Ever buy games where the developer pretends a given problem with their game doesn't exist?

Wish they'd just admit to a problem and fix it? Well here's our list of problems that we've encountered and some of them are going to sound pretty obscure but if they affect you, better to know.  We plan to address these by release:

Item #1: Windows 2000 on Non-English versions.  There is texture corruption on non-English versions of Windows 2000.  It works fine on Windows XP and Windows 98 all languages, just Windows 2000.  We expect to have this updated by release.  If anyone here has a non-english version of Windows 2000 as their main machine let us know.

Item #2: The video tutorials stutter. Click the "view full screen" option. This option isn't in the retail release but is in the digital release and subsequent updates.

Item #3: If you're running in 16-bit color, you need to switch to 32-bit color in some cases or the game will simply fail to launch (or launch with an error and die).

Item #4: On Some nVidia cards, if the game isn't running on your primary monitor, the mouse cursor may get flakey.

Item #5: It takes a LONNNG time to get back into the game after alt-tabbing away. This has to do with a trick we used to keep memory use down. The game isn't crashed but it can take awhile to get back. If you're going to be switchign around, run the game in a window (see the video options screen).

Item #4: TNT and Geforce 1/2 users (technically not supported but they do work) will not get lighting on planets.

Item #5: On Windows 98, if the system has less than 20% resources left, there may be problems with late game performance (frame rate).

Item #6: If you are using an older nVidia card and running your system in 16bit color, the game may not launch. You will need to set your desktop color depth to 32bit. Nothing we can do on this, some older cards don't support DirectX 9 video depth switching.

Item #7. You need to be running your system at 1024x768 or better. That means 1280x600 won't work both X and Y needs to be equal or better.  1600x1200 is fine. 1280x1024 is fine.  4000x3000 is fine.  This should only affect certain older laptops.

Item #8. Certain CRT older (non PnP) monitors may need to tweak the brightest and contrast settings of the game to their liking. The defaults were set to PNP CRT / LCD norms.

Item #9. You can run the game in a window from the options are or by running the game from a command prompt galciv2 w

Item #10. You can turn on cheat mode by running the game with a "cheat" parameter (i.e. galciv2 cheat)

Item #11. We have not tested the game on non-Indo European languages yet.  That means we don't know how it runs in Mandarin, Hebrew, or other languages.  We plan to look at those OSes in the future but our access to those kinds of systems is limited. It might work fine, we just haven't been able to try it.

Item #12. One of the weapons thumbnails in the ship design screen is missing if you run at a very high resolution on certian versions of ATI video drivers.  We have fixed this internally already.  Most people will likely never see it anyway since it is a very very high tech (we were able to find it through cheat codes).

That's all for now.  We'll keep updating this.  Hopefully we haven't scared anyone off.  We have found from our non-game software that the best policy is to treat customers as partners. 

Most of these issues won't affect anyone (they certainly didn't come up during the beta and there were thousands of people in that).  But they will likely affect someone and we want to make sure they're taken care of.

UGO has put together a very cool preview on Galactic Civilizations II.  Check it out!

Lots of new screenshots.

Most of the team took the rest of the week off to recover. It's been quite a time.  Now I have to start catching up.  I wrote up an article for IGN today for their feature on the GalCiv races. So you'll soon get to see the first public shots of the Dread Lords in action.  Their ships look quite a bit different from the other ones.

I've taken a couple days away from playing the game so that I can get a fresh perspective to decide what to focus on for the Bonus Pack.  Basically, when you get the game, you should come here and make sure you get the free Bonus Pack.  If you pre-ordered, you get even more stuff but the Bonus Pack has a bunch of other neato stuff in it.  Better explosions, more extras to put on your ship. Gameplay updates. etc.

Of course, my thing is the computer AI.  One of the things I definitely want to put in are more difficulty levels.  I'd almost like a slider or something rather than picking a set intelligence level.  Right now the AI intelligence is set between 1 and 128 with "Intelligent" being set to 80 (there's nothing special about the numbers, the 80 is simply where the exponential equations worked out to provide an even resource match with the human player).

Right now, I can beat the AI in most starting conditions at 80.  But at 96 I can beaten nearly every time.  So I'd like to see what it's like at say 85 or 90.  So that's one thing for release day I'd like to have ready. The tough thing AI's have going against them is that unless you script it, they rely on generalized analysis.  As a human player, I have a "build order".  The AI does not.  That was one of the things we wanted to get away from.  Instead it's all analysis based.  Which is much better than GalCiv I IMO (which had scripts for how it researched).  I know it's more fun for me since I don't know what the AI is going to do.  I had the screenshot here show up and it was quite a set back because the Drengin then proceeded to wipe out 7 transports which took some effort to put together.  I still beat them but it set me back.  I really got to get better at escorting MY escorts (maybe I need a brain upgrade).  The AI generally tries to escort its ships unless it determines it can sneak one by.

What's the best ship?

One thing that goes back and forth is what is the best ship?  Am I better off putting on massive defenses with only a bit of attack?  Or should I go the other way around?  The answer I'm rapidly coming to is that massive defenses work out decently at the easy levels but not so well at the higher level -- the AI adapts its ships pretty quickly.

That said, I have some ideas for how the AI can design better ships.  But it's going to take some time.  Right now, I feel it's not as efficient as the human player at stuffing things on. Man, this would have been a nice area to have the AI cheat too -- not have to obey the size restrictions. LOL.  A human player will sit there and make sure every unit of space is used up.  You can have a computer do that too but the trick is to make sure it puts the right stuff on.  The generalized algorithm for "Best fit" is nothing new and is in use here.  It's a matter of making sure it's very fast and fits a whole series of criteria. 

Downloading

So the plan is for next Tuesday or so to start letting people download most (but not all) the game.  That way, when the game goes live on February 21, people who bought the download option (or bought the CD from us) will be able to just download a 2 or 3 meg file and be up ready to play without having to download some mega sized files.  Plus it clears the bandwidth.  Things went pretty smoothly with GalCiv I and this time we're going to have even more bandwidth available. But I don't want to take chances and I'm sure that there will still be horror stories -- it's all in the percents: 1% of people having download problems with 10,000 first day downloads is still 100 people and 100 people posting on a forum will look like a legion. And there may be more than 10,000 people based on the upsurge we've seen.

Starting to work on the demo

The demo version obviously needs to get done.  A lot of people won't buy a game without at least trying out the demo.  The demo won't show up before release though.  We want all our development effort put first to the people who are buying the game sight unseen.  Those people have put faith that we'll treat them well and I want to make sure we do what we can to  make sure they feel like they aren't let down. 

So once the game's released, we can put together a demo pretty quickly.  Even though the game requires 2 CDs to install, I really am hoping we can put together a demo that is less than a 200 meg download.  Maybe even less than 100 megs.  The tough part will be deciding what's in the demo.

GalCiv as MOO 4?

No.  The comparisons have always been there.  Even back at the start when Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 was released.  GalCiv for OS/2 came out in beta before MOO (Master of Orion) shipped but 1.0 came out after MOO.  So there's always been some question as to who influenced whom. 

I mentioned on a few occasions that with GalCiv II that we wanted to make sure we opened our minds and tried to put in features that appealed to a larger audience.  And that meant looking at MOO and many other games.  But it's not our intent to be like Master of Orion and as I saw someone else write in the forums, someone thinking GalCiv II is the heir to MOO is likely to be bummed out as it's quite different in gameplay.  The ship design and fleets are obviously similar and watching your ships battle is pretty similar in some ways to watching ships fight it out in MOO if you turned on auto.  But in MOO, you controlled those ships whereas here you're just (optionally) watching them to check out how your designs worked out.  We've talked elsewhere -- at length -- why we chose not to do tactical combat which boiled down to wanting the game to focus on the strategic game.  You're leader of a civilization, not a squadron commander.  It would be like Civilization IV turning into Battlefield 2 when your forces entered a city (though I'm sure there's people who would love that! <g>).

If we were to do a MOO 4 we would go back to MOO 2, expand on THAT to make sure we remained faithful to the Master of Orion legacy.  I think MOO fans, and they really are legion, deserve a MOO game that respects the original design.  Of course, then again, I think Star Control 2 fans deserve a SC 4 that does that.  What is it about version 3 of classic games? Maybe we should skip GalCiv III and go to GalCiv IV!

The GalCiv Backstory

I must admit, I borrowed some concepts from Star Control 2.  The Precursors were not lifted from Babylon 5 or Stargate or whatever.  They were inspired from Star Control 2.  I always dreamed that there'd be a SC3 that would expand on who these Precursors and the extra-dimensional beings.  I have no idea what they had in mind but I thought it was a very cool concept.

But the actual back story itself came from a series of stories I had been writing since the mid 80s.  The Arnor and the Dread Lords were both present in the back story that would eventually be put into GalCiv on OS/2.  The same story where the Drengin and Arceans and the rest came from.  At the time, I thought it was pretty unique.  The Torians having been once enslaved by the Drengin. 

In the back story (the main one being called "Corruption of the Shard"), the Arnor didn't disappear but had instead become isolationist after seeing the destructive power if the Dread Lords and their minions who they had finally defeated though at a terrible cost for them.  The stories tended to focus on a set of key characters who don't really show up here due to the strategic nature of the game.

When designing the game though, Star Control 2's precursor mythology was just so cool and so the Arnor disappeared and became the Precursors.  It fit much better in terms of being a strategy game than having a super powerful race just hanging around.

Sci-Fi does have a lot of parallels though. Arnor ships were supposed to basically look like squids. Very organic.  The final result looked to me to be like Vorlons. Which is ironic because the guys who modeled the ships never watched Babylon 5.  The Arnor and Dread Lord are fairly similar to the Vorlons and Shadow really.  Though then again, Sci-Fi seems to have a reoccurring theme of ancient super races.  Stargate has the "Ancients" and now the Orai (evil ancients).  I think there's a lot of appeal in having some very very bad guys out there. 

The Drengin Empire as bad guys

The Drengin are pretty standard bad guys on the surface. They're the Klingons (classic Trek version). They're the Goul'd. The Orcs. Etc.  But we wanted them to be a bit scarier than they they first appear.  They're methodical. They are pure evil. There is no reasoning with them. There are no alliances of convenience options for the humans.  If the replicators were coming to destroy the galaxy and the Drengin's only option was to team up with the humans to defeat them or die, they'd choose death because clearly the galaxy didn't deserve saving in the first place.  They really hate the humans though in sandbox mode, you can control that quite a bit by taking the path of evil.  But in the backstory, they see the humans as threats.

After all, the Drengin have been a technological society for a hundred thousand years.  The humans are a real threat to them. They pop up out of nowhere and start organizing their prey. The humans have to go down.  

The humans in the GalCiv universe aren't the Federation. Not by a long shot.  Humans are the blood thirsty warriors who are wearing suits.  We really want to be nice guys. Really.  We want to get along. We're all ready to hug and live in harmony. But you mess with us and you'll discover we've been killing each other for thousands of years and we're pretty good at it. As one dialog message to the Korx recently said "Look buddy, we're TRYING to be nice here. But we've been doing war against ourselves for a long time, do you really want to join our party?"

It's something the Drengin fear. The humans are better at tactics than any primitive civilization that poses as diplomats should be.  They think we're frauds.  Maybe they're right.

Anyway, if anyone's interested in this stuff I can go into more detail.  I just don't want to bore people with the back story stuff if it's not something they care about.

 Gamespot is running a preview of Galactic Civilizations II which is due to come out at the end of this month. 

Why are we mentioning this? Because GalCiv II is what me, T-man, MikeB, Mormegil, and many others have been working on feverishly these past few months.  It's about to hit stores world wide. Then you can expect us to be back more active here on WinCustomize.

A couple interesting notes on the game:

• User Interface was created using DesktopX
• All the UI graphics were done by Mormegil
• www.galciv.com was designed by MikeB. www.galciv1.com was made by Pixtudio and www.galciv2.com was made by the same team that made WinCustomize
• I wrote the computer AI.
• Cordellia from PowerUser.TV did the tutorial videos.

So check out the preview and here are some screenshots to give you an idea of what the game is like.  It's a turn-based strategy game set in the 23rd century.

Q: I want to purchase the game at Stardock and download immediately but I still want the box. Can I do this?

A: YES. If you purchase the second option (CD purchase) you still get a serial # to download the game. That serial # is temporary (i.e. will expire) but will let you play the game until the box arrives.

Q: If I bought the game for download only, can I still get the box/CD later?

A: Yes. Just requires shipping and handling.

Q: If I pre-order at will I get the Collector' Edition?

A: In North America, as far as we know, ALL pre-orders are being fulfilled with the Collector's Edition. Walmart, EB, and Gamestop explicitly mention it on their sites for instance.

Bear in mind: We don't control retail.  So here's some help on knowing which the store is getting you:

Collector's Edition SKU:
708192010332

Standard Edition SKU:  
708192010325

That said if you pre-order the game at reatil and they still get you the standard edition, Stardock will do what it can to help you out by getting you access to the additional content (because we know which serial #s were in the first batch to go to retail and can use that to give access to players in a pinch).  So if a store messes up, please avoid returning it. It's not easy for indies to get into retail to begin with, so if a bunch of people start returning the game, the store isn't going to think it's because they messed up but because it's a bad game.

The best route is to keep an eye on the SKU. Many stores are taking pre-orders but are using the regular SKU.  Like I said, we will make sure you get the extra downloadable goodies. 

Q: If I buy it at retail can I still download the entire game directly?

A: YES. Using Stardock Central you can enter in your retail serial # regardles of where you bought it and download the full game.

Q: I heard the retail boxed version has no copy protection. Is this true?

A: Yes. The retail version has no copy protection whatesover. You don't even have to enter in the serial # if you don't want during the install (people lose serial #'s anyway). You will need the serial # to get updates however.

Q: I don't want to use Stardock Central to get updates. Do I have to use it?

A: NO. You will also be able to get updates via the website using the traditional "patch" method other games use. You will still need your serial # though.

Q: I live in Europe, how do I get the game?

A: Our friends at Paradox are handling GalCiv II in Europe. They will be mirroring our release and have a collector's edition box and have the same sorts of goodies in there we think (should talk to Paradox for specifics).  Users who purchase in Europe can also still use Stardock Central to download updates.

Q: What about Australia/New Zealand?

A: Auran is handling it down under.

Q: What about foreign language support?

A: Paradox is in the process of translating files now.  We will also be putting up our translation kit here so people can translate it however they want.

Q: Do I have to pre-order to get the collector's edition?

A: Somewhat.  Direct CD orders will be fulfilled with the collector's edition until we run out of stock which should last for a couple months at least.

Q: Should I buy at retail or direct from you? Which is best for you guys?

A: Whatever is best for you, the customer is best for us.

(Sorry if the site is slow, one of our ISPs is switching their network and so some parts of the site are very slow - hopefully will be solved in a couple of hours).

Gamespot has a very cool look at the gamma of GalCiv II.

So what makes Galactic Civilizations II such a promising game? It takes all the great ideas found in Master of Orion II and expands on them to deliver a deeper and richer experience. In this turn-based strategy game, you'll play as one of the galaxy's primary races, or you can create your own custom race, and you'll attempt to expand from a single star system to conquer the galaxy peacefully or militarily. It won't be easy, though, because there's a whole lot that can happen between the start and the finish of a game.

Over in this journal entry I talked about how when it came time to design GalCiv II that we had to decide whether we were going to try to just expand on GalCiv itself or try to bring elements in from other games.

You see that a lot in games where some features in a given genre become widely accepted but franchise developers are wary of adding them because they almost seem like they don't want to acknowledge the existence of those other games.

When we made GalCiv II, we thought carefully about what kinds of features we wanted and then gave some thought to how other games tried to implement those features.  Sometimes the game had a great implementation, other times there were side effects that could never have been foreseen that we wanted to avoid. 

At the end of the day, we wanted to create a game that would appeal to more of the 4X fan base.  More story.  More control.  More strategic options.  A cleaner interface.  Better grapihcs.  Resolution indepedence. Longevity and replayability.

Whether we succeeded in this remains to be seen.  That's not our call.  Only you can make that determination.  We hope you like the end result. 

That said, we don't look at GalCiv II to be the heir to anything other than Galactic Civilizations I.  Master of Orion along with the other classics are special on their own merits.  

We hope you're as excited to play GalCiv II as we are for you to get your hands on it.

So what can you do to make sure you have the best possible experience? Here are some suggestions:

1) If you have an integrated video card and you have a free AGP/PCIE slot, do yourself a favor and get a good video card.  For less than $100 you can get a decent ATI or nVidia video card that will make all your games run much better.  You MUST have at least 32 megs of memory on your video card. If it's a really old (i.e. >3 years) Intel Graphics extreme you may not be able to run the game because it won't support DirectX 9C.

2) If Option #1 isn't available, make sure you have the latest video card DRIVERS.  We're serious about this.  The game uses some fairly new graphic features that only recently are well supported by video drivers. We found during the beta over and over people having some problem and it turning out their video drivers were 2 years old.

3) Make sure your desktop display is running at 32bit color.  To do that, go to control panel, display properties, and choose 32bit.  We found that on some systems running in 16bit color won't run the game (or most other games, we have no idea why).

4) We did a lot of memory optimization to make sure the game runs on pretty low end hardware.  Still, if you're running around with a PC with less than 512MB, see if you can upgrade. The game will still run but it'll be slower.

5) The game will default, if it can, to 4X anti-aliasing so that things look nicer.  But if you have an older video card (a Geforce 5600 is an older video card incidentally) you may want to turn that off, especially if you're watching the video cut scenes or video tutorials (The 3D engine itself works fine). The game runs fine on Geforce 5x, but 4x anti-aliasing may be too much for some of the high resolution cut-scenes YMMV. Most of our testing boxes were this series (or ATI equivs) so don't take what I'm saying here as the game not running well on it.  It's just that 4X anti-aliasing is probably overkill on such a setup.

6) If you have Mcafee anti-virus, be aware that if you have VB script detection on it will give a warning when you run the game the first time. It's not on by default but it's useless anyway (it detects ALL VB Script as "a malicious script").  Our game launcher uses VB Script.

7) The game does not have copy protection but it does come with a serial #.  When the installer asks for it, it's optional but we recommend putting it in because it'll make it easier to get upgrades. Since it's optional, the installer doesn't check for the accuracy so be careful when entering it in (don't worry, there's an easy way to update your serial # if you do make a mistake).  The serial # is only needed to download updates.  That said, PLEASE DO NOT give your CD to others.  We are really trying to avoid putting copy protection on our games and every sale counts.

8) The game takes two CDs to install so you will want to make sure you have enough disk space (two CDs worth).

9) If you pre-ordered from us and plan to download the game, we expect to start letting people preinstall most of the game prior to release (next week) to decrease bandwith needs. We recommend taking advantage of this.

10) If you do run into a problem of some kind, there is a file called debug.err in your GalCiv directory that should tell us a lot of info about what happened.

11) The game will run at any resolution >= 1024x768.  So 1440x1050 or 1600x1200 or 3072x2200, it doesn't matter.  But the game will start at 1024x768.  Go to options and select the resolution you want to play and then reload.

IT'S GONE GOLD. IN STORES FEBRUARY 21

Check out the last few days..

Last Friday we went code-complete.  That means, no touching the code except to fix something. 

We had spent the past 2 weeks in the final QA process -- fixing bugs, typos, grammar, optimizing performance, and adding usability features.  We had also used that time to continue improving the AI here and there along with tweaking the campaign missions, game mechanics, etc.

So over the weekend we went through the really hard tests.  That is, making it as solid as it can possibly be.  Running it on the absolute worst systems we could find.  Trying to crash it.  Having it run on its own (forced turn mode) to see if it would crash.

This is one of the reasons why I'm glad we're self-publishing.  Total control over when and if it goes to manufacturing.  No one to tell us when it has to go to retail.  We had the luxury of being able to make sure we were happy with it.  Plus, our experience in testing and debugging is pretty significant.  After all, most game developers release one product every 2 or 3 years.  Stardock releases new software it develops every few months in the form of Object Desktop and related components.

Of course, even with all this testing and testing and testing you know there's still going to be someone who runs into some problem.  I recall reading on forums about Civ IV being "buggy".  For me and I suspect for Firaxis's internal testing people, Civ IV was rock solid other than the ATI issue that was quickly resolved.  That's the thing, with so much hardware out there, you never know what you're going to run into.

Since I'm an engineer I'm going to tell you the horror stories we ran into during testing. The marketing people when they read this will probably have a heart attach...

Win98, 2K, and ME..

"Why are there so many, songs about about compatibility.."

Most games these days only support Windows XP.  And for good reason.  If you're running Windows 98 or ME you should upgrade. Really. Stop reading this and do it.  But we said we'd run on Windows 98 and ME and we meant it.  But what a pain.

First off, the December Microsoft DirectX SDK says it supports Windows 98/ME.  It doesn't. Not as far as we can tell anyway.  We had thousands of beta testers and NONE of them were running Windows 98Draginol that we could find.  So we were totally on our own.  And luckily we were able to figure out the issue and for Windows 98/ME users we were able to go back to the August 2005 SDK and it was happy.  There's nothing new in the December version that I can tell that's significant.  Certainly nothing that would affect the game.  Beta 5 of GalCiv II was built on my machine that sadly was running a 2004 SDK. 

But it did mean we had to make a special build just for Windows 98Draginol users.  When you install it from CD, it'll look at your OS and install the proper one.  By the time the game ships, we expect to have a unified EXE again (i.e. figure out what DirectX issue it was and deal with it).  Not that it's particularly necessary but because it's a hassle to maintain more than one EXE.

Meanwhile Windows 2000 had a different issue with regards to how it handled critical sections.  It too required its own EXE for installation in which we removed a background thread and put it into the main thread.  It's a bit redundant now anyway.  At one point in development, GalCiv II took like 7 seconds to go from clicking on the icon to seeing the title screen on a decent system. Beta 5 was slow like that.  So we added a background thread to speed that up.  But through performance optimization, we got the time down to about 1 to 2 seconds (i.e. very very fast).  So the background thread isn't really necessary (though I must say I think some people will be impressed at how fast the game comes up).

Only about 5% of the beta group has Windows 2000.  But we think plenty of buyers out there in absolute numbers are still running Windows 2000 so we wanted to make sure they were taken care of.  The last problem we had to solve on Windows 2000 may not have necessarily come up because of the artificial conditions of the testing box.  On one of the test boxes running Win2K, the game would crash if you clicked on New game too fast (the thread timing problem).  Of course, how many 3 Ghz machines are running Windows 2000? On slower machines, it didn't come up or at least a lot less often. That's why it was hard to track down.  Once we found that the issue was loading of models -- that the main thread zipped through to the main screen so fast that the semaphore controlling it wasn't working on Win2K, it was just a matter of making it not threaded.  But definitely a weird issue since Win2K and XP are so similar something like that was unexpected.

XP, it's good to be the king

The people who really benefit from this are Windows XP users (well technically everyone).  Because while we were futzing to make sure Win98/ME/2K were working well, the rest of the team was able to keep tweaking things.

For instance, once we nailed down making sure it was bullet proof on Win98/ME, I used the weekend to keep tweaking missions.  My favorite campaign mission is called Apocalypse.  In it, you have to take on the Dread Lords directly.  And it had to be balanced just right.  So I was able to tweak the Dread Lords to be just the right level of nastiness without it being overwhelming.  I spent most of Sunday playing that mission at different difficulty levels to gauge it.

It also gave me time to tweak a bit further the AI weapon/defense adaption code.  That 2 days between "code freeze" and "gold" made a big difference there.  The AI is much better at adapting to the weapons and defenses of its enemies than it was before. 

The AI is a never ending journey

As I get better at the game myself, I think of new things I want to put into new AI personalities.  I would like to add some additional AI personalities in so that when people get their game and bring it home, they can look forward to the first of many free updates that keep adding new stuff. 

One of the things I want to work on further is the planet building up stuff.  But to do that, I'll have to wait until I see how the top players are playing the game.  From the Metaverse, I'll start emailing the top players and see how they play.  What do they build first? When do they purchase (quick build) something and when do they let it build normally? Which resources should be gotten first? Should I trade with minor races more who aren't likely to go to war with me or use trade as part of my diplomatic arsenal?  I have opinions on these things -- strong opinions.  And the AI reflects much of this.  I know from the gamma testers that they certainly find it pretty challenging.

"It's cheating!"

I know I'm going to hear that a lot because I kept saying it when I'd see the AI do something that I didn't think was possible.  One of the changes that has had a far greater impact on the AI's effectiveness is the new economic analysis system.  Previously, (including GalCiv I) the AI looked its economy as a matter of how much to spend. It didn't touch taxation.  But now I've plugged in the overall approval API into its analysis and it raises and lowers taxes based on a bunch of criteria.  The result was unexpected -- the AI focuses somewhat more on getting high approval ratings so it can raise its taxes which in turn gives it more money.

But when I was playing it out of the debugger, all I saw was the AI with a larger economy with a similar population.  That meant loading up the game in the debugger and trying to figure out the "bug" to keep it from "cheating" in the future.  The result was a higher tax rate than anticipated and the AI going after those morale resources.  Let me tell you this -- if you let the AI take and fortify either the morale or influence starbases all the way, you're dead.  If you see the galaxy suddenly turn to their color, that's why.  Controlling those galactic resources matter a lot in the long term because when they get built up, they can literally double your ability in a given area. 

Now, if you set the AI intelligence to "Genius" or higher then it IS cheating. I make no bones about that.  If you beat the AI at "intelligent" then you are beating me.  Congratulations, you're better than I am at the game.  At that point, play some Metaverse games and I'll likely contact you to learn from you.  But in a single player game, the player needs to be challenged and if I can't beat you, then there's the option of just handing the AI more money.  But that is the key -- the AI isn't getting free units or special attacks.  We also don't start you in crummier galaxies or give you poorer planets.  The highest levels are just AI gets more money. The reverse is true at lower levels.  If you play at beginner, we're giving you money.

The Marketing really ramps up

We've had full page ads going in the major PC game publications in the United States for the last few months.  Next month that'll expand to on-line ads, in-store ads, and an expansion on the existing ads with 2-page spreads and such.

Now, to gamers reading this, that's all to be expected.  But the costs are amazing.  A full page ad in a major game publication can cost well over $10k per month.  An in-store ad, a good one, can cost $30k.  Even the major gaming sites can charge pretty big bucks for this.  There aren't very many indie developers out there.  There are even fewer indie developer/publishers.  And we're trying to be certain not to cut any corners.

Meanwhile, in Europe, we teamed up with Paradox to make sure the game is available in Europe at the same time.  Paradox, makers of Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron are kindred spirits.  Initially it'll only be available in English but German, Italian, Russian, Polish, and other languages are in the works.  It should also be available down under (Australia and New Zealand) around the same time but I'm not as up to speed on what's happening on that front.

So far, we've got orders from WalMart, Best Buy, CompUSA, EB, GameStop, Jack of All Games, Circuit City and a few others.  Users who pre-order get the collector's edition which besides having a cool looking box get the tech tree poster, the GalCiv Desktop, and extra game content (additional pieces for the ships, etc.).  Cost is the same as the regular.  Users who have pre-ordered it from us directly can also get the same thing.

The initial availability is going to be 3-times what the first GalCiv was.  We're very excited

The Reviews

The reviews always make me nervous.  Very nervous.  Two years of work and I can tell you the reviews on an indie game can make or break it.  Now that we're not as obscure, we tend to get the better reviewers.  Back in the days of Entrepreneur (our first Windows game) we'd be lucky to get assigned to a reviewer who would play the game.  It was discouraging to have worked so hard on something and have some reviewer not even give it 10 minutes before writing the review.  But like I said, things are much better now.  By GalCiv I the major game magazines knew us enough to make sure that their solid reviewers checked it out. 

Good reviewers don't necessarily mean positive reviews though.  It just means they'll give it a fair shot which is all you can ask for. 

GalCiv I got 4.5 stars from CGW and CGM and an 82% from PC Gamer and an 8.4 from Gamespot. GameSpy gave it an 87.  So that's our baseline to see how we've done.  3 years have passed and the bar has been raised, so there are other factors to consider as well.  This time, it's not "Hey, it's either this or MOO3".  Civilization IV, the best turn-based strategy game I've ever played, came out 4 months ago.  So in many reviewers minds (I know it would be in my mind) the question is "Is this a game that is worth looking at with Civ IV there?"  That's a question I can't answer. I'm too close and too enthralled with Civ IV anyway.   I can say that they're very different. 

There and back again

GalCiv II took a major turn this time around.  We wanted to make a game that could be a definitive 4X space strategy game.  That meant incorporating features from the genre that are popular.  Sometimes, games leave out feature -- good features -- from other games simply because they don't want to acknowledge that other games exist.  I see that in RTSs and it drives me nuts.  After playing Rise of Nations, it's hard to go to another land based RTS that doesn't have a concept of land control (at least for me).  It's such a good idea.  After playing Total Annihilation, it's hard to deal with units that don't fight back (or run away) when attacked. 

Similarly, GalCiv II couldn't just pretend that Master of Orion didn't exist.  Or that Homeworld didn't exist.  Or that Ascendancy didn't exist. Or that Stars didn't exist.  Or Twilight Imperium. Or Space Empires, or Starships Unlimited, or even the unreleased Stars Supernova.  I don't claim to be a real game developer. Or even a real programmer.  I'm a gamer who just happens to know how to make game ideas be turned into actual games. 

So we could either pretend that GalCiv is the only 4X space game that's ever come out and expand on its existing features.  Or we could try to reach out to the fans of all these classic games, many of whom are probably looking for a new game to try and see if we have something to offer them.  That's not to say we just took features X, Y, and Z and crammed them in to have a bullet point.  We didn't do that.  Instead we looked at features we thought might make the game better and then looked to see if other games implemented it, how they implemented it, and how that might make sense in our game.

First GOLD screenshots

Here are the first GOLD screenshots..

This is a fairly late stage planet.  In GalCiv II you can have your planets focus on a particular type of production (a lot of players asked for this). And if you're not building a ship, you're not charged for it which is why the (2) at the top (2 potential production but you're not being charged because you're not building a ship).  That was one of the most common complaints from GalCiv I.

Planets are not just visually unique (we generated the high quality planets each game, so you'll never see this planet again).  We also added things like artifacts, mineral rich areas, fertile land, and other things that give you bonuses (BIG bonuses) if you build the proper thing there.

There are probably three  major technological innovations in GalCiv II that I can think of off the top of my hat.  The first is the unlimited smartscaling technology. Play at any resolution (at or above 1024 x768) and have it all used intelligently -- 16x9, 9x16, you name it, the smart scaling stuff will let the game be relevant years from now.  The second is the vector based texture development so that the textures can keep getting better as technology changes.  So 3 years from now when our video cards have 2 gigs of video ram on them you'll be able to plop in GalCiv and hopefully have say 4096x4096 textures on things.

And the third is the per-race dialog system.  I don't know how big of a deal it is to have each race have its own dialog.  I do know that Paradox's translation team won't be sending me any birthday cards though.  But we really thought of having a lot of this stuff would be fun.  And it's done in such a way that we can keep adding more easily.

Some would probably argue that this is why user-designed ships aren't such a good thing.   This is my "Awacs" ship. I used the ring to throw on tons of sensors. 

Speaking of ship design, I wonder how many polygons this ship has. Heh. The game (as far as I know) has no limit to the number of things you can connect to it.

Here it is in action:

BTW, little thing but the display settings in the game let you control ambient light.   So you can make space very dark.  The lights you see on the ships aren't just texture noise. They're literally lights:

I turned down the ambient lighting so that just the ships themselves have their own light sources doing their thing.

I think I mentioned this before but we felt this was important:

You can click on a ship and press the details button (or hit I) and see what is actually on the ship and how much it cost.

Don't like the colors of the UI? No problem, change them.

GalCiv I's UI wasn't quite so nice..

Speaking of which, I've heard some people downloading the GalCiv I demo.  I wouldn't bother.  It's nothing like GalCiv II.  It would be like trying to figure out what Windows Vista is going to be like by trying to fire up a copy of Windows 3.1.

One of the other things I think people will like is that you can zoom out with your mouse wheel until the map turns into strategic mode where the units are icons. You can play it like a war game from afar.  It's not nearly as pretty. 

I'm going to try to put together a quickie animation though because you can zoom all the way from this to looking right up close at a planet or ship.

So anyway, tomorrow the crew will start to go on vacation.  I plan to take a day or two off, then catch up on email and then try to catch up in general! Plus spend some time with wife/kids.

In about two weeks, it'll be out.  February 21st at a store near you.

With 16x9 displays becoming increasingly important, Microsoft's new Sidebar, scheduled for release in Windows Vista and also to be back ported to Windows XP may be the right program at the right time.

The sidebar is essentially a container for "gadgets".  Gadgets are similar to widgets except they don't require a special enabler in order to use.  Stardock plans to support Microsoft's Sidebar in a variety of ways depending on the final implementation.

Originally, Microsoft planned to have the Sidebar support gadgets made either via DHTML or as Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) gadgets.  However, the company seems to be focusing more on DHTML gadgets in order to allow those gadgets to be able to run on both the desktop and on web pages seamlessly (something Avalon gadgets would not be able to do since they would require the browser to support Avalon explicitly).

The question that remains to be answer is whether Microsoft's particular implementation of the Sidebar is compelling enough for users to adopt when Google and even Stardock have their own "bars" that can do much the same thing.

We think it'll boil down to two things:

1) The content of course.

and

2) Whether there is a compelling need to have a bar sticking around on the screen.

Taken together, Microsoft and others have to make the case that we need this.  Sure, an RSS feed might be nice. But what else? Weather? Do I need weather info taking up screen space 24/7? Or a big clock? Or MP3 controls?  This isn't a new issue. 

For all the hype widgets/gadgets have received over the past few years (and we've certainly been part of that) no one seems to have answer to that question: Why.  Can Microsoft come up with compelling content.  Look at Microsoft's own screenshot carefully.  It has a clock, an RSS feed, a picture, a couple of shortcuts, and an MP3 control. Is it worth 10% of your screen space for that?

We think that the Sidebar as a concept is good. The problem that remains to be solved is finding compelling content.  Clocks and RSS feeds ain't it.  Even with all the exposure Yahoo has given the Yahoo widget engine and all the press it's received, the typical widget for it gets less than 10,000 downloads (compare that to a "niche" thing like WindowBlinds or even a popular DesktopX theme or an icon package).  The story seems the same -- widgets and gadgets simply don't have enough meat right now to be compelling.  Someone needs to come up with content that goes beyond the mildly useful and into the realm of compelling.

What do you think?