One of the things that I tend to fixate on is the shape of my territory. Anyone else like this?
In GalCiv III: Crusade, I re-wrote how the territory expands. Crusade comes out this Spring.
We just came back from the Game Developer's Conference. It was a great week for the Nitrous engine (the underlying engine used in Ashes of the Singularity).
Big News: AMD is bundling Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation with more and more CPUs The hardware bundling keeps a steady stream of new players coming into our community.
Moreover, the AMD Ryzen chips, which are 8-cores, really show off the power of the game. As more people get 4 core machines and more powerful video cards (like the AMD Radon VEGA) the more people that can play the game which in turn allows us to increase the rate of development even further.
As you know, the up-front hardware wall on Ashes of the Singularity is fairly high. If you don't have an SSD, loading the game is slow. If you have low resolution, the fonts are blurry. If you don't have at least a 2GB video card, the graphics are slow. What players get in return, however, is that the game doesn't slow down, even late game.
Thus, the faster AMD, Intel and NVIDIA can get mainstream high-end, DirectX 12 and Vulkan hardware out there, the quicker the adoption of Ashes of the Singularity.
Now, let's talk about what's coming in Version 2.2 this month...
Galactic Civilizations is a game that asks the question: What happens after we start colonizing other planets? For our purposes, we are going to assume that we will come into contact with alien civilizations.
Alien civilizations will have their own histories, cultures and ideals that we can only fathom. In Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade, you will be able to train your citizens to learn more about these other civilizations and, if necessary, do very bad things to them.
March 2017
Contents:
## Contacts ##
To chat with me directly, follow me on Twitter. To discuss this issue of Stardock Magazine, visit the feedback forum. Also, for those of you who use forums, please feel free to write in any suggestions in this thread on what features you'd like to see put into the forums.
## Editorial ##
Like a lot of you reading this, I've been around a long time. I just got back from GDC and it's always great to talk to people who have been in the industry for many years.
For example, how many of you know what "poke 53281,0" does? Good times.
The tech just keeps getting better and better. For instance, AMD announced the Ryzen CPU recently. It's a big deal, but not for the reasons I've seen covered. What makes Ryzen special is that it brings 8 core processors to the mainstream.
Those of you who have been with me since the OS/2 days know what a big deal multithreading is. Unfortunately, it's been a long time since CPUs, on a per core basis, have gotten much faster. Most of the way computers have gotten faster is by adding more cores. But the progress of adding more cores has been slow. Most laptops, like my beloved Surface Pro 4, only has 2 CPU cores.
All the juicy new tech really needs a minimum of 4 cores. 8 cores would be better. That's what we at Stardock have been investing all our Impulse money into: a next generation engine for our software and our games. Last year, we released Ashes of the Singularity, our first game to make use of this new engine. But games are really just the tip of the iceberg. As much as I love making games, the main purpose for developing this new core-neutral engine is for our software business. Specifically: Mixed Reality.
Mixed Reality isn't the same as Virtual Reality. I personally don't really have much use for VR. It's neat and there is a place for it, but just as OS/2 allowed me to do lots of tasks at once, Mixed Reality will let me interact with lots of things at once. Mixed Reality will require lots and lots of CPU cores to take off - you might even say 8 cores minimum - and that's why Ryzen is so exciting.
In Mixed Reality, you will need to split up every task into tiny parts between a desktop level device, a mobile level device, and some sort of eyeware (think same as sunglasses and no heavier). Then, using a simple gesture, you can bring things into your view as you need them and be totally unobtrusive otherwise.
One day, we'll look back at pictures in which people hefted along big old monitors or even laptop displays and laugh just like we do when we see CRT monitors or giant mainframes. We are still pretty far form that future of course, but the first steps are mainstream CPUs with 8 CPU cores.
## Star Control: Last Chance to Join ##
If you want to join the Founder's Program for Star Control, now is the time to do it. We're going to close it this month. You can also visit the Star Control site to pick up the classic series from the 1990s.
Check out this preview video to see what we're working on:
Leave your feedback here. Will be sending this out soon. 
I'm on my way to GDC. I write this from first class on a 752-200 from Detroit Metro. 25 years ago I lived in poverty. How did I go from having nothing to being one of those 0.1%ers? The usual, hard work, self-discipline, delayed gratification. But there's another element that rarely gets talked about: Being born lucky.
I took a political test and one of the questions struck me, "Some people are born lucky." as a True or False statement. I remember watching a video of Sargon, a popular political YouTuber, taking this test where he answers no to this question. Let me assure you, some people are born lucky. I would know. I was born lucky.
There is a tendency I've seen with "rich" people I know to believe their wealth is solely due to their virtue and wisdom. But in my experience, being "born lucky" is a pre-requisite to success. The problem with believing in ones own virtue and wisdom when it comes to success is that it is easy to lose empathy for the less fortunate.
Besides being born in the United States I had an advantage that even those who were born rich didn't have. I have almost super-natural good health. I suspect if you were to study rich people, particularly those, like me, who were at one time living in poverty (by USA standards) you will find that unusually good health is something they have in common.
As tempting as it might be to ascribe my health to decisions I made, I know that not to be true. I eat horribly. I don't require more than a few hours of sleep per night. I brush my teeth only when my wife complains my breath is killing the plants even as my dentist tells me "whatever you're doing, keep doing it, you have exceptionally good oral health" (I've never had a cavity and tell the dentist that flossing is his job). I never had to blow my nose until after I had kids. I didn't have a single sick day from K-12 except for chicken pox.
My health isn't something I earned. It was something I was born with. My mom is a mutant as well as I'm not sure I've ever seen her sick. Ever. As in, I'm not sure she's even had a cold.
My unearned health has allowed me to do things that others couldn't do. So many times in my career a given opportunity was only possible because I could work every day for months at a time to get it done. So much of my success can be attributed to my unusually good health. I don't get tired. I don't get sick. Year after year. Even now, my entire family at home is sick. I try to sympathize by pointing out I have a hang nail (advice to others: don't do that, I am not immune to my wife's beatings).
So next time you hear someone ascribe some sort of moral failure on the part of the poor, remember, some of our success really is based on being born lucky.
This week, amongst many meetings, I will be reporting what I find over at www.neowin.com. Also, I trimmed that hangnail.
4X strategy. You may have heard of the term. It stands for: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. They are a specific genre of strategy game. Today we are going to talk about them and how Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade, aims to innovate the genre.
The world's most popular turn-based space strategy game is getting a major overhaul with this Spring's Crusade expansion. In this week's Development Diary, we discuss the new Citizen system.
To read more, go here.
