I have the greatest job in the universe. And finding that out was no small feat. With the universe having a diameter of 14 billion or so light years, I had travel a lot in order to make that determination.

So why is my job so awesome? Because I get to not just play games but as I find things that bug me, I get to change them right on the fly.

My job today is to continue to walk through the different computer AIs and civilizations, making changes to them based on YOUR feedback from the forums as well as my own experiences during playing.

You guys keep commenting on these journals and I'll keep looking.

We on the GalCiv team at Stardock have a pretty transparent way of doing things. We don't mind showing our dirty laundry to our fans because we feel a mutual trust - we know you aren't afraid of seeing the sausage factory and you know we're doing our best to make sure we go that extra step to give you a great game.

You can see lots of issues in this screen. The first problem is that it reads the name of the tournament from the file name rather than the description inside the campaign file. 

Secondly, the leaderboard is going to need to be improved so that each leaderboard is based on the selected tournament.

Thirdly, we will need images for these campaigns.

As for the Arceans..

The Arceans are basically noble Klingons. That's the best way I can describe them. They're a warrior culture that is fixated with honor.  I've seen some people say the Drengin are like Klingons. But that would be inaccurate. 

The Drengin are evil by our standards. It's not a matter of them being misunderstood. They are just vile. The Drengin are ruthless to the core but also very clever. They're much more complex than your typical villains. The Drengin genetically produced their own castes. Their hyper aggressive warrior caste were called the Korath (which eventually became their own incredibly vicious independent civilization).  The Drengin have muscle and brain.

The Arcean have muscle but not quite the brain. But they are the toughest civilization in the game.

Display bug:

Look at the time it says it'll take to build this. Clearly I have 4 social IUs. So never is wrong.

Having played the Arceans, I would say they have a pretty rough road. So I've evened the odds a bit by giving them a unique constructor module which is far cheaper than what the other civilizations get.

At almost half the cost, Arceans can afford to build a lot of starbases.

I think the Arceans are in a good place now.

The Torians will get some love next.

Here is an experiment that you can repeat yourself.

Have Windows Vista?

Open up Visual Studio 2003. Have Aero running. Now try to do a search on all files.  Microsoft Visual Studio hangs. Every time.

Solution: Either go to "Classic" or use WindowBlinds with the Aero skin.

Now THAT's Ironic.

Very annoying too.

In the last article, I put up the blue print for the first floor of the house my family is building over the next 3 years.

Now, for the second floor.

The last floor plan we still have to do is the lowest floor (the "basement").

Greetings once again friends and family. We have the close to final blue print of "future house".

It'll take about 3 years to finish this.  We haven't designed the lowest floor (walk out basement) but we do have the second floor pretty set as well.

Stay tuned.

For updating the computer AI more fully for Twilight of the Arnor, I'm creating tournament maps. This way, I can help balance the different races while at the same time improving the AI plus creating more tournament maps.

Today's example is the Drengin Gambit. I play as the Drengin Empire in a medium map.

Ignore the quality of my screenshots as I'm running in the debugger.

Drengin default tech tree

I start out with a kick ass planet.

AI Improvement #1: Better scouting

The AI is not good enough at scouting out planets. One of the things that I find amazing is when people try to say the AI is "cheating" because it "knows" where the planets are. Not only does it not know, it's not terribly good at scouting planets.

(30 minutes pass)

Okay, the AI has better scouting ability. Before it would go to stars, now it sees if it can tell if it has planets and goes there first. Pretty obvious but this code was written back before players could see planets on the mini map.

Key Drengin technology: Xeno Slavery

One of the things we're pretty proud of is how unique each technology tree is. The changes aren't just cosmetic, they are to the bone of each civilization. Of course, it makes balancing a pain but we should have this nailed down by December of 2007. Cough.

AI Improvement #2: More aggressive at getting galactic resources

BUG:

A lot of techs are missing animations

PERFORMANCE BUG: Every time you click on the map,  UpdateTechnologyContext() is called which requires calculating the number of turns it takes to finish your tech.

Not a serious issue, but anything we can do to improve performance is good. This would fall into the piddly but still.

One of the new features that is nice is that the AI can auto design ships.  I'm always curious to see if it can do a better job than I do.

BUG: AI designed ship has a goofy name.

Star Fury Template?

AI Bug:

So, Torians.  Whatcha doing there?

(20 minutes later)

Okay, let's see if we can improve this...

LOTS of pain:

The improvement code has all kinds of problems. This is going to take awhile to get into.  It's just...painful.  The original coder of the planetary improvements was a lot smarter in terms of coding. The improvements are done as a database.  So getting access to things like pMyColony->HowManyImprovementsLikeThisDoIHave(pImprovement) are very difficult.  It's a real sausage factory.

The biggest issue I'm seeing in the improvement code right now besides the problem with it getting obsessed with a particular improvement, is that if planet A is building super project X, there's nothing stopping planet B from trying to build it too. The game rules then abort the attempt since that's cheating but planet B will then, next turn, try to build it resulting in it not building anything.

BUG: Drengin don't get enough upgrades to economic starbases.

Solution: Drengin need some techs that provide starbase upgrades.

Drengin gain a new tech and two new starbase modules.

Going to attempt an ascension victory.

Relations presently:

After taking all the ascension crystals..

AI Bug: Arceans didn't research interstellar contruction.

BUG: Tournaments don't seem to support the Ascension Victory Condition. At the very least, they don't display the progress.

More to come.  The sausage factory awaits!

Altaria has the strategic fortune of being located in the outer rim. As a result, even its handful of colonies are relatively unimportant from a strategic standpoint. The Drengin Empire had largely ignored the Altarians during the Dread Lord war of 2225. But the Dread Lords tended to put specific effort to do harm to the Altarians.

According to Altarian legend, the Dread Lords were involved on Altaria during the opening stages of the Precursor wars eons ago.  The war between the Precursors (the Arnor and the Dread Lords) nearly wiped out Altaria.  This time period is still known as the cataclysm  in which the surface of Altaria was decimated and over time, the world was recolonized bit by bit.

In the infamous "Altaria Resists" incident, the Dread Lords with Korath support were driving towards the Altarian home world in an effort to eradicate the Altarians. It is quite unlike most of the epic battles as the space it occurs in was immensely large while having relatively few planets to fight over. It was this literal distance that served as the only hope for the Altarians in keeping the Dread Lords at bay.

Well friends and family who are keeping up on "Future House". The plot plan has been largely completed.

Click to enlarge

We have the plot of land. It's a little strangely shaped. It's about 3 acres overall. We've settled where the house is going to sit on the property.

Here is a closer up view.

Click to enlarge.

The driveway is subject to change as I am trying to avoid cutting down trees (though, sadly, we've cut down a lot of trees since this lot was 100% wooded).  The wood is being milled to be used on the house at least.

More to come.

How hard can it be to do file copying? Vista SP1 still hasn't managed to nail it.

Besides the fact that copying over a network isn't reliable if I use the machine name (it'll just randomly cut out, I have to use the IP address), there's a more fundamental one: They can't estimate time.

So I'm looking at the above dialog. I can tell by the items remaining (and the GB remaining) that it's copying at around 8 megabytes per second. But the speed says 188k/sec.  So it uses that 188k per second to do teh estimate.  Right now, it says it'll take 16 hours and 57 minutes to do this copy when in fact it'll be done in probably 5 or 6 minutes. (and in the screenshot it said 8 hours, so I actually lost time).

Seriously guys, this is pretty basic stuff.  You can't manage to write a shell copy routine in 2008? I don't care if Google stole the guy who wrote it  (remind me to sell my Google stock). Fix this stuff. This is just incredibly sloppy.

And now at the end of this post, which took about 3 minutes to make it says:

So in 3 or so minutes, it copies about 1.5 gigabytes.  So...Microsoft, what is 1.5 gigabytes divided by 180 seconds?

This holiday weekend my plan is to get some serious AI coding on GalCiv. I've been looking forward to it and my new home PC box has arrived.

I don't know if it's because I'm getting older or if there just isn't as much benefit to upgrading as there used to be but the box it's replacing is over 3 years old. I used to upgrade every year and now it's 3 years.

My new box is an Alienware machine. We do a lot of business with Alienware and in the past I haven't bought their machines because they were too loud. But with liquid cooled options and sound dampening, it's not bad.

The machine is a monster though. Besides being the fastest quad-core currently available, I also got two 64GB SSDs put in RAID 0 configuration. Yes, it's insane.

Only on the video side of things did I not get too crazy. I have a Radeon HD 3870 X2 in it -- but only 1. So, you know, it's only insane not INSANE. Ahem.

Right now, I'm installing the various compilers, updates, etc.

GalCiv is written in Visual Studio 2003 which is a bit of a pain these days. Microsoft hasn't been real good about making the latest versions of their tools very compelling. Word 2007 = Compelling. Visual Studio 2008 != Compelling.

In a few hours, this machine should be set up and ready to make the Drengin, Arceans, Altarians, and so on smarter.

Twilight of the Arnor has been a real treat to work on.  This week, we're releasing Beta 6 of it and then, over the next week, I'll be dedicated to the computer AI in updating it and balancing the races.

The plan is to do a game example for each race, documenting what things are working well and what things need to be balanced.   As I post my own observations, I am hoping that fellow players will be chiming in their own ideas and input and I'll be looking forward to integrating it.

Stay tuned!