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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.

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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.

By definition, there can only be one singularity.

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Sliders. Knobs. Checkboxes. Such is the spread-sheet roots of strategy games. Let's fix that.

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Overview

Years ago, Random House asked me to write a book around the Elemental universe.  As a first time author, I was assigned an editor, Dave Stern, who soon became a good friend of mine.

Over the course of writing the book, now sold on Amazon, Dave and I would go back and forth on the story along with Random House's requests to ensure that the book was commercially successful.  I will be the first to admit that my vision of the story may not have been as commercial viable as theirs.  After all, the editorial team assigned to me was the same team managing the Game of Thrones series who, fortunately for me, had a lot of extra time to spend with me due to a Dance with Dragons being late.

The end result, however, is that what is on store shelves is dramatically different from the original story I wrote.

Thus, for the first time, I will share with you the original draft of the book with you. 

I hope you enjoy it.

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Stardock Magazine: February 2017

by Brad Wardell

## Contents ##

1. Editorial
2. Object Desktop status report
3. Merging the Singularity
4. Handles: Your oldest enemy
5. Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade
6. Why do video games look...like video games?

## Feedback ##

The feedback there is here. You can follow me on Twitter here.  I will also be at GDC.

## Editorial ##

Sorry about missing January’s issue.  I'm getting older and slower.  I recently had to get reading glasses which I am wearing now to type this to you.

Most of January was spent doing business planning for 2017 which, at Stardock, is always an interesting challenge as I have what amounts to two management teams: One for the games and one for the software.

As some of you know, most of Stardock’s income comes from the software.  Over the years, the corporate sales side of the business has sort of taken priority over the consumer side.  A big reason for that is the way the market has changed.  Back in the 90s, we sold Object Desktop for OS/2 for $89.95 per box (and it came in a box with floppies).  Now, software routinely sells for $5.  Thus, a lot of the updates to our consumer facing software has come thanks to sales to corporate customers.

This year, we are working on two new products for Object Desktop.  One involves virtual desktops and the other…well it does not involve virtual desktops.   We are also planning our update to WinCustomize.com which is badly in need of a refresh.

On the game side, we have two studios working on four games: Star Control: Origins, Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade, Ashes of the Singularity and an unannounced new game for this Fall.

Needless to say, it’s going to be a busy year.

## Object Desktop Status Report ##

A lot of the work on Object Desktop continues behind the scenes as we work to ensure things aren’t getting broken by the Windows 10 Insider builds. 

Besides the two new products we plan to add to Object Desktop this year, we have major updates planned for DeskScapes and SkinStudio planned.  We really want to see desktop customization start to make a comeback once people start to standardize on Windows 10.

->>www.objectdesktop.com

## Merging the Singularity ##

Early last year, Stardock released its much anticipated next-generation real-time-strategy game, Ashes of the Singularity.  The sales were much stronger than anticipated and a lot of users requested features that would greatly increase the depth of the game.  Since we didn’t want the base game to become too complex, we decided to create a separate program: Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation.

Historically, creating multiple SCUs for different user bases has worked very well for us.  Keep the standard version true to its original vision and price it for the masses and create a “Pro” version for those who want the more sophisticated one and price it higher.

However, this metaphor has not worked very well on the games side for a variety of reasons, the biggest being the nature of how PC games are distributed (either via Steam or GOG) where each SCU has its own page and forum and different SCUs can’t play with each other.

For last few months, I’ve been surveying the user base on what they think we should do and the overwhelming consensus is that we should merge the games back into a single game.  The question is: Which game? 

Weighing in development time, opportunity costs and customer goodwill we decided the best path was the one that would make the most customers happy: Merge them into Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and give everyone who bought the base game a free copy of Escalation and then give those users who have already paid to upgrade to Escalation a season pass to all the Escalation DLC.

This merging should occur soon (or may even happen by the time you read this).

While some may question the idea of giving away what amounts to millions of dollars worth of free licenses, my view comes from owning a software company for over twenty years: Happy customers equals future sales.   Long-term customer loyalty trumps short-term profits.

->>www.ashesofthesingularity.com 

## Handles: Your oldest enemy ##

If your computer is starting to run slowly, before rebooting it try checking for how many handles a given program is using.

To do this, bring up task manager (ctrl-shift-tab), go to Details and then add the Handles column.  Anything over 10,000 handles should give you pause.  The more handles a program uses, the slower it will make your PC no matter how much memory or how fast your CPU is.

## Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade ##

After a ten-year hiatus, I am back in the coding/design chair of Galactic Civilizations.  It’s good to be back.  I technically started back in November, working on what became version 1.9 and more recently 2.0 of Galactic Civilizations III.  My long-time friend and colleague, Paul Boyer, remains lead designer but my job is to get in there and start doing “my thing” to the game.

This Spring, we'll be releasing a major expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations III called Crusade.

To learn more on that, here are the DEV DIARIES:

1. DEV 1: Introducing Crusade
2. DEV 2: The Civ Builder

->>www.galciv.com

## Why do video games look...like video games? ##

Ever wondered why no matter how much they try, video games always look like video games and not...real?  And I don't mean real like uncanny valley real, I mean, they don't even look like a Pixar movie.  What's the deal?

This has to do with how game engines render out a scene.  There are a lot of different techniques used by game engines to put something on your screen.  When it comes to rendering something that is 3D (as opposed to a 2D drawn sprite for instance) how something looks is heavily influenced by how light interacts with that object in a 3D scene.  If you have heard of the term "shading" or "shaders" it means what it sounds like: how an object will be shaded from light sources.

Deferred rendering

Most games used what we call "deferred" shading and/or lighting.  The object is rendered and then the light is done in a second pass.  This is kind of like taking a picture and then putting it into Photoshop to do stuff to it (terrible analogy but you get the idea).  The advantage is that it's a lot less expensive on your CPU and graphics card to do it this way because shading is relatively expensive.

Example of a game that does this would be Dota 2.  The Unreal and Unity engines support this. 

CGI-style rendering

There is no such thing, technically, as CGI-style rendering.  But when most people think of CGI quality versus video game quality it comes down to how scenes are rendered.  RenderMan 21 is probably the best known package for handling movie production.  Specifically, they tend to use what is called REYES rendering (though more recently, they have begun moving to Monte-Carlo ray tracing but I split hairs).

Not surprisingly, the amount of computing power you need to implement Reyes rendering is far greater than deferred rendering.  Since games have to do their rendering in real-time, deferred is generally preferable but at the cost that no matter how much effort an artist puts in, most people can tell the difference between deferred (when shadows and lighting are applied afterwards) versus when the lighting and shadowing are inherently part of the render.

The good news is that we are starting to reach the point where we can do REYES.  For example, Oxide's Nitrous engine, which Stardock uses on its newer games, supports Object Space Lighting.  Its strength is that it handles the shading before the scene is put together as pixels.  This way, the shadows are inherently part of the scene and not applied afterwards.  The main downside to this is that it requires a lot of GPU memory and of course, high end video cards.

But for now, the reason your game doesn't look "real" or even like movie quality CGI has to do with when shadowing (shading) is being applied.

Haven't sent this out yet...

But feel free to chat with me here.

If all goes according to plan, most, if not all, Ashes players will have Escalation in the next few days.

Why are we expanding the criteria?

Simply put: While people like Ashes of the Singularity, the overwhelming message is that the community needs to be merged together.

We originally planned to allow players to play MP against each other but as time has gone on, it has become increasingly apparent that this would have both technical and fairness issues (i.e. do Ashes players get strategic zoom in MP vs. Escalation players? How much work is it to let players of SCU 1 play the players of SCU 2?).

And even if we meet those challenges, what about multiples forums on Steam and GOG that split the community? What about modding?

Since we are in this for the long-run, the best way is to just merge all players bases together into a single player base with Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation for everyone and then we can create a "simpler" in-game game mode.

We will have more information soon on this.  I want to thank everyone for sharing their ideas and feedback on the various options that have been presented.  I realize that some people will be pleasantly surprised to see their suggestions actually utilized by a game company, but sometimes the best ideas come from without.