Take 2 has told us that Galactic Civilizations II should be showing up today and the early days of this week at a store near you!

We're getting Galactic Civilizations II T-shirts in.  All the major civilizations get their own shirt.  The first 10 of these shirts are being reserved for the people who can post the best retail sighting of Galactic Civilizations II.

Here's how:

1) Find GalCiv II at a local retailer.

2) Take a picture

3) Post picture up in THIS THREAD.

4) Make sure you include where you were (city and which store).

We'll then pick out 10 of those pictures and send them a free T-shirt of the civilization of their choice.  

And most of all, have fun!

The GalCiv II launch was a much greater success than we ever imagined.

Of course, that also meant it was a much bigger load on the servers so we had to keep JoeUser.com down a little longer than we expected.

But we're back now! Sorry for any inconvenience.

As some have noticed, we've been pretty much living in the forums.  The support team has been keeping statistical track of how many users run into problem X, Y, Z.

In our non-game stuff, any serious problem that affects more than 1% of the user base is considered serious. Anything that affects more than 5% of the user base is considered critical.

One problem that has fit just over the serious but just below the critical has been game crashes.  And the logs have confused us because they don't make sense.  Why would these people have the game crash? Crashing should be reproduceable to some extent.

And yet, here we are with about 2.5% of users running into interittent crashing. 

The update (1.0D1) made the game better for most people because it fixed bugs that were found. But for some people, it actually crashes on them more than 1.0D - digital release).  Why? We had done some performance optimizations but it's really straight forward stuff.

But then..

Hmm...

During development, one of our mantras was to force everyone to run and test on lower end hardware so that we could "know their pain".  Too many games come out these days that require state of the art hardware to run.  So we mostly played and tested on lower end hardware. (not exclusively by any means, I did all my AI testing on a state of the art machine with an ATI X1800 in it).

But we noticed something in the logs -- most of the people who had these random crashing issues had really REALLY good computers.  A statistical anomaly.  A couple of people noted that the game runs their GPU very hot. VERY hot.

This week I've been playing the game and monitored the temperature on my ATI Control Panel applet (which, coincidentally, is built using licensed Stardock technology from the other side of the company <g>).  My GPU's temperature was 85C!  That's really hot!

But it's no biggie for me.  I have a Dell, it's got 50 fans on it. But what would happen on a machine that wasn't as well vented? I know what would happen: The game would start crashing -- randomly.  And it would happen relatively quickly because it reaches that high temperature within 10 minutes give or take.

So why don't other games do this?  That depends on the game of course.  Some games, like Halo, throttle their FPS. Other games simply don't use nearly as many video card features do.

I know strategy games are notorious for crappy graphics, but GalCiv II uses it all. I mean ALL OF IT.  Specular Lighting? Check. Bump Mapping? Check. Zillions of lighting passes? Check. Stuff I don't even begin to understand? Check.

If you read the entry that showed a screenshot of that Bird of Prey in teh game, that should tell you somethign about the engine.  One of my graphics guys told me that model may have over a million polygons.

The art team found a whole bunch of Star Trek models that were designed for video production (i.e. NOT for being displayed in real time).  They literally had 20 different ships in the game, each with an absurd number of polies. They ran.  To put it in perspective, a typical ship in GalCiv II only has around 600 polygons.  So there is a lot of room to grow.

Which brings us back to our heating problem.  What can be done?  The answer it seems to me is frame rate throttling.  So that's what I did:

if(ulElapsedMilliSeconds < 10 && bThrrotleOoption == TRUE)
    Sleep(5);
EnterCriticalSection(&g_csD3DDevice);
Draw3D();
LeaveCriticalSection(&g_csD3DDevice);

By doing this, my temperature stayed at around a more normal 65C.   We could probably be even more stringent.  I mean, if the time between the last frame is less than 10 that means the game's running at >100fps.  Realistically, anything over say 40 to 50fps is probably pointless.

But this way, people's machines will stay cooler.  And there will be another benefit: Laptop users again.  I'd like to put in a thing that lets us REALLY throttle it for low power usage.  I.e. >25fps is throttled (optionally).  This way, I could play the game on my ThinkPad all the way from Michigan to California on a plane trip.

Galactic Civilizations II T-shirts are coming. One for each major civilization!

Evil Drengin. Crafty Humans. Ruthless Yor.

And we're looking to give some of them away.  If you see Galactic Civilizations II at a retail shop, take a picture of it, post it here and we'll pick the 10 best ones in about two weeks and send them T-shirts as soon as they arrive! 

Please make sure that the thumbnail you post is no bigger than 640x480 (actual linked picture can be whatever you want).

I have a confession. I've been cheating on WinCustomize. It was only supposed to be a temporary fling but it's turned into being a full blown affair.  What started out as being a small game project grew and grew until nearly everyone at the company has been on that instead of working over here.  You can see my writings over there on this page. It's like having a double life.  By day, making PC desktop extension software, by night, we make video games. It's crazy.  But things are starting to return to some level of normality.

The whole Galactic Civilizations II thing has been consuming us and on top of that, there's been a lot of internal work on the ThinkDesk programs (those of you in the beta, updates coming soon, we're just trying to test these things out).

I want to stress that Stardock is hiring. As long as you're willing to work in Michigan, send your resume to [email protected].  We're looking for developers, artists, quality assurance people, web developers, ASP.net developers, .NET develoers, support people, and many others. If you think you have a particular talent, put it in with your email and send it to her.  No experience required in many cases. Some of our best developers of all time were right out of high school. Others had 4 year degrees.  We don't care what a piece of paper says. We only care about what you can do. 

Last of people is literally what slows things down the most though.  Especially in QA.  We have builds for everything from LogonStudio 2 to Sound Packager to ObjectBar that end up going to an increasingly long queue of an over burdened QA team.  And it can't be done remotely.  And we can't just release this stuff either because even if people "reported" the problem, who is going to read the reports if there's not enough QA people?

Suffice to say, we're trying to hire as fast as we can.  FYI, Michigan has warm sunny weather all year round. Rumors to the contrary are malicious and false...

A great month in skinning

Meanwhile, proving that my presence on WinCustomize is what could be considered "optional", the great skinners have been quietly kicking butt this month. A few skins I've noticed this month that struck me as particularly cool include:

Aten	Nimbus II	HALO
Lozenge	Glossamer	ArtWork
Wire and Glass	Omega Point	Solaire-dark 2.1b
Mako	Pandora's Box	SD Organizer (2.04)
Camuflaje IP	ArtWork	CYY SkyLine

And this is by no means a complete list. As people have noticed, I've been gone a lot working on that galactic game.  So I don't have every new skin running yet on my machines. But there's been some great stuff.

Meanwhile, those of you who have Object Desktop should definitely check out the latest WindowFX's.  It's a pity we didn't get these betas out earlier. The QA backlog really bit us this time because a lot of the features that seem "Vista-like" were actually in there before they appeared (or that we even knew) they'd be in Vista.  (Some visual effects are simply obvious).  But of course, since there was the beta delay, some people are going to say it was just "copied" from Vista.   Of course, it bears pointing out that we're doing Windows Vista level effects on Windows XP.   In other words, there's some really cool stuff in there.

If I can get some more QA help, we can finally get ObjectBar 2 out the door along with Control Center 2.  QA has been the primary issue there.  If we had more IT resources, we'd set up easier to manage external beta teams but again, without someone to organize the reports, it's hard to act on them.  

The new Windows Vista build came out.  I think people who were all jazzed up for the Sidebar are going to not be so excited.  I don't know Microsoft's ultimate plans with the Sidebar but it is increasingly looking like it may just end up as another accessory.  The problem is the same problem all widget/gadget things have had -- a reason to exist.  Let me give you an example from a program I like -- Yahoo Widgets.  Yahoo has been featuring a 2006 Olympics widget during the olympics. There's a perfect use for a widget right? Something to keep you up to date with what's going on in the Winter olympics.  Total downloads? Less than 20,000 total and they count repeat downloads (WinCustomize does not count repeat downloads in its count). By comparison, Treetog's new skin, Mako, already has over 50,000 downloads. 2,000 of them today and it's just barely afternoon here and that's with no promotion, no front page coverage. Certainly no Yahoo.  

It's not that the widgets aren't a good idea or aren't that popular. It's that they are niche.  For people like me, who love this stuff, and thousands like me, widgets are sweet.  But it's going to be hard to have the Sidebar on by default just to satisfy people like me when they can put it into accessories where, again, people like me will find it, turn it on and run with it.    So we'll see how that works out.

Windows Vista is almost certianly going to usher a new era of skinning.  Right now, skinning is pretty much off limits to the increasing number of 3D artists out there.  But Vista is probably going to open the door to them. Stay tuned on that front.

So anyway, hope you found this informative.  More soon.

Next Level Gaming has the first review of the retal version of Galactic Civilizations (v1.0).

What can be more fun than playing a fantastic strategy game… oh wait I know, what if they throw in funny comments, like when you read technology upgrade descriptions and you find yourself cracking a smile or even laughing out loud.  I can’t stop playing this game, I’m so glad it didn’t come out during the holiday season or there is no way I would have gotten any other games done.  95/100

You can read the whole thing here.

PC Game World has a review up. It's based on the gamma version (the final version is considerably nicer) but it's still a thorough review of what you can expect in the game. 

While the Stardock love is flowing I should also mention that they forgo the usual draconian DRM mechanisms found in most of today's games. Once installed no disc is required to play, and the game can be installed on multiple computers with the developers blessing (provided they are owned by the same person of course). Between my HTPC, My laptop, and my "gaming rig" I have three computers that I regularly play games on, and now I don't have to shuffle the disc around my house to play this game where I want to. Thanks Stardock.  90/100.

You can read that review here.

I visited Game Rankings today to see what was new and to my shock, Galactic Civilizations was #3 in the most popular games.

But..But..PC games are supposed to be dying right? Isn't that why it's hard to get shelf space? People don't play PC games? Certain promises were made.

And turn based strategy? Nobody plays turn based strategy. What's up with that? What are you people doing? Didn't you get the memo? Quit playing the game and get back to whatever it is you're supposed to be doing.

With the success of Civ IV and other games coming out this year, maybe publishers will really start to notice that A) The PC game market isn't so dead after all and There's a pretty good market for turn based strategy. 

Incidentally, the other PC game on the list is also a strategy game.

To many people reading this, a company is a company is a company. We don't really give it a lot of thought about the people -- the individual people who work at a given company.

Today was a good day. I've never been as proud as I was today when I came in.  I had a meeting with some out of town guests from Redmond (non game related) and to my shock, almost everyone was there on a Saturday.

There was no memo sent out. No hints suggested. Nothing to encourage people to come in on their weekend to work. Just a bunch of people who felt, on an individual basis, to individually come in to do some thing.

People came in to help pack boxes

A couple people came in with their spouses to help package up boxes. The pre-orders have been just amazing but totally unexpected at these levels.  We did more direct sales in the first two days on Galactic Civilizations II than we got on Galactic Civilizations I for the first three months. 

Let's just pull a ballpark number here -- 1,000 direct orders per day.  What would it take to ship those out? Let's say we called you up and asked you to send us 1,000 of something.  How long would it take to package them up?  Let's say you had super human powers and could package 1 up, label, and send it out in a single minute.  That's 1,000 minutes. That's about 17 hours straight for one person. And of course, it's not 1 single minute, it's more like 3 minutes so it takes 51 man hours to handle a single day's orders.  Which of course, is greater than 24.  So you're actually talking more like 7 people, full time, doing nothing but that.

In a company of 40 people with only roughly 30 at the main location, that's a lot of people.  To put things in perspective, my friend at Blizzard told me that they have over 1,500 people who just do support. Not art. Not coding. Just customer support.

So people came in, on their day off, without encouragement, without being asked to, with their families, to package up boxes to send out.  Their day jobs? Programmers, office managers.  Our staff attorney had his wife and kids in to help.

People came in to hang out on the forums and help people

Again, no demands, no subtle hints.  Just people coming in to help other people.  1 out of 100 people run into some account issue. Maybe they used two email accounts (one to buy the game and another when they created an account and hence their game account doesn't know they bought the game). Maybe some other odd thing happened. Who knows.  But 1 out of 100 people means 10 out of 1,000. 100 out of 10,000.  Pretty soon, you have quite a few people that need help.

People came in to help with sales and customer support

Kim, who some of you know by name, came in on her day off to answer email, help people with all kinds of things. Some people accidentally buy two copies of the game.  Other people lose their info.  There's a zillion different things that can come up.  But she and others came in and waded through it all. 

People came in to help with network server stuff

We were able to put the new build on Stardock Central today too.  I think some people who were previously dissing Stardock Central may have a new appreciation after trying to download the update from a "good old secure HTTP web page".  Because Stardock Central has a lot of nice feature that are hidden from the user.  All kinds of redundancy and AI to find a person's account and get that file downloaded for them and only the files they needed.

But to do that, IT people had to take time away from their families to juggle the delicate dance of updating a massively mirrored server network without it hicupping (which it did hicup between 4am and 10am today -- only minutes after I left and went to bed ironically). 

And more

And other people came in to tweak artwork, to work on modding guides, to figure out easier ways and tools for people to make ships.  Kristin from PowerUser.TV was in to put the touches on interviews with the game's team.  If you haven't ever been to PowerUser.TV, you should check it out.  She also helped us work with Paradox over in Europe on issues such as a misprint on the serial numbers they printed in their retail boxes (we'll have to update our system to deal with the misprint).

Nakor, who helps keep things together, was able to keep servers up, put new updates up, answer questions, help people on IRC, and so forth.

I'm just so honored to work with people like this.  It's definitely not me.  You guys can read my stuff, I'm kind of a goof ball. So it's not leadership by any means.  It's simply a matter of good people, good individuals who came in on their own.  Like me, none of them came in knowing that anyone else was coming in.  I didn't know they were coming in.  They didn't know I was coming in.  They didn't know that their coworkers were coming in.  It was a spontaneous thing.

And even those who didn't drive in, many of them were on-line from home. Helpig people out.  Hanging out on IRC answering questions.  And still others on IRC working to make sure that our primary business (Object Desktop and related products) continued to get proper support and help.

To my friends/coworkers. Thank you.  It is a privilege to work with you.

We've released our first update to Galactic Civilizations II.  This update includes a number of playability tweaks, user requested UI changes, and of course some bug fixes as well.

Because it's Friday and we wanted to get this up as quickly and painlessly as possible can, we have teamed up with Cachefly to put the update on there to ensure very fast downloads no matter where you live.  It's NOT available on Stardock Central, we'll do that on Monday when the IT people are all here.

NOTE: If you were in the beta, you may need to get your final game serial #. Go HERE and type in your email address and it will email your serial #.

[What's New]

[GET IT HERE]

GalCiv II is extensively moddable.

Everything in the game is in an open format of some kind.  Screens can be modified with DesktopX (www.desktopx.net). The models are .X files, the graphics PNG and the data XML.

One user, Winterlight, has already figured out how to put in his own .X files.

Look closely at the ship since it's not textured. There's no polygon limit in GalCiv II. 

Most games tend to start to look dated because they limit how many polygons they can do in their models.  GalCiv II has no limit, your system performance is the only limit.  So there's no limitation on how big your textures can be or how detailed your ships except your own system performance.

This was done so that the game can be kept "new" for years to come.

The post that discusses that Bird of Prey can be found here:

https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=162&AID=102652