As promised, BETA 2 is going out today. Users who have pre-ordered it will soon have access to it as well.

That said, I want to make sure you guys are aware of some issues.  Real life (TM) has inserted itself into our beta process as Seattle (where GPG is located) is experiencing a bit of a snow storm which is reducing their manpower and there's a blizzard on the way to Michigan as well.

As a result, this beta is a lot rougher than we had intended it to be so let me walk you through some of the issues:

UPDATES

The internal build number of what you're getting is 825.  We will be updating it to 826 later today. That's right, there will be an update today.  There will also probably be an update tomorrow depending on the weather.

Build 825 does not filter out games in progress from the Internet Games list which, as you can imagine, means that trying to join those games would be futile resulting in an infinite wait to connect.  That's what 826 will correct.

BUGS

Don't bother reporting bugs for this build. There's a tonof them. We just didn't have time to put this through QA to nail down the zillions of bugs.  Here are some of the more serious ones:

1. The list of Internet games is crashing the game for some people. This is pretty bad since you have to get to this screen to play (even single player against bots).  It's intermittant which means it won't always happen to you so you can keep trying.  It hasn't happened to me but it has happened CariElf a few times and it usually happens to Zoomba. 
2. Because we've focused our attention on #1, we don't yet know just how good the multiplayer connectivity works. You'll note that there are no ports to open here.  As long as you aren't behind some nasty firewall, it is supposed to "just work".  Whether that is the case or not will be something we'll learn from you guys.
3. There are numerous UI issues we're still working through.

As the guy who helped pioneer com-napping and putting a flash tank to die into my opponent's vehicle plant and giving my opponents metal makers in TA, I can assure you that I'm all over working with GPG and the rest of Stardock to get code in for quitters and look for exploits.

One of the challenges in making Elemental has been to create a game with a very distinctive look. A lot of land-based strategy games tend to look pretty similar to one another. 

What we want with Elemental is an art style that someone will instantly be able to identify with this particular game.  To that end, we have developed an art-style that is kind of a water-color look.

One of our challenges is that we want players to be able to zoom in on units as closely as they want or zoom out as well and have the performance be good while still being pretty and have varying degrees of visuals based on the hardware.

At the low end, we want most Pixel Shader 2 cards (ATI 9800 or Geforce 6800 or better or most remotely recent laptops) to run the game fine. But by fine, we don't mean ugly but rather stylized. With stylized graphics, we can do some interesting things to make the game attractive on lower end cards rather than just turning off shadows and lighting and making the game look ugly. 

Today was a good day.  A major book publisher wants to publish my book. That makes me happy. Then, IGN gave our PC game, Sins of a Solar Empire its Best PC Game of 2008 award and Twilight of the Arnor got best expansion pack. And that came on the heels of GameSpy giving those two games its best of the year awards too.

We also closed a major new deal with a major PC manufacturer today too on MyColors which is pretty exciting and Dell let us know they're very happy with the way things are going with the Dell Dock.

I spent much of today between playing the beta of the new chapter in Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment and playing Demigod beta 2.

Today was a good day.

Today Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment BETA 1 goes up and this article will give you a quick run through of some of the features and what we're hoping to get out of it.

First thing to be aware of: Installing the BETA of Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment overwrites your existing Sins install. So you'll want to back up Sins if you want to switch back and forth.

Now, for people who play on-line, we're still working on some of the issues with the ICO server locking up. It's a top priority to nail these down.

We are still working on costs and pacing for BETA 1.  A lot of the costs for star bases and other things are largely placeholders to get feedback on.

One big suggestion we have is to set the rates to Fast otherwise the game pacing is very slow.

In the final version, we'll probably make Normal speed what is currently Fast and Fast will be made even faster.

At first glance, one might think Entrenchment is very much like the original game. But it won't take long to notice some big differences...

First, military research labs get a big boost with the new defensive tech tree which lets players construct starbases and upgrade their weapons in lots of interesting ways.

One of the things you'll probably notice is how much better the AI is, particularly the unit AI.  Ironclad's AI team did a great job on making units a lot more intelligent. You should notice that pretty quickly in battle.

Beta 2, like Beta 1, is multiplayer only.

We haven't put in the obfuscation yet for the password so don't logon in front of anyone yet.

Beta 2 is about the custom game (which we'll probably rename to skirmishes later).

Beta 3 (January) will focus on the Tournaments.

THIS is the screen where the pain will take place.  We do NOT have the Internet stuff working very well yet.

Let me talk about the issue here so that everyone is on board:

Unlike most games where users try to open up router ports and port forward to a particular machine, Demigod is using Impulse Reactor's CVP (Common Virtual Platform).  What this does is have the Impulse cloud take care of setting up multiplayer games.  This means not having to open ports, it lets people in college dorm rooms play each other as well as others on-line, and eliminates all kinds of other hassles normally associated with PC multiplayer games. Yay.

But right now, it's flakey and slow.  Very flakey and slow.  Yesterday, we did get a good Stardock vs. GPG game going using it. But at other times, I couldn't play someone at Stardock whose machine was 5 meters away. 

So that is what we're working on fixing between now and Thursday's release of BETA 2. But odds are, it'll still be flakey.

Click on the achievement slot on the UI to spend favor points to get persistent items.

Generals have their own minions that are unique to each General but they can also purchase generic minions too.

Don't forget to upgrade your Citadel -- unless you're playing me in which case, don't bother, they're a waste of time and what not.

Suggestion: Make your minions TOUGHER before you add more of them so that you're not just giving your opponent free XP.

Other things to note:

We're still balancing things and will be for awhile. We have only partially implemented the flags and a lot of items are not in the game yet. So stay tuned.

My cell phone's camera is pretty lame but here's the first go around with the collectable Rook miniature that comes with the Collector's Edition of Demigod.  Now, before anyone asks, anyone who purchases the digital version of the Collector's Edition can get the boxed edition sent to them for the $5 difference and shipping and handling but wait until we put up a page for it which won't be until March so don't worry.

The Collector's Edition will also have a MyColors theme for Demigod to make your XP/Vista/7 desktop feel like the game UI. It's very slick.  I'm not sure what else is coming with the Collector's Edition yet so stay tuned.

Testing testing testing.

I'm not personally into guns but I am a strong believer in the right for citizens to legally purchase pretty much any type of precision target weapon (i.e. guns).

One of the strawman arguments I hear often is "Why not let people have nukes then?" and the reason is that the constitution intended citizens to bear arms -- specifically weapons that have a relatively high degree of precision.  Explosives, canons, etc. are not precision weapons.

Now before someone gets hung up on the above paragraph and starts naming various non-gun weapons that are arguably precise let me get to the meat of this discussion:

Guns are the great equalizer.  Societies in which citizens have few guns also tend to have more crime when comparing similar demographics. Gun opponents tend to fixate at overall crime rates or cherry pick types of crime ("gun violence") but when you compare apples and apples (like two middle class families in the US or UK) you find that the society that has guns tends to suffer less from crime.

That's because criminals have to think twice before doing a home invasion.  Home invasion, in Britain, is relatively common. Former Beatle George Harrison was attacked in his home by an intruder and severely injured.  In the US, home invasions are very rare because the would-be intruder never knows when the residents might be armed.

I don't want to have to rely on a benevolent government for all my protection. I expect to have the right to defend myself and my family -- with lethal force if necessary.

Certainly, there are a few nuts out there and some of them (not many but some) do purchase their weapons legally. But that's going to be true with anything. More people die due to cars and alcohol and I don't think we're going to be outlawing those things any time soon either.

Update: 

As if to help prove my point...

Found on this blog today:

An intended rape victim shot and killed her attacker this morning in Cape Girardeau when he broke into her home to rape her a second time, police said.

The 57-year-old woman shot Ronnie W. Preyer, 47, a registered sex offender, in the chest with a shotgun when he broke through her locked basement door.

The woman told police he was the same man who raped her several days earlier. Officials do not intend to seek charges against her.

In the first incident, the woman heard glass breaking in her basement about midnight on Saturday. She went to leave the house, and the man attacked when she opened the front door. He punched her in the face and then forced her into a bedroom, where he raped her, said H. Morley Swingle, prosecuting attorney in Cape Girardeau County.

The victim reported the crime to police, and her landlord repaired the broken window.

She was home alone again Friday about 2:15 a.m. when Preyer broke the same basement window. The victim was awake watching television, when Preyer switched off the electricity to her house.

She tried to call 911, but couldn’t because the power was off. She got a shotgun and waited as the man began banging on the basement door. She fired when Preyer came crashing through the door. When Preyer collapsed, the woman escaped and went to a neighbor’s home, where she called police. Officers, who arrived within a minute, found a bleeding Preyer stumbling away from the house. He was taken to St. Francis Medical Center, where he died several hours later.

Swingle said the victim identified Preyer as the attacker in both incidents. Preyer, of Jackson, Mo., had wet caulking from the recently repaired basement window on his clothing when he was shot.

“I will not be filing any sort of charge against this 57-year-old woman, who was clearly justified under the law in shooting this intruder in her home,” Swingle said.

Thank God we haven't given the government the ability to take our guns.

The GPG team has submitted a candidate for Beta 2 early this morning for testing.  The big hang up has been the Internet integration between Demigod and Impulse Reactor.

It's a very interesting discussion I think that I thought I'd share with you guys.

Impulse Reactor is an overall platform that allows developers to make use of a whole range of Internet services from Impulse without having to have Impulse loaded.  So there is a DLL called ImpulseReactor.dll in with the game or application that uses it.

Inside of Impulse Reactor is the less sexy named Common Virtual Platform (CVP) that are the actual APIs that developers make use of.

CVP calls include everything from storing saved games on the server, intelligent multiplayer match-making, achievement handling, storing files in the cloud, sending and receiving game setup data, etc.

CVP is premised on the idea that developers will send back and forth XML data. If you wanted to save a binary saved game, you would submit that file on its own along with XML data on how to describe it in the database.

Demigod uses LUA scripts and has a very clever way of handling multiplayer setup in that it literally sends over LUA bits back and forth to control the screen.

In essence, Demigod establishes trust relationships between the computers in a given game. If I press the "Ready" button in my game, I send over the LUA script to command the other clients to press Ready for my name too. 

In short, CVP is designed for sending XML data, Demigod is designed to send LUA commands. So even converting LUA to XML isn't as straight forward an option as one might think because it still gets back to one side expecting the game to interpret the data and the other side sending the actual already interpreted command.

So we've been having to make changes on CVP and Demigod to make sure they can work together. 

The result will be totally worth it though. You'll be able to do some really cool things in Demigod that I don't think people have seen in games before.

Let me give you an example: Demigod's CVP based match-making will support games of 2 versus 5.  That is, if there are 2 really good players on one side, it will balance it with the other side even if it requires putting 5 people on that side.  That means a greater number of possible games (and before anyone asks, yes, we plan to have configuration options to let players have as much control over this as possible down the line).

You still have regular skirmish games like every other RTS out there has. The stuff we're talking about is somewhat new. Sort of a "super" instant action type setup.

Our story so far...

In Elemental there is no such thing as a knight or a wizard or an archer.  Instead, players design their own units.  If you wanted to call a unit a knight, you might take a man, equip him with some armor, give him a helmet, arm him with a sword, and pair him up with a horse.

The armor, helmets, swords, etc. are things you manufacture and thus have some control over how they look. Normally, customizing an individual unit falls only in the realm of role playing games. And what they tend to do is called texture merging. That is, they simply blend various textures together.

In Elemental, what we're doing is actually giving each item its own heft with its own physics.  The trick is to find a way to do this that still lets it run on lower end hardware so it has to be done smartly. At the same time, you want the guy with that new Core i7 with the latest nVidia or ATI card to look at it and go DAMN that's cool.

The example we have going is a knight that we've equipped with armor, a sword, a helmet, along with a horse with its own armor.  When they move, each item moves as if it were real. That is, the armor on the horse when the horse is running moves like you would expect.  The knight riding the horse moves on the horse as you'd expect and even the sword dangling from the side moves as you would expect. 

Normally, to get such an effect, you would have to model/bone/rig/animate the entire unit together.  The breakthru here is that these elements are all independent and created by the players and they just work together.  I'll try to get a little video or something to show this in action next time.

This will really make the tactical battles really compelling. Since so much of the game revolves around the premise of massive unit differentia, you will see some really breathtaking battles I think.