some of my coworkers nuts. Why the hell am I talking to this guy?  And ultimately, it’s an answer few can understand. He’s an entrepreneur. He has nearly an identical personality as I have (different skill sets, I’m an engineer, he’s a creative). At some instinctive level, we are always going to be kindred spirits.

As companies get larger, the wise entrepreneur will start to shield external partners, customers, and furry animals from himself (or herself) by hiring other people who aren’t as hyper-aggressive as they are. And in my experience, entrepreneurs tend to be hyper-aggressive to the point of self-destruction.  There has been many a time where had I been the the one talking to a major (>$1M) partner after they did something to piss me off I would have told them to kiss my butt.

I remember one time, after dealing with some translation issue in one of our programs loudly promising (in our offices) that “Europe can suck it!” Luckily, cooler heads prevail around me and it’s not anything personal against the target, it is that the mental illness in most entrepreneurs that I’ve met (and including myself) is the requirement for personal freedom even at the cost of money. Because it’s not about the money, it’s about the freedom to do whatever the heck you want.

Those of you who know me and the GalCiv team (who are now all on Elemental) know we’re huuuuge Civilization IV fans. If you don’t have Civilization IV, I’m not saying you’re a bad person for not having it.  But I’m not saying you’re not a bad person either.  Though, wait until it shows up on Impulse next month before buying it if you haven’t already.

Anyway, at GDC, Soren Johnson (designer of Civ IV), myself, and Paul “Mormegil” Boyer) had a long lunch together and talked about the challenges we’ve been having in Elemental random map generation.

One of the big challenges we’ve been having has to do with rivers and roads – how do you make them look good in a randomly generated map?  Soren was nice enough to walk us through some of the algorithms they used in Civ IV since they ran into the exact same problem. It’s a real pain in the butt.

We also talked about the challenges of doing big maps.  This is where Civ and Elemental are fairly different largely because of the differences in the engine being used.

In Elemental, the strategic zoom feature lets us have much bigger maps since it’s very easy for people to manage much larger areas because the Elemental map turns into a cloth map where players can instruct units and cities and the like from afar.

Another advantage Elemental’s engine has is technology.  That is, the hardware is just a lot faster which means we can easily create a lot more “stuff” that players can automate without it slowing performance.

One result of that is world size.  In Civilization 4, the largest default map size “Huge” is 104x64 tiles. There are custom maps bigger (138x96 for instance).  But in Elemental, the map size is 224x160.  To give you an idea of that:

And that’s on the 32-bit version of the game.  Assuming Intel gets us a 64-bit Havoc, the 64-bit version of Elemental could be even bigger.

Of course, we also have map sizes that are ridiculously small too (one called “wee” even). 

Having a big map, of course, is pointless if you don’t have the UI and automation in to keep micromanagement from being a pain and of course, like I mentioned, you have to have hardware fast enough to be able to navigate quickly and seamlessly through such a map (A Civilization V would no doubt have maps on the same scale as Elemental for instance).

We are going to be clearing the on-line stats for the Demigod beta in preparation for a very short on-line Tournament with some prizes prior to release as a kind of “Thanks!” to the beta group. That will start with the release of beta 3F in the next couple of days.

However, we want to give kudos to the top 10 players in terms of minutes played on-line during the beta before we reset the stats.

Rank. Minutes Played. Player

1. 7772       HorseRadish
2. 7680       Zirjin
3. 7100       Micah71381
4. 6826       Flurus
5. 4704       sivizpacemparabellum
6. 4679       WarlokLord
7. 4488       Labradoraki
8. 4440       Bier_Kanonier
9. 4333       chaos40
10. 4332       Hellrazior

Congratulations!

This is a picture of my very silly daughter, Ashley.  She is 2.5 years old.

If you want to have a good experience with Demigod, here are some suggestions:

1. If your router is older than Ashley, consider getting a new one.
2. If your video card is older than Ashley, consider getting a new one.
3. If you run dxdiag.exe and you see dates on drivers that are older than Ashley, update them.

Anyone who reads enough of my posts can probably tell that I’m a kook. As I get older, I become more and more of a kook.  I have some theories as to why people in my position inevitably become more and more weird as they get older but that’s for another conversation.

Former speaker Newt Gingrich has a fantastic article pointing out something that many people who follow this stuff are not just well aware of ut preparing for but is probably news to most Americans: There is a pretty good chance that in our lifetime we will suffer a catastrophic terrorist attack in the form of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP).

Newt’s full article is here:

http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/gringrich_emp_weapon/2009/03/29/197257.html

As he says:

On Feb. 3, Iran launched a “communications satellite” into orbit. At this very moment, North Korea is threatening to do the same. The ability to launch an alleged communications satellite belies a far more frightening truth. A rocket that can carry a satellite into orbit also can drop a nuclear warhead over any location on the planet in less than 45 minutes.

Far too many timid or uninformed sources maintain that a single launch of a missile poses no true threat to the United States, given our retaliatory power.

A reality check is in order and must be discussed in response to such an absurd claim: In fact, one small nuclear weapon, delivered by an ICBM can destroy the United States by maximizing the effect of the resultant electromagnetic pulse upon detonation.

An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is a byproduct of detonating an atomic bomb above the Earth’s atmosphere. When a nuclear weapon is detonated in space, the gamma rays emitted trigger a massive electrical disturbance in the upper atmosphere. Moving at the speed of light, this overload will short out all electrical equipment, power grids and delicate electronics on the Earth’s surface. In fact, it would take only one to three weapons exploding above the continental United States to wipe out our entire grid and transportation network. It might take years to recover from, if ever.

Now personally, when I say there’s a good chance, I am saying that the odds are probably a bit better than 1 in 10.  But that’s still an awful big chance in my book if you have the resources to do something about it.  That’s why I’ve looked into Faraday cages and the new house I’m building is designed to be self-sufficient if necessary so that if something like this happened, my family and friends wouldn’t starve.

Consider this: Look at your own household and tell me how long you could survive without going to the grocery store for food.  2 days? 3 days? An EMP pulse, that North Korea or Iran is likely to be capable of producing in the next 5 years, would, as Newt says, take out our infrastructure for years. 

What does that mean? It means it would probably be a solid week before city water came back on-line. Electricity would likely be offline for months. But the real killer would be food. That’s because food must be shipped and an EMP would wipe out all cars and trains.  I have no idea how long it would take for food to start getting re-distributed but unless you lived in a major urban center where emergency supplies could be distributed, you’d be in big trouble (in other words, if you live in the subs, you’re going to likely die of starvation).  If this sort of thing happened in the Winter, you would likely be looking at millions of deaths.

So when friends come over to “Future House” and see the bee hives and the apple orchard and the gardens (my wife won’t let me have chickens unfortunately) along with the “Kook” supplies (i.e. the capability to defend our physical assets effectively) hopefully we’ll all have the benefit of just laughing at how weird I’m getting.  Hopefully I’ll always be just a kook as opposed to a survivor.

Whether it be Obama’s poor handling of the British Prime Minister or his crazy remark that the US invented the automobile or even Obama’s aggressive plans to introduce ever more troops into Afghanistan (talk about a real quagmire opportunity) the question that keeps coming to my mind is: What if Bush had done the same thing? What would the reaction had been?

Today’s example is Obama’s firing of the CEO of General Motors.  Think about that. The President of the United States just fired the CEO of a privately owned corporation. It’s not that I think the CEO of GM doesn’t deserve to get canned. Rather, I just don’t think it’s any business of the government to make that call (just like the government bailing out private companies isn’t something I support either).

Bush, who got accused of going into Iraq for  its “Oooooiiillll!” would never have dreamed of simply outright personally taking control of companies. That’s a level of powergrab that even the most liberal of my friends would never have pictured Bush doing.

Yet here we are. 2 months into the Obama administration and Obama is deciding personally which parts of the economy he wants to personally control.

So let’s see, we have Obama wanting to take over banking, calling the shots at the auto makers, putting out plans to take over healthcare, passing laws to retroactively tax particularly individuals he doesn’t like, and liberals were whining about Bush because…? The warrantless wire tapping program (that Obama voted for incidentally)? 

What’s truly breathtaking about the situation before us is that for years, liberals referred to Bush as a fascist and yet, we now actually seem to be getting the literal genuine article.

Read more here.

This May we intend to launch a completely re-designed WinCustomize.com. The new site will be a major departure over the existing site with an emphasis on speed, ease of access, and efficiency.  The site will “seem” a lot simpler because there’s a lot fewer clicks.

What you see above is an early version of it (all the thumbnails will, for instance, be re-created as high quality PNG’s instead of low quality JPEGS).

One thing not shown here is that the Library list in the Explore menu won’t say “CursorFX” of “Dream” but instead say “Moue Cursors”, “Animated Wallpapers”. When the user’s mouse cursor goes over it, the right-side will explain what it used to make it happen. This way, new users understand intuitively what they are customizing and experienced users can quickly see which programs are being used for it.

With over 3 million monthly users, WinCustomize is the world’s most popular site dedicated to desktop customization so we’re putting a lot of work to make sure it’s done just right.

Even in beta, one of the things that’s really amazing is how easy to navigate the new site is versus the existing site.  For example, on WinCustomize today, if I want to read articles I have to click on”Articles” and wait wait wait for the articles page to come up. Then I get a list of top articles and newest articles along with a running log of featured articles.  It’s just a lot of “stuff” to deal with.

By contrast, on the new site, I click on articles, a menu comes down that quickly lets me navigate to what I want to get to, often without having to go to a seperate page.

Same thing for the community page.  Right now, users click on community which then takes them to the master forum list page which takes a good 5 to 10 seconds and then they decide what they want to read.  On the new WinCustomize, a user clicks on community and the menu pops up listing the most recently responded to threads along with options to jump to a particular forum right away.

Of course, it’s in the libraries (which are currently called galleries but are being rebranded as libraries to support Sins, GalCiv, Demigod, and Elemental mods along with other mods in the future) that the magic will really come in handy. For instance, right now, if I just want to find a wallpaper, it’s a pain to find one that fits my monitor.  On the new WinCustomize, I’ll be able to just search on 1920x1200 wallpapers and then download.  IF I’m a WinCustomize subscriber, you’ll be able to simply press a button to make that wallpaper your background immediately (to give you an idea of the direction we want to take for subscribers).

Stay tuned for more info.