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.

I have downstairs an old Dell Dimension from 2003. It wasn’t state of the art, not even back then. It is running a Pentium IV running at 2.8Ghz.  My office machine, powered by a Core i7, is 15 times faster.  So the question is, is it possible to make this machine still useful today and if so, how much and how much work would it take?

One of the things I always hear in support forums or critics of the PC is how expensive it is upgrade hardware.  So let’s take a look. This is a 6 year old PC. What would it take to make it pretty decent?

Let’s start with memory upgrading.  I go to www.crucial.com and learn that it’ll cost around $40 to upgrade its RAM to 2GB (it has 1GB already – which is how it came 6 years ago!).

Second, its ATI 9800 Pro might have been decent 6 years ago but it’s not really capable now.  Because it’s 6 years old, I’ll have to find an AGP card that’s decent.  The dirty little secret about game performance is that RAM matters the most. I will also need to get something that supports DirectX 10.1. Not because I will run Vista or something on this machine but because I know then it has the latest/greatest Pixel Shader support without having to do any real research.  So going over to NewEgg I find this. $76 AGP 4/8X.  I’m also looking at this one too.

I found video cards that were cheaper that could do DirectX 10 but the reviews mentioned driver issues and part of the point of this exercise is to put something together that’s cheap but also easy to do.  So we’re at about $120.

If all goes well, for $120 this PC will be just fine for a long time to come.

Stay tuned…

Using two benchmarking programs: Performance Test 6.1's CPU test  and HD Tach from Simple Software I measured performance I’ve started collecting historical benchmarks on my PCs.

Turtle’s are laptops and Frogs are my desktops.

Frog 2003: Decent Dell Dimension for its time.  Score 132.

Turtle 2006: My ThinkPad T60 which is what I took on business trips in 2006. Score 150.

Turtle 2007 My ThinkPad T61 which is in the process of replacing the T60 once I finish transfering everything to it. A good 2007 laptop. Score 286.

Frog 2007: My work desktop PC is a Dell XPS 710. A quad core monster with Raid 10. It's about the fastest PC you can get. Score 798. State of the art 2007 machine.

Frog 2008: My home PC is a Dell XPS Gen 3. It was state of the art in 2005. Score 125.

Frog 2008: My updated home PC for 2008 an Alienware Area 51. It's state of the art for 2008. Score 885.

Turtle 2008: My updated new ThinkPad T400, fairly state of the art laptop for 2008 which replaced the T61. Score 563.

Frog 2009 The new work machine in training, the Frog 2009. Score 2014!

I also use an ultra portable Thinkpad X40 laptop PC but I didn't have time to mess with it, it's a ThinkPad X40 which I use for surfing that I usually carry around with me. It's slower than the rest.

So below were the results for those of you interested in seeing how these machines stack up.

Hard Disk Benchmarks

This is my hard drive at home. It's a  Dell Dimension XPS Gen 3 from 2005.

 

This is from the ThinkPad T61 laptop. Brand new as of November 2007. My new laptop is about as fast as my state of the art hard drive from my XPS from 2 years ago.

 

This is my ThinkPad T60.

This is from my mega machine at work. Dell XPS 710.

 

CPU Benchmarks

 

My main Dell Dimension box back in 2003. Pentium IV running at 2.8Ghz. Score is 132.

 

XPS Generation 3 (2005): 125.5

XPS 710 (Quadcore, 2007): 798.3 Wow. MUCH faster. AKA Frog-2007.

 

ThinkPad T60 (2006): 149.8. Faster than my XPS Gen 3.  DualCore. AKA Turtle-2006.

 

ThinkPad T61 (2007): 286. Twice as fast as my old ThinkPad.  But still no where near my mega machine (Frog 2007) at the office.

Meanwhile, at home in 2008, I bought an Alienware box.

Alienware Quadcore monster (Frog 2008) This new machine is even faster than my monster machine at work which is saying a lot.  Score: 885.

And then I got a new laptop.

The new Thinkpad T400 (Turtle 2008) is amazingly much faster than the T61 was and nearly as fast as my work monster machine. Crazy. Rating 563 overall. This is my beloved ThinkPad T400. I love it.

Update 2009:

I introduce the new Core i7 monster machine.  Has the Core i7 965 in it. 3.2Ghz.

Almost 3 times faster than Frog 2008 (the monster Alienware box).  Just amazing! Score: 2014!

It’s amazing how fast PCs continue to get. Whenever I get a new PC these days, I try to benchmark it to see how it rates.

For my benchmarking purposes, I use: Performance Test CPU test. I name my desktop PC’s “frogs” with the year I got them and the laptops “Turtles”.

I’m a little bummed that Performance Test 7.0 scores don’t correspond with 6.1 since I have a bunch of historic benchmarks with 6.1…

 

Frog 2003: Decent Dell box with a P4 running at 2.8Ghz. CPU score: 516.

Turtle 2008: Thinkpad T400 laptop with T9600 CPU. CPU score: 1901

Actual Results

Thinkpad T400, state of the art 2008 laptop. T9600 CPU. Score 1901.

 

Frog 2003, decent Dell box with a Pentium IV CPU at 2.8Ghz. Score 516.6

 

 

Commentary

So in the scope of 5 years, a decent laptop has quadrupled its CPU advantage over a 5 year old desktop PC.

More to come…

This week Demigod goes into private Gamma testing.  It’ll be in Gamma for about a week (and no more than a week and a half in order to make the April 14th street date).

So what are the changes you can expect from the beta to final?  We’ll know a lot more this week but here are some general things that are on our mind:

1. Lots and lots of balance tweaks based on feedback. See http://forums.demigodthegame.com/342558 to get a sampling.
    
2. Implementation of Multiplayer Skirmish.  That’s where you choose a Demigod and press fight and the match making finds someone for you to play with.
    
3. Impulse Reactor Overlay. The ability to send messages to friends, chat, user score, etc.
    
4. Impulse Reactor NAT. This is the infamous connectivity stuff. Unlike most games, Demigod is pure peer-to-peer in order to reduce in-game latency. The challenge, however is that EVERYONE has to be able to send and receive UDP packets (in most games, only the host needs to do that).  This past week, the lead developer of RAKNet was at Stardock to help in this area.  We expect to have a new beta of Demigod this week with some of these changes in.
   
5. Impulse Integration.  We’re going to try to put as much useful information into Impulse for finding and getting games going as possible. So data like disconnects, rank, etc. will start to be displayed. You’ll be able to pick a game, click launch and be inserted
   into that game.  This is an area we plan to expand on after release as well.
    

Impulse Reactor: Phase 3 internal beta

Want something in Demigod’s balance changed? Make the case in this thread.

 

 

 

Everyone here at Stardock and GPG can feel the electricity in the air. It’s that feeling, that knowledge that the game you’ve been working on is going to be a hit. Those of you in the game industry know that feel. But for those of you who aren’t let me explain: Game projects take years from start to finish and let’s face it, statistically, most games aren’t very good. And for those on the project, it can be a real morale killer because the teams on those games usually know it long before release but cannot really do much about it.  With Demigod, both teams (Stardock and GPG) know they have something special here.

That said, I’ve put together a list of change requests that are in front of us to see what we can do and what we can’t do. 

This is the official change-request discussion thread. As these features are changed/added/addressed we’ll update this post.

I.                    Game options

d.      Tower Strength

                                                               i.      Weak is 2800. Please change to 4200.

                                                             ii.      Normal is 5600. GOOD.

                                                            iii.      High is 14000. Please change to 8400.

                                              

e.      Grunt strength

                                                               i.      Please change to” Grunt HP”

                                                             ii.      Weak is 240 HP. GOOD.

                                                            iii.      Normal is 390.  GOOD.

                                                           iv.      High is 870. GOOD.

f.        New option: Grunt Damage

                                                               i.      Weak: 75% what it currently is.

                                                             ii.      Normal: what it currently is

                                                            iii.      High is 150% of what it currently is

                                                           iv.      Severe is 300% of what it currently is

g.       Gold rate

                                                               i.      Low. please increase by +1.

                                                             ii.      Normal. Please increase by +2.

                                                            iii.      High. Please increase by +3.

h.      Starting gold

                                                               i.      add: Please add “low: $0”.

                                                             ii.      normal is $1000. GOOD.

                                                            iii.      high is $20,000. Please change to $5,000.

                                                           iv.      filthy rich is $40,000. Please change to $15,000.

II.                  Citadel Upgrades

b.      Building Firepower.  Please reduce cost on each one by 50%.

c.       Currency. 

                                                               i.      Currency I. Please change to 4 gold.

                                                             ii.      Currency II. Please change to 6 gold.

                                                            iii.      Currency III. Please change to 8 gold.

d.      Black Smith

                                                               i.      Black Smith I. GOOD.

                                                             ii.      Black Smith II. Please change to 40%.

                                                            iii.      Black Smith III. Please change to 50%.

                                                           iv.      Black Smith IV. Please change to 60%.

f.        Experience.

                                                               i.      Experience I. Please change to 20%.

                                                             ii.      Experience II. Please change to 30%.

                                                            iii.      Experinece III. Pleae chnage to 40%.

                                                           iv.      Experience IV. Please change to 50%.

III.                In-game Balance

a.       Going up a war rank gives all players on that team 1000G.

b.      When teleporting, the target destination displays an animation to cue players that someone is teleporting in.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhuPKYyKu5I&eurl=http://forums.demigodthegame.com/342558/page/4/&feature=player_embedded for refrence

c.       Torch Bearer

                                                               i.      Fireball I. Please increase damage from 300 to 400.

                                                             ii.      Deep Freeze. Cool down penalty on others reduced by 3 seconds on each on.

d.      Rook

                                                               i.      HP decreased by about 10% at all levels.

                                                             ii.      Boulder Roll 3 stun time reduced to 3 seconds.

e.      Unclean beast

                                                               i.      Base speed reduced to 6.0

                                                             ii.      Reduce melee damage by about 10%.

                                                            iii.      Reduce HP or Armor by 10%.

f.        Destroying a tower provides 800 gold, destroying a fortress 1600 gold.

 

IV.                New Items

a.       Scroll of rebound. $250. Upon use any spells cast on that player or area around player within the following 2 seconds are rebounded upon the caster.

b.      Ring of rebound. Instant cast time. Upon use, any spell cast on that player or area around player within the subsequent 2 second are rebound upon the caster.

 

V.                  Ongoing Bug issues that must be resolved

a.       Disconnects in-game

                                                               i.      More consequence for disconnecting

                                                             ii.      The game must be able to cleanly recover from a disconnect.

b.      Connectivity

                                                               i.      Connecting to other players needs to be as reliable as possible

                                                             ii.      Current beta connectivity dialog needs polishing

c.       Pantheon

                                                               i.      Pantheon experience when connecting needs polish

                                                             ii.      AI players should be last resort and there should always be at least 1 human player on both sides.

d.      In-Game (separate bug database not covered in this thread)

VI.                User Interface Requests

a.       Tracking toggle button on screen (for new users, the [T] track option for having th3e camera follow and center on the Demigod is very nice but not easy to get to.

b.      In the lobby screen, display the Experience rating (from the Pantheon) by a player’s name to make it easier for players to balance custom games.

VII.              New Features

a.       New Multiplayer Option: Skirmish [Demigod]

                                                               i.      User selects Skirmish then choose Demigod and then presses Fight

                                                             ii.      Impulse Reactor puts together players that are balanced to battle it out.

                                                            iii.      Pantheon displays separate top players for Skirmish.

b.      Pantheon Teams [Pantheon]

                                                               i.      Players can create and join teams

                                                             ii.      Player s can only belong to one team at a time

                                                            iii.      Various ranking options based on Teams.

c.       Skirmish Tournaments [Pantheon]

                                                               i.      Not to be confused with the Pantheon itself

                                                             ii.      Set begin and end date where players participate in a series of Skirmish games with their rankings filtered during the tournament. Top players win prizes.

 

 

 Version 1.03: Updated March 29, 2009.

Just a heads up that this weekend we're migrating the Demigod back-end servers used for the beta to the high capacity data centers in preparation for release.  

That means hosting of games and such this weekend will be iffy as machines get turned off and moved and such.