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

Wow. I mean. WOW!

What a first few days it's been.  We are very glad people like the game. It's one of those things you can never know until it's "out there".

Retail Stuff

Ah retail.  A couple weeks ago there were a lot of people who pre-ordered the digital download-only option who were upset that we were making them wait to get the game until the game was at retail.  So we took a bit of a pounding for that.  But after having taken a beating for that, as fate would have it, that is exactly what happened -- we released the digital download on February 21st as planned but general retail available remained very sketchy for an additional two days (and it's still sketchy in a number of retailers). As a result, we were able to tick off both digital downloaders and people who pre-ordered at retail.  It took some skill and hard work to manage to not have your cake or eat it but we did it.

Then there's the whole Collector's Edition fun. We were told that all pre-orders, regardless of source, in North America, would have their orders fulfilled with the Collector's Edition box. We passed this on. Naturally, only some stores are doing that. Oh, it gets better, some stores are doing it part-way. That is, they provide the technology tree poster but not the box. Oye.  So here's the thing -- anyone who pre-ordered from a retailer in North America and ended up with the regular package who wants the Tech tree poster, email us ([email protected]) and we'll mail you a tech tree poster (as we get them in) for free.  It doesn't really matter whose fault it is, at the end of the day, you bought our game and it's up to us to make sure you're happy.

Game Stuff

Luckily, the game itself has gone very well. When you spend 2 years making a game, you can never be sure how it will be received. Plus, you always worry that there's some huge bug or compatibility issue that will sneak out.  That isn't to say that the game is perfect. Nothing's more annoying (at least to me) than some developer saying how everything is perfect or saying "well it works fine on my machine". When you sell a game, it doesn't matter how well it works on the developer's machine, it matters how well it works on your machine.  So we've been living on the forums, writing down what problems people have and we expect to release our first update today.

Also, since widespread retail availability is going to be more graduated than we had expected, some people may not get their boxed game until mid next week. Apparently it's at Best Buy, Walmart (but selling out quickly at both), and a few other places but it's in various levels of quantity.  I've been assured that they're getting them out there as "fast as possible". 

We're planning to do a v1.0X build next Thursday. We don't know what's going to be in that build yet.  What we want to do is have some nice little game play tweaks and other minor changes so that people who bought it at the store and had to wait to do it have something to look forward to.  So if you already have the game, you can go onto this thread and post your ideas. 

Post Release Updates

Stardock's been making software for digital distribution for some years now.  Those of you with Object Desktop already know that we tend to update our software very often. To us, that's the whole point of digital delivery.  But in the game world, it's actually considered a negative to keep releasing updates because apparently most games only release updates to fix bugs.  Our updates will include bug fixes to be sure. But that's not what they're for.  They're to provide new features to our software based on user feedback to reward people for buying our software.  In essence, free updates ARE our copy protection.  Or more to the point, we don't need copy protection because we provide (or try to) a greater incentive for people to buy the product by giving them free updates.  Moreover, free updates helps keep people playing which helps word of mouth.  Word of mouth is what makes or breaks PC games.  So our view is that providing a stream of free updates is just good business.

Players should not feel they need to download the updates.  Many Object Desktop users will only download updates every few months. Others will update every month.  And some grab every update we make.  It's all up to you.  We plan to keep releasing updates to this game for a long time. So don't feel like you have to get these updates if you don't want.

We'll keep you posted on how things are going. Feel free to comment here or on the forums and we'll try to answer your questions.  One thing though: Please make sure you read the stickies or the Readme in the game if you run into some issue.

This is a sticky thread for people to request very simple tweaks -- things that could be put in and tested in less than an hour that you think would make the game more fun.

So suggestions like "We want a full blown encyclopedia" or "Can we have tactical combat?" should NOT go here.  These are things that should be very easy to do.

The goal is to come up with a list of little things we can do to put into a Thursday update so that people who had to wait to get the game at retail will be able to have something to look forward to to make it worth the wait.

Want your PC to look like an iPod? How about a Pumpkin? Or something all together different?

CNET has a story on how some vendors are starting to customize what their PCs look like on the outside.  Now, one wonders when more of them will figure out that differentiation on the inside matters too.

From the site:

In the news this week: Blog readership is apparently down, but Brad thinks there is a correlation between big news events like the 2004 election and blogging popularity. Also the RIAA is at it again. They’ve banned the selling of pre-loaded iPods. Fine. Then they also stated that ripping your music CD’s that you purchased to your iPod is not "fair use". Not fine. Feel free to express your outrage in the show comments.

Also, ID chips have been implanted in American workers for the first time, someone has invented a very useful clothes washer that will wash, dry and iron, and is the flying car on the way? We’ve been hearing rumblings about it since the 1920’s, so surely they are just around the corner.

We have another call to create a video game, but this time it’s from researchers at the University of Southern California and they want you to invent the "World of Peacecraft" or similar. Perhaps someone will invent the thing while power-lunching with their clubmates in WoW, where there is now an online version of a country club. (Brad not invited). We have an update on the "StarForce" gang and Brad lets us in on a Star Wars: Empire at War review. Plus a question from a listener about n00bs – should we enslave them all? (We’re paraphrasing). Check it out!

I love digital updates. That's one advantage that PCs tend to have over consoles -- PC games can be updated. 

Of course, this is also a downside as developers seem to often release games before their time.  Hopefully our customers don't feel that way about Galactic Civilizations II. 

On our non-game products such as Object Desktop, we do weekly updates year in and out and that's just how we do business.  So to us, it's natural to keep putting updates on a regular basis for as long as possible.  Because when we play the game, we're in the debugger or have a graphics package handy. So like many gamers, we'll see something we don't like and we'll make a tweak or a change.

Tomorrow, Friday, we're going to put up our first update.  Part of this is to thank people who stuck it out and bought the game at a store (which in turn helps keep us on shelves -- PC game shelf space is really getting hard to get and we're hoping to change that). The other reason is to provide fixes to people who have run into issues.  What you see below is what we've done in the past 48 hours (game was released February 21st digitally). 

Bold items are new features, italic are "bug fixes". And normal print is, well misc.

Version 1.01 will have:

+ Fix for bug where save games with a version <= 24 didn’t properly set the cached commonly-used tech IDs.  This bug manifests itself by making the "Speak To" button do nothing or not acknowledging a technology victory.

+ Support for a mods directory where people can dump things in (we'll document this as soon as we get a breather)

+ Fix for when a starbase is destroyed and being unable to build another star base on it

+ More debug messages for saved games to provide more user info on what's being saved

+ Custom maps with support for fewer players won't allow too many players to be on them.

+ Fixed "No Image" png that would show up then prompting to harvest a resource

+ Easier to get higher approval on planets with low tax rates

+ Fixed bug in surrender code that caused the Defection victory popup message to pop up.

+ Fixed bug where improvements that were supposed to change the player’s miniaturization ability were actually changing their logistics ability.  This affects exactly one improvement type: the Hyperion Shrinker.

+ When a starport is destroyed, classColony::OnDestroyImprovement() now sets its planet’s bNeedToUpdateOverlayIcons member to TRUE so that the planet will have its starport overlay removed in the main game screen.

+ Morale ability nerfed a bit it now is to the .80 power to balance.

+ Sensor range capped at 15 tiles. Significant performance issues if it gets much bigger than that (> 1 sector)

+ Tweaked farm improvements. Farm improvements provide 4,6,8,10,12 units of food as you go up the tech tree. This prevents players from accidentally ending up with ridiculously large populations that are impossible to keep happy.

+ Sensors are a bit more expensive in terms of space

+ Starport Details: List now shows number of installed modules / available modules so players know what starbases to send ships to.

+ Trade Wnd: Alliances made in trade window more fool-proof...old code open to allowning one race to consider another race an ally, but not the other way around (fixes Ashberrys Treaties Window Bug).

+ Saved games should load faster

So that's what we've done in the past 24 hours and thanks to the power of digital distribution, you will be able to get it tomorrow.  Today and tomorrow afternoon we'll run it through final QA to make sure everything's good. 

This should take care of most of the remotely significant issues we are currently aware of. 

We are still looking at other things people have reported. There is a 0 byte saved game issue that some people have run into, we are still trying to reproduce that.  It's very rare but that doesn't help the people who run into that.  There is also a known issue with some nVidia cards losing their mouse cursor, we've not been able to reproduce that (and we've got a lot of nVidia cards here).  Apparently the mouse issue isn't specific to GalCiv II so I'll probably shoot an email over to our friends at Firaxis to see what they've seen on this.

There's a missing planetary improvement that we need to put in (Neutrality Learning Centers) and a couple of other similar things.  Plus we have a list of all kinds of other things too.

There are some very bad men in Galactic Civilizations II.  And IGN has just put up the newest entry in the series on the races of Galactic Civilizations II.

This time it's the Dread Lords themselves!  The most in-depth discusson of the game universe yet. Check it out.