A new WinCustomize is coming and it’s a reunion of much of the original 2001 WinCustomize team with Johanne (Alexandrie) leading the UI design and Pat (T-Man) re-architecting the backend.  This time, we have a crack team led by Matt (Orcnbeans) helping create a new way for the site to function that should make it lighting fast.

Much of the site will be XML based which also means that the site will be able to be displayed in lots of different ways (which obviously makes it skinnable).

One of the areas we’re going to increase WinCustomize’s focus on is that it we’re going to expand beyond just talking about how to customize the aesthetics of Windows but also the functionality of it.  As Windows has evolved since 2001, so has customization. 

Moreover, web technology has evolved substantially since 2001. In the age of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, we want to begin to let users make use of those technologies in interesting ways. We’ll talk more about that as we get further alone.

The new site design is a lot cleaner with an emphasis on fewer page loads.

The galleries are much more straight forward and focused on that gallery. This way, we can add features that are specific to a given gallery. A wallpaper gallery, for instance, will eventually support specific wallpaper sizes, color searches, etc.

The rating system, as previously mentioned, is gone, replaced by the Love/Like system to let people know which skins people love/like the most and letting us filter skins based on that metric.

Navigating galleries will be done through a drop down menu with each section being explained to users.

The Community features will get a  major bump and more software will be made available to make it ever easier to interact with other users, find what you’re looking for, and more.

Stay tuned. We hope to launch the new WinCustomize.com later this month (fingers crossed).

If anyone wants to know what I'm like during a beta when I'm just a beta tester here's some of my posts during the Supreme Commander beta (as Draginol).

http://www.forumplanet.com/SupremeCommander/topic.asp?fid=22613&tid=1967042

http://www.forumplanet.com/SupremeCommander/topic.asp?fid=22613&tid=1969144

http://www.forumplanet.com/SupremeCommander/topic.asp?fid=22613&tid=1969816

Now in those posts I'm not super specific since it was still relatively early in the beta process.  

I think in many cases, GPG benefits in Demigod because there aren't so many sycophants in the beta like there were back when Supreme Commander was being made.  Demigod has benefited from the critiques it gets.

One other helpful thing is that Supreme Commander critics (myself and Mike Marr at GPG) are involved in the design on Demigod.  The main limiting factor we have is budget and time for v1.0 and v1.01.   

We’re playing around with Beta 3B today.  Took this with the new Camtasia Studio so it’s only 15fps (if anyone knows how to get it to record in 30fps let me know). 

Beta 3B has quite a bit of work on AI and balancing as well as lots of critical bugs. We’re working on a change log now.

One of the major differences between a game like Galactic Civilizations and Elemental is going to be the tactical battles.

Players won’t have to actually fight these if they don’t want. If you’ve played Galactic Civilizations, you can pretty much imagine how the tactical battles in Elemental will work in the sense that they’re really just the next step from what we had in GalCiv II.

The idea is that you zoom in to a given battle and you see all your units there. From there, you can set the speed you want the action to take place (from “turns” to real time). 

On the map you give your units orders and those orders appear on the screen and they go and fight it out. You can zoom in and out as much as you desire on the map to see either the whole epic battle or down to seeing individual units fighting.

Our goal is that if you want to see the whole “Battle of 5 armies” type thing you should see each and every soldier fighting if you want or you can zoom out and see it more abstracted.

There will be quite a bit of skill involved in managing the battle in terms of where you place your forces and how you handle your hero.  However, the AI (which I’ll be writing) will be designed to wage war as effectively as possible.

One of the concepts we’re playing around with is a leadership ability. Leadership basically gives a general bonus to your side. The idea there being that players who don’t want to monkey around with the tactical battles can focus on having heroes who are also excellent generals (high leadership) who you can have confidence that they will fight a battle with maximum capability.

The AI too will be allowed to invest in leadership skills to help their generals get better and better.  Early on, leadership won’t mean much.

Sizes of armies

As a player, one of my questions about this kind of thing would be how big are the armies going to be?  The answer is that it’s going to vary a great deal.

At the start of the game, I would imagine the sovereign walking around alone or maybe with 10 foot soldiers armed with pikes. Those early battles will be pretty straight forward.

Later on, however, you could have battles with thousands of soldiers with a few recruited magical creatures involved along with your hero.

Hence, even if you enjoy watching the tactical battles, you may eventually want to build up your heroes leadership ability so that you can have confidence in letting them call the shots so that you can just sit back and watch the show in fast motion.

Demigod beta 3A is a pretty big step up from beta 3.  Unfortunately, the biggest problem with upgrading from beta 3 is that the “check for updates” API wasn’t in Beta 3.  So what would happen to beta 3 users is that it just wouldn’t log them into the game which just looks like a bug.

Beta 3A has a lot of balancing, performance, and connectivity improvements.

Here are some of the key issues we found.

BUGS

BUG #1: Stuck looking at “waiting for other players” forever

There’s quite a few cases where connecting to the game results in someone crashing or getting booted. This is problematic for two reasons. First, that shouldn’t happen. Second, even if it does happen it shouldn’t cause all the other players connected to be stuck looking at “waiting for other players” forever.

BUG #2: Victory/Defeat hangs/super slow

For whatever reason, the end game is super slow. That is, when someone wins, it just brings the game to a crawl. The more players, the more of a crawl there is.

BUG #3: Lag is other people

It seems like your settings in multiplayer affect other people. It doesn’t make sense but for whatever reason, me having my uber-settings is slowing other people down even though my machine can easily handle it.

BUG #4: Unreproduceable problem on certain nVidia cards.

This one is driving us crazy. A handful of people with nVidia cards are experiencing extremely slow (>5fps) performance. We’ve put together identical configs and we’ve never been able to reproduce it.  If you experience this, let us know and we’ll work 1 on 1 with you to find it.

BUG #5: Memory leak

There is a memory leak at the various menus.

BUG #6: NAT negotiation

So that people understand this issue: Demigod is PEER to PEER.  It needs it to reduce latency. Most games are client server (i.e. somebody hosts a game and people join and that person is the “server”). That’s a big deal because most people know someone who “can’t host games because of their router”.  Well in Demigod, everyone is the host effectively (because it’s peer to peer).  The guy who can’t host say Company of Heroes games or can’t host Sins of a Solar Empire games wouldn’t even be able to play Demigod online because they have to be able to be the host too in peer to peer.

So Impulse Reactor has been developed to solve this issue and it works pretty well (amazingly well actually). But it has to work in 95% of cases or it’ll be a pain.  Beta 3A gets us pretty far down the path but not far enough. It’s still not ideal.  We’ll be continuing to improve this as we get to general availability. IF you are someone who has trouble connecting, hang out on #demigod (see the Impulse chat area in community).

BUG #7: AI dumbness

AI needs more love.

BUG #8: Path Finding

There are still cases where your Demigod gets stuck and won’t fight anymore. It’s getting better but it still happens. Minions are particularly bad about this.

BUG #9: The Pantheon…

Right now, it’s virtually impossible to get more than 2 human players into a pantheon game.  It just isn’t working fully.

BUG #10: Default video settings not ideal

By default, the shadow fidelity and graphics fidelity are set to high. They shouldn’t be. By default they should be set to low. Technical users who care about graphics will know to boost it and non-technical users won’t care.

BUG #11: SLI is really slow on some machines with AA on.

BALANCE

Balance is better but the game is in a state where even 2 expert players won’t just beat another player but they will make the other team wish they had never been born. Me and Tandis can go into a game and make it so that the other side barely gets to play thanks to stun and a few other items.

Here are some items that I think are problematic:

 
General minions are way way too wimpy.  These minions should have at least 2X base as many HP as they currently have.

Other Balance Tweaks:

• Destroying towers should give much more gold than they currently.
• Destroying fortresses doubly so. There should be a lot more material reward from destroying towers since that helps mark the progression of the game and can help move things along.

Demigod Beta 3A quick video.

Beta 3B should be out this week (fingers crossed).

Developer Ironclad Games and publisher Stardock Entertainment have teamed up to bring you the first micro-expansion pack to Sins of a Solar Empire.

Right now, we plan on doing 3 of these micro expansions and then rolling them together as a single traditional expansion pack.  The intro pricing for each micro expansion is about $10 so you get a ton of new features for a tiny price.

Based on sales so far, it seems gamers do like the idea of being able to pick up expansions in bite-sized pieces.  Entrenchment, of course, adds an immense amount of new features to the game.

So what is a game of Sins of a Solar Empire – Entrenchment like?

Starting it up I typically go 1 of 2 ways. Either single player or I go to Ironclad Online.

If I choose Ironclad Online I get the chat area and can get a game going:

If I opt for single player I see this:

Switching to 4 player FFA:

When I set up the options, one of the things that’s new to the Entrenchment expansion is the Quick Start option. We basically found that people tend to do the exact same moves at the start of the game which eats away about 8 minutes of start time. So the quick start just does that for them.   I love this feature.

Now to start the game.  The computer AI in Entrenchment is significantly better. But the real advancements are subtle because it’s in the unit AI (the stuff that happens automatically) where the artificial intelligence has really been improved.

As both a gamer and a developer, I love the fact that Sins of a Solar Empire is an RTS with thousands and thousands of units in the game that you can zoom in this close to a single ship and then smoothly zoom out to this:

And I’m doing this on my Lenovo Thinkpad (definitely not a gaming laptop) and it’s totally smooth.

The early part of Sins is about exploring the star system. I tend to play random maps so I don’t know where the best planets are. What’s nice about Sins is that you can set your scouts to automatically go out and explore.

Of course, the one screen that provides the most obvious new features for Entrenchment is the new Defense tech tree:

Here players can research star bases, mine fields, deep space constructors and lots of other goodies.

How much this changes the game play for the better in Sins of a Solar Empire can’t be understated.

I remember in Star Trek 3 we first got to see what a Federation starbase looked like and it was awesome.  All those years of seeing how big the Enterprise was and then seeing it tiny against a starbase was cool.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment gives me the same feeling. The starbases are huge and you can spend all kinds of time improving and enhancing them to be incredibly powerful.

The new torpedo cruiser does very bad things to structures. I love it!

And of course attacking a starbase can be quite gratifying too!

I just love the size difference between the massive capital ships and the even massive star bases. You have to zoom quite a ways out just to see them.  If you zoom in on this picture, you can see the exhaust trails of the fighters but not the fighters themselves because they’re so small.

Here, I’ll zoom in on 1 of those fighters:

Here’s another:

For people who haven’t played Sins of a Solar Empire, imagine an RTS game that truly feels epic. In many RTS’s these days, you’re directing a tactical battle really. But in Sins of a Solar Empire, you are really directing an interstellar war and while you can go in and tell each fighter what to attack, you don’t need to and can have confidence that the computer is going to be intelligent with those units.

zooming out…

Battles can be occurring across the entire star system (and in Sins of a Solar Empire, you could have many star systems going at once too).

Now, with the scale of Sins of a Solar Empire, one of the issues that came up was that of fleets. It was simply too easy for players to flank another player’s fleet and go after key worlds in the rear.

What Entrenchment does with star bases and other such improvements is that players can build interesting structures that can then be built up to counter a particular player (or group of players) strategy.

Through a combination of economics, military strategy, technological research and a host of other elements, the fate of your empire rests in your hands.

You can learn more about Sins of a Solar Empire and its first micro-expansion, Entrenchment at www.sinsofasolarempire.com.

Please post here all the things you think that would make the AI more effective.

Thanks!

If you’ve ever played D&D with friends, you no doubt got a feel that you were adventuring in a world that was much larger than just your party. Elemental is, in a way, about building that world.

Each game of Elemental is meant to be different and customizable in such a way that players can make those worlds theirs.  For us, that means having a world that feels organic. As you build things up, things begin to happen automatically. There isn’t a ton of micro management in Elemental by default (though you can really go nuts if you want).  Instead, trade happens largely automatically. You see people, caravans, etc. on the roads you build moving about living out their lives. You will even see parties of adventurers running around dungeons and stirring up trouble.

The player’s skill comes in by deciding how they want their fantasy civilization to evolve – what its focus will be, what direction it will take, etc.

[scary voice]

Gathered from across the lands the QA team at Stardock has brought together the oldest and most terrible of routers, firewalls, shareware virus scanners, port blockers and beyond in order to create…

THE NETWORK OF THE DAMNED

After Beta 3A gets released, we will begin finding and solving as many of these horrible configurations as possible in order to help make Demigod’s multiplayer experience as bulletproof as possible.

And if you are one of those people who just can’t connect to games, after beta 3A, hang out on #demigod in the Impulse chat channel and we shall seek you out.