There's a lot left to do in Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar. But most of the core new features are implemented, they're just buggy. VERY buggy. And there's little AI yet to take advantage of it and there's a lot of polish missing and UI crumminess and tons of other things.

Today I worked on some of the mega events.  Coding a mega-event = Easy. Testing a mega event = Hard. They're a pain to make them balanced and feel right.

Take for example the Dread Lords event.  In Dark Avatar, the Dread Lords might show up as a major civilization.  Nice. But how tough should they be? How tough should they REALLY be?  Well you don't want them just wiping everyone out and be game ruiners. But you want them to be challenging. Which means that you'll have 20% of people on the forums screaming that the Dread Lords are "broken" because they wipe everyone out, 20% of people saying the Dread Lords are a joke, and the rest thinking they work fine. That's how it always is. You also have the inevitable crash bugs. There's quite a few of them right now and we're cleaning them up. Big pain.

See our bugs:

What are those blue dots around my ship? I dunno.

Why aren't my agents nullifying their production? Dunno.

Missing symetry in that hard point.

Why is my civilization one of the listed opponents?

We also have a lot of graphics to get in.  I have to implement the rest of the Mega events. There are quite a few and some of them will require more graphics than are currently present. The new soundtrack is really nice and the new intro video is probably going to be a lot better than the original.

I can say this, even at this rough stage, Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is a much funner game for me. Three things that make an immediate difference - the spies, the asteroids and the special planets. Not being able to colonize half the worlds until you get advanced technology - VERY big change to how the game is played.  Having agents to wack your opponents with keeps players from getting too powerful without having to actually go to war with them. And asteroid fields give players a LOT more control over their economy based on THEIR strategy as opposed to randomly placed good/bad planets because players can direct where the resources from asteroids go to (with diminishing returns as they get further away).

People I think are really going to like the streamlining of the economy. The numbers for everything will be much smaller. Much easier to deal with and more intuitive to work with.

So while the internal alpha is pretty buggy, it's already pretty fun (the mega events are pretty fun too -- mega events are different from the random events in that they are more intelligent in who they effect and why).  For example, a plague event that starts killing off the population requires players to research a tech to stop it. It's an expensive tech.  Do you research it yourself or trade someone for it when they get it? If you research it yourself, you can trade it to others and get a ton of stuff. And that's just one of many mega events that we have in. Almost all of them change the gameplay in some way but not by imbalancing it but by adding a new gameplay element.

As some may know, the upcoming expansion pack, Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is only going to be available via TotalGaming.net (i.e. on galciv2.com).

People will be able to purchase it and download it or purchase it and download it while waiting for the boxed unit to arrive.  But it won't be available at stores.

So the question is, how much will this affect sales? Some percentage of people won't buy on-line for various reasons.  Which means no one knows how well an on-line only release will do.  Let us know what you think and check out the poll.

As for last week's poll which asked how players like the new version of Galactic Civilizations II, 84% said they are happy with it. 9% Said they are happy with it but liked 1.2 better. 3% said they don't like it. 4% said they were having technical problems of some kind with it.

In the sandbox mode of the game, the alignments in DA will be:

Good:
Altarian Resistance
Torian Confederation
Iconian Refuge
The Krynn

Neutral:
Terran Alliance
Arcean Empire
The Thalan
Drath Remnants

Evil:
Drengin Empire
Korath Empire
The Yor
The Korx

For the first time since the original Galactic Civilizations, good, evil, and neutral will be balanced.

Now you can get the complete Galactic Civilizations I saga for only $29.95. This includes the original game, Altarian Prophecy and all the updates in-between.

If you've ever wanted to play the game that started it all at a reduced cost, now's your chance. You can buy and immediately download it OR you can have a box sent to you (and still download it while you wait).

 

"Hey Bill."

"It's Brad."

"Yea, whatever. Hey, how you doing?"

"Actually, my back has..."

"That's great, here let me introduce you to Susan, this is Bill."

"Brad."

"Whatever."

In the software world, we always make fun of ourselves by calling it "Starduck". "Yea, those StarDuck guys are making that need Window blind thing." 

Who would have ever thought that the Vista install would make it official...

Good old WindowBlind.  While the spelling being wrong is annoying, it's more annoying that this was on the WindowBlinds Vista build. The compatibility check on it is just looking at the most generic info.  This is on a release candidate so it can still be fixed. But I tell ya, OUCH.

We have added an ObjectBar 2 gallery.  While many ObjectBar 1 themes will work with ObjectBar 2, the number of underlying changes in ObjectBar 2 make compatibility somewhat iffy.

So we've created an ObjectBar 2 gallery where you can upload ObjectBar 2 skins and well as themes. What's the difference?

A theme is the actual collection of bars on the screen. A Start bar, a Sidebar, whatever would be an example of a theme.  The bars in those themes can be skinned. 

Similarly, we have added a RightClick section.  RightClick skins are compatible with ObjectBar skins (or more precisely, RightClick can be seen as a sub-set of ObjectBar in terms of functionality). 

Making ObjectBar skins is quite easy to do.  Documentation is here. Have fun!

Stardock has updated its forums to support a new kind of view -- summary view.

Now when you go to the forums, you will see at the top right, just under the search bar, a "Forum summary" link.  Pressing this will display the forums in a different way -- it will display the last 5 active posts in each primary category in the forum.

This view will allow users who are interested in browsing the forums as a whole a way to keep up to date easier with what's going on.  Subsequent updates will add preferences automatically to cookies so that it will default to whichever view you last chose.

Users can use the + or - buttons that are now above each primary category to hide or show a given topic category. These are automatically saved to cookies to be remembered for next time. 

Hope you like the new feature.

Greetings!

This forum has been created so that Object Desktop users from around the world can get together and tell us what they'd like to see in Object Desktop.

A lot of changes are coming to Windows in the next several months with Windows Vista in development. And we want to make sure we're here to serve your needs as users of Windows XP and eventually users of Windows Vista.

So if you have a new program, a tweak, a change, or anything else for that matter, let us know.

Thanks!

IGN is publishing a series of articles by the development team (including me) about what we're doing in Dark Avatar. What our goals were, some of the features, and some exclusive screenshots as well.

Head on over there and check 'em out.