It was a good week at PAX as we got to show the pre-beta of Demigod to the world and let people play it multiplayer.  Only a few more  days until the engine test beta.

If you're not familiar with hamachi, you will want to download it for the beta 1 of Demigod if you want to play multiplayer.

https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/vpn.asp?lang=en

The first beta will be LAN only with support for AI playres (so you can pay single player too effectively).  But we won't yet have true Internet play in unless you use Hamachi.

I write this from the plane on the way to Redmond which is where Gas Powered Games is located. 

Normally, publishers and developers have very explicit division of labor on projects. The developer makes the game, the publisher takes that game and markets, distributes is, and supports it.

As people observed with Sins of a Solar Empire, you can get tremendous results when the developer and publisher combine their teams together into a single "big" team.

That means Gas Powered Games will be intimately involved in the marketing of Demigod and it means Stardock will be very involved during development.  At GPG, I'll be sitting in the "bull pen" with the development team working on the game itself.  And together, we will be able to tap into the combined team's resources to get things done much more quickly.

Of course, the crucial element that can't be forgotten is the public beta program.  Here's how it works:

We get the first beta out to you sometime in the first week of September. The goal here is to just see how well the thing works on people's computers. It won't be anywhere nearly fully functional.  But we'll rapidly be enabling features and getting feedback which we'll be able to address.

AI needs help? AI developers at Stardock (including myself) can help.  Need more map elements? Let us know and we'll see who is available to help on that too.

Similarly, advertisements and promotions for the game will get posted here before they go live typically. Art work, ideas and concepts won't be from Stardock's marketing team alone but rather the Gas Powered Games development team as well as anyone else. 

One of the reasons why the Sins of a Solar Empire ads came out so well is because Ironclad (the developer) was so involved in the actual creation of the ads. It also didn't hurt that we put out the ads on the forums before they went to print where fans could make suggestions on how the ads could be improved.

Right now, we're playing the internal beta.  The part that we're most challenged by at present is how quickly we can implement the Hamachi-like multiplayer system so that players who don't know what router ports are and such won't have to worry about them anymore.  The first beta won't have that in there (I'm not sure as yet how much, if any, multiplayer will be in the initial beta 1 engine test portion).

One other thing players may find interesting is that GPG and Stardock have nearly a full year of free updates planned for Demigod. While the single player portion of the game is very important, our hope is to make Demigod the preeminent multiplayer strategy game for tournaments and such since the actual game-play is supports a lot more team mechanics than the traditional Starcraft or even Supreme Commander model would. 

We'll have a pre-beta 1 showing at PAX in Seattle this weekend.  If you're in the Washington area, be sure to stop by the Penny Arcade Expo.  Chris Taylor and I will be giving live demos.

-Brad Wardell = Frogboy = Draginol

The good news is that there will be a Galactic Civilizations III.  The bad news is that it won't be out this decade.

Galactic Civilizations II v2.0 is currently in development but it's free for all players of the expansion packs.  But that will serve as the code basis for any further GalCiv II updates.

Right now, the team is working on the "unnamed fantasy strategy game" sometimes called "not-MOM" (not Master of Magic).  It's a totally new graphics engine that makes use of multi-core CPUs and GPUs but will still run fine on lower end hardware thanks to built-in detection that will determine "how much stuff" to display in real-time.

That game will go into public beta early next year and its release date will be largely based on player feedback.  As many of you know, we are in the position of being able to keep working on our games until everyone's happy with them. Our non-game part of the company does so well that there's no pressure. We want to make it the best turn-based strategy game of all time.

THAT engine will be what serves as the basis of a future Galactic Civilizations III.  That means GalCiv III will have features like tactical battles (as an option), multiplayer, more sophisticated planetary development, and much more. 

Over at Quarter to Three, we have a great discussion on who should get credit in games.  That is, in the manual or the in-game credits, who should be listed.

It's not as easy of a question as one might think to answer because making games is not like making a movie, making a game is an engineering effort as much (if not more) than being a "creative endeavor".  That means, the amount of contribution person A makes to a game may absolutely dwarf that of person B even if they hold the same position.

So when you look at the credits of a game, who should get listed? Anyone who participated at all? Only people who were part of the team when they game launched? Or what?

I often have discussion with family and friends about how "we" should help the poor, the sick, and the incompetent.

Usually, I end up taking the role of the villain because my view is that society can decide what it values through the individual contributions of its citizens. That is, I don't think my government has the right to forcibly confiscate my property to hand to someone else. 

If people want to support giving health care to everyone, then they can start or support a foundation or charity that does that. Or if they want to make sure someone born with down syndrome is able to be supported, support a charity or foundation. But don't use the government as an inefficient goon squad to compel other people to pay for your compassion.

But I hear the response already "We express what we want our society to be like through our elected officials". Bullshit.

In a country where half the adult population pays zero net federal income taxes, we certainly are not expressing our society through a democratic movement.  We are, instead, expressing a shallow, narcissistic feel-good set of policies that someone else ultimately has to pay for.

What study after study has shown is that societies that transfer individual responsibility to the government ultimately surrenders any individual obligation to help others.  There's nothing compassionate about supporting a government policy.

Beliefs aren't compassionate. Deeds are. Supporting universal health care is not compassionate. Helping a friend, a family member or a total stranger with their medical bills is.

I have a vision for Object Desktop. I have always had an idealized vision for it.  What stops it from becoming a reality is that my vision involves a lot of work that is not economically feasible.

Part of the problem is that what I think is super cool isn't necessarily what other people think are super cool. 

Let me outline things in Object Desktop that bug me today:

1. I want to see Theme Manager massively updated. I'm not talking about MyColors. I don't want to see MyColors replace Theme Manager. I want people to be able to take a snapshot of their desktop and I want to see MyColors themes that don't use licensed IP include a .suite file option.
2. I want a consistent user experience between all the programs.
3. I want to see TweakVista get a LOT more features so that I can do a lot more surgery on my computer.
4. I want to see more productive features integrated into Object Desktop that extend the OS.
5. I'd like to see DriveScan re-introduced,
6. I'd like to features that extend the windows shell to be more useful but without having to get rid of explorer,
7. I'd like to see Object Package (from the OS/2 version) brought back so that I could press a button, get a big giant .package file and take it to a new machine and press unpackage where it reinstalls all my stuff.
8. I'd like to see features that speed up my system. Why isn't anyone doing anything that can speed up perceived performance of Windows anymore? If I have 2 gigs of RAM, why can't Object Desktop have some feature that better manages the swap file or something like make sure all shell related stuff stays in memory or whatever?
9. I'd like to see a feature that better handles my Windows start up. It's crap right now. I'm not talking about something that lets me kill off stuff that loads up, I mean something that lets me get to my desktop quicker and has an explicit loader for all the other crap that can load later in a low priority state?
10. For that matter, why doesn't Object Desktop have features that make Windows use the priority settings for processes better?
11. I want to see DesktopX re-imagined completely so that I can build fantastic shells and user experiences using .NET, WPF, etc.
12. I want to see cloud computing features integrated into the Windows shell.  If I have multiple computers, on a high speed connection, why should I give a crap where a folder physically resides? Let it invisibly sync everything together. I don't even want to know it's doing it (other than at a technical level). Just make sure I have my stuff wherever.

So why don't we do this? This is where the vision and reality collide.  A lot of the coolest features rarely get used and sell terribly.  Keyboard LaunchPad, for instance, is insanely useful but it's not very popular.  Same with RightClick.

A lot of cool features are hard to market and get people to understand or not be afraid of. 

And a lot of cool feature are simply very difficult to develop and there just aren't a lot of developers capable of making this kind of stuff well at any price.

But the above are some of the things I'd love to see make their way into Object Desktop.

Stardock is looking for developers and artists to work on our upcoming games ranging from the fantasy strategy game, an RPG, an MMORTS, and of course future versions of GalCiv.

So what do you need to do to work at Stardock?

Here is the check list:

1. Work in Plymouth Michigan. We're near Ann Arbor Michigan. Seriously.  We get lots of people saying how great they can "work from remote".  We already have lots of remote people. We need people here.
2. If you're a developer, you need to know C++ (at the very least) on Visual Studio. We don't care how much formal experience you have as long as you can code. We can't teach you how to do that, you have to already know it and be pretty good.
3. You have to be into gaming. At Stardock, everyone participates in the game design. There is no such thing as a game designer at Stardock and there will almost certainly never will be. We all take part.
4. If you're an artist, you need to know 3D Studio or Maya (preferably both).  You also need to have a portfolio of cool stuff you've made.
5. You need to be self-starting. Seriously. Raises at Stardock are not based on percentages, they're based on what you produce. We have people here who started out making <$30k who now make over $100k. 
6. You must be able to get along with others.  We get a lot of people interviewing who are quite certain that they're the smartest people in human history and make every effort to impress that on us.  Look we're just a bunch of Monty Python loving, Simpsons watching goons but we are reasonably bright too, mutual respect amongst the team is crucial.

If you think you or someone you know may fit this basic criteria, send us your resume.  [email protected] and [email protected] should do the trick. 

Also, no interns, co-ops, etc. We're looking for people who are ready to get into making cool stuff right now and stay at it until the game is done.

A few other things about Stardock:

• We don't lay off after projects. Once you're hired, as long as you do a good job, you're here as long as you want.
• We've been around for 15 years as of this October. It's a very stable environment.
• Very laid back working environment. We like to have fun.
• Typical work week is about 45 hours a week. Crunch times are rare and short. Since I am there during crunch time and I'm lazy, I tend to work to schedule things so that there aren't much crunch times (I.e. I pad the schedule).

In June we launched our next-generation digital distribution platform, Impulse.  And in July, we released the beta of the mega update to Sins of a Solar Empire that Ironclad has been working long and hard on.  There's been a lot of talk about Impulse (pro and con) since then.

Our tentative date for the final version of Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1 is mid September. We want to have plenty of time to address your feedback and Ironclad has been doing a great job in implementing features and adding content to the game (feel free to give the Ironclad team some kudos in the forums, they'd love to hear some positive feedback on this free,  huge, update).

One of the big goals of Sins v1.1 is to greatly ease on-line play in terms of connectivity.  This is something we're working on with Impulse which will support game-listing, achievements, rankings, and the rest and allow developers to query this data and display in game. 

To see what will be in Impulse: Phase 2 visit here: http://draginol.impulsedriven.net/article/321533/Impulse_Phase_2_Preview

Impulse is Stardock's next-generation digital distribution platform.  On June 17th it got its initail release.  Next week, Phase 2 will be launched which will add a bunch of new features to the mix.

For Galactic Civilizations II users, it opens the door for some continued development possibilities. For instance, we would like to make use of Impulse's achivements and rankings features to better support the Metaverse.

Galactic Civilizations II: v2.0 (for Dark Avatar and Twilight users) is due on October 1, 2008.  We think users will be shocked at how much development time has gone into this free update to improve the espionage and dozens of other elements of the game.

In November, we anticipate announcing the fantasy strategy game (no promises though) with the beta opening up next Spring for that.

To read what's new in Phase 2 of Impulse, go here: http://draginol.impulsedriven.net/article/321533/Impulse_Phase_2_Preview