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.

Welcome to another (or first) edition of "Did you know..."

Standing in for a dialog with a "show me more tips" checkbox is your host, me with a series of fairly random but hopefully useful suggestions that might make your gameplay more fun!

#1 You can "grab" the map with the left mouse button and move it around by holding it down.  You may never want to edge scroll again.

#2 You can RIGHT-CLICK on the ship built block notifications that flow down on the right and your ship will automatically be launched.

#3 On the planet screen, you can put your mouse over the approval and influence and it will explain where that number is derived from.

#4 In the Diplomacy screen, you can RIGHT-CLICK on tiems to bring up a dialog that gives info on that item.

#5 You can play a quasi-Hot seat game with someone by loading up the game as GalCiv2 cheat (use the cheat parameter).  Then when you set up the game, you let the AI play out a few turns and then have your friend pick one of the races they want to control. Have them select that unit and hit  CTRL-SHIFT-Z.

#6 CTRL-S is the quick save.

#7 You can double click on planets and various other items to take the place of having to place, or install or build or go to their screen.

Some retailers who took pre-orders didn't order the Collector's Edition SKU.

No problem, we'll make sure you're taken care of.  Thanks to the serial #s that come with the game, we know which serial #s were part of the first manufacturing run.

Therefore, anyone who pre-ordered the game or gets a box from the first run (the pre-orders pretty much eat all the first manf run) will be able to download the special Collector's Edition content.

That includes:

• The Galactic Civilizations II Desktop
• Additional goodies to help design your ships and more!

So don't worry, we'll make sure everything works out okay.  We'll be updating the Downloads page in the next 24 hours to handle this.

UPDATE: Please don't read more into these words than are there.  SOME retailers who took pre-orders didn't order the collector's edition.  As far as we know, MOST did.  We just want to intercept those who find out their retailer didn't order the right unit to know that we will make sure they're taken care of.

We were assured that PC games were "d0med". We were told nobody plays turn based strategy games despite the fact that Civilization 4 is a huge hit.  But here we are, seeing activity at 10X the level of GalCiv I which in itself did far better than anticipated.

Things went a lot smoother than we had expected and ironically, a lot smoother than they would have if it weren't for just plain luck (we reserved a ridiculous amount of bandwidth which turned out to be just barely enough).

You can read some of the experiences we've had from the trenches these past two days at the link below.

That is the bandwidth graph from yesterday of JUST the multimedia/movies module.  It's measured in megabits. So we peeked at over 300 megabits per second yesterday on just that.  To put things in perspective, Galactic Civilizations I required a total of 30 megabits of bandwidth for the entire game. 

You can see where at around 4pm Cogent, our ISP for our database server, hic-upped causing the default server to not transmit.  At 4:15pm, you had numerous people posting on the forum about how bad their download experience was and when it came back at 4:30pm, everything was fine again.

Observations

I would make a terrible tech support person. I just don't have the patience for it.  I'm an engineer so I tend to get riled at hyperbole in descriptions.  So here are some things I've noticed:

#1. Not only will people not read the manual. They won't read the readme. They also won't read the sticky posts with titles such as "STICKY: Don't have sound? Make sure you download the multimedia!".  I took a screenshot last night where the forum list literally had two "NO SOUND!!11" type posts in a row that were directly underneath the sticky.

#2 Similar to #1, people won't update their video drivers no matter how many times you tell them.  One user, who posted several different places how "buggy" the game was because it kept crashing on them finally, after much loud complaining, gave us a debug.err.  He had an ATI card with drivers from 2003.  His debug.err file actually contained the notice that it had brought up a warning dialog about his drivers.  In email, I went back and forth with him that boiled down to this:

Me: Didn't you read the Readme where it says "We're serious, you MUST update your video drivers if they're older than a year."?

User: No. I don't have time for that.

Me: You didn't read the sticky post entitled: "Having an in-game problem? Read here for tips!" which said "You absolutely must update your video driver, if you make posts saying how the game crashes intermittently on you and it turns out you have some video driver from 2004 we'll find you! "?  And your video driver is even older than that.

User: No.

Me: You didn't heed the warning dialog that came up when you launched the game that said "Your video drivers are old.  You will experience problems if you don't update them. Your drivers are dated 9/1/2003"

User: I didn't think that applied to me. My other games don't have a problem.

This kept up over and over. And the problem is that people who don't read the Readmes or Stickies end up crowding out posts from people with legitimate issues.  Moreover, it makes it tough (at least for me) not to get jaded when someone posts yet another vague issue.  Is it yet another person who decided to rush to the forums and make another all caps post proclaiming "problems" without having even looked at the readme.   And just to be safe, we made stickies and knowledge based articles.

#3 Three people can completely change the perception of an entire forum.  I read on Penny-Arcade about companies hiring moles to go around and make their products look more well liked on forums? It would probably be more efficient to hire moles to go onto other people's forums and say negative things about someone else (That's not happening here btw, it's just a joke).  Because 3 people having problems (Real or imagined) can make enough posts and responses to make something trivial look like it's wide-spread.

Since we know the stats (how many people actually have the game) and the number of different people having a problem, we know some things I've seen are not widespread.  But you get a couple guys responding in every post or making 5 or 6 posts with the same general subject "GAME BUGS IN RELeASE!!!11" and soon you get people asking "Wow, it's buggy!"

That's not saying that the game is free of bugs. Certainly not.  But at a certain point, on a PC game, we're at the mercy of the hardware vendors and their drivers.  We can't come over to people's houses at gun point (yet) and force them to update their drivers.  We can't force handful of people running 16-bit color to change their color depth from 65,000 colors to 32bit color.  If there was an easy programmatic solution to force the color depth change (Direct3D certainly seems to have one and we're using it but on newer video drivers they seem to assume no one even runs at 16bit color anymore) we would do it.

The main thing is that I now really understand why game publishers get tempted to censor or control their forums because it's really frustrating to see a handful of people changing the whole flow. 

I also see why many publishers get accused of trying to "cover up" bugs. Because what happens is that the vocal people who don't read the readmes or the docs or even the sticky forum posts will start accusing the developer of trying to not acknowledge "a very real problem" because they don't want to admit that they just didn't bother to read the docs.

Like I said, there are definitely glitches in the game. But virtually everything I've seen (and I've been living on those forums) fall into the the trivial or the obscure.  They are things we'll fix as quickly as we can, but if you read the posts, you would think "OH man, maybe it's buggy?"

#4 Stardock Central's UI caused a lot of grief.  The biggest problem of the release in my opinion was that in Stardock Central, when you click on the game to download, it doesn't automatically expand to display the other modules. As a result, people download the game and don't download the sound, multimedia, movies, or tutorials.  I don't blame them. That's bad UI on our part and we're fixing that and putting it out as we speak.

#5 The most serious real bugs (i.e. not individual specific) I've seen are:

• If you add enough jewelry to your ship (i.e. the cosmetic addons) the game will eventually crash.  In all my game play examples and all our testing and all the testing during the beta, this never came up.  But now that real players are getting into it, some are making some super-sophisticated ships.  This is something that will be addressed in Friday's update.

• In the Metaverse, some people are reporting weird ability values.  This has been fixed (initialization issue that's only present in the release compile).

• On nVidia Geforce 6x series cards, the mouse cursor for some people disappears.  We don't have any idea on this as we can rarely get people to answer our questions on their systems (another gripe, some people seem to enjoy complaining more than solving their problem).  No idea what the cause it.  Our theory is either they're using the Omega drivers or something that doesn't support what we're doing OR they're using colored mouse cursors outside the game. 

• The GNN has a "Goto" button that can mess up the UI if the player goes deep enough in it (it was intended for people who just wanted to jump to a planet, make an adjustment and leave but people who go to the planet and then go to a bunch of other places from the planet all from within the pop up manager can overload it).  We've fixed this already.

#6 Lessons learned?

1. You can never be too prepared. Thank goodness we did the preload last week.  We never imagined the game using half a gibabit of bandwidth to bring down. Not a million years. We felt we had gone overkill on bandwidth and it was just barely enough.

2. It is impossible to find every glitch.  We had gamma testers giving us the thumbs up weeks before we sent it to manufacturing. One suggested that we were having "separation" anxiety (i.e. being afraid to let it go out there).  Sometimes bugs exist simply because someone does something you never thought of. 

3. Transparency is key.  Be open and honest with people and MOST people will respect that.  Tell people what problems you think you have and what problems you think you don't have and let people decide for themselves. Don't try to "control" the flow of information.  Stay ahead of the curve and make sure you are the one telling people what's going right and wrong.