I think long before global climate change matters one way or the other that the fate of humanity will be determined by how we make use of strong AI.

In the near term (next 5 to 10 years) we’re going to see a huge swath of jobs disappear.  This past week Panera bread added a kiosk to let me order my food.  Wendy’s and McDonalds are already heading that way too. 

Transportation is next.  My Tesla Model X with auto-pilot is on the way. I should have it in the next month or so and it won’t be long before a lot of transportation jobs are simply eliminated as machines start taking care of moving stuff from point A to point B.  They don’t have to be perfect at it, just better than us which is a pretty low bar.

I often hear about the demand to have a basic allowance provided by the government in order to prevent the masses from rising up.  But even there, they’re not thinking far enough.  Long before there are unemployment riots there will be security bots that the upcoming uber-rich will be able to afford to protect their property.

My question to you guys is this, how do you see this going?

Got a Kindle Oasis. 

I won’t bore you with a full on review because there’s a ton of reviews that basically say it’s wonderful but too expensive.

It is a lot more expensive than the other Kindles but the screen is noticeably better thanks to having a more consistent series of lights and it is also noticeably lighter.

If you do a lot of reading on the Kindle and you’re not price sensitive, get it.

We’re putting the final touches on Ashes of the Singularity version 1.2.

Below are some screenshots on what we’ve got going:

Global Chat

Voice-over based single player campaign from scratch.

Lots of little touches to the multiplayer league stuff

If you have enough CPU cores, you can enable some new visual effects

A new benchmark for measuring your CPU’s gaming potential

New PHC unit: Athena (short-ranged heavy cruiser)

New Substrate unit: Eradicator (long-ranged anti-cruiser)

We expect to release this within the next week.  Stay tuned!

With the 1.7 series done, we’re well on our way to version 1.8 which has a pretty substantial update in terms of the underlying plumbing of the game as well as new features.

A lot of work has been spent on the multiplayer parts of the game.  While few people currently play GalCiv III multiplayer, it is a part of the game that we want to improve the general robustness on as it, in turn, makes the single player game more robust.

We are also putting some work into the AI diplomacy. This is mostly about making the AI substantially more sophisticated when dealing with other players.

As you can see in the screenshot, we are also bringing back asteroid mining in 1.8.

Road Map 2 is in the works

For fans of Galactic Civilizations III this next year is going to be pretty exciting.  There’s going to be a stand-alone expansion for the game next year (and “expandalone”).  All DLC for GalCiv III will work on it as well but the main thing is that like GalCiv II: Dark Avatar and Twilight before it, this will be a major revamp of the entire game from top to bottom.

Now that the GalCiv III engine is maturing along with the completion of Ashes of the Singularity we can turn more attention to the next phase of GalCiv III.

Let’s take a look at our staffing today:

Each purple box represents a game team.  EXP teams are “expansion” teams that are mostly focused on content rather than engineering. The size of the box represents the staffing size for each project.

By the end of this year, the staffing will look more like this:

There’s a major Ashes of the Singularity expansion scheduled for 2016 and once that is completed, the expansion team will move to GalCiv III along with anyone we hire this Summer (pass the word around, we are hiring software developers).

[Not released yet]

HIGHLIGHTS

• Deluxe Campaign: All dialog now voiced, 3 new missions, 2 new cut-scenes, dialogs no longer modal
• New Units!
• Hall of Fame
• Lots of UI improvements
• Substantial AI improvements

UI

• Health bars and more informative tool tips for unit within an Army in the Army unit panel
• Unit panels can be data driven such that new units can be added by modders and hooked into the UI
• Skirmish map sorting
• Select air hot key (F2)
• Add someone as a friend from the MP lobby
• UI will display boosts/etc on a given region
• Clear production queue button

NEW UNITS:

• Substrate Eradicator: Strong long-range Cruiser
• PHC Athena: Strong, short range Cruiser

NEW FEATURES:

• CPU Benchmark
• Global Chat

MISC:

• General performance optimization pass across the entire project
• Gravity effects applied to units in their own phase 
• Streaming audio support for campaigns & scenarios
• Map disk space usage optimized
• Optimization for better scaling on multi-core CPUs
• Voice audio now on its own channel
• Voice volume slider
• Modeless dialogs
• Fix netural player colors
• Tooltip text improved for techs
• Cosmetic improvements
• Dawn of the Singularity button update

[To be continued...]

Ok, so internally we've been playing on huge maps and another type of map size called massive.

Huge maps are (I believe) 4X larger than Large.  Massive maps are 16X larger than the large maps.  We won't support Massive in Ashes 1 (you have to have 4GB of video memory to run them and at least 6 CPU cores).

However, even on huge, yes, we are going to need a way to zoom out and see a strategic view of the map.  

We aren't going to turn every individual unit into an icon or something (we internally have that and it's a mess) but we have to do something that lets you look at things in a very different way than we do now.

For instance, on our massive map, we modeled a square area from London England to Margate England south to Brighton.  And understand, we expect eventually to support maps that are 64X larger than large eventually with 255 players. The game mechanics of Ashes will evolve during this time to lend itself more to this scale than it is today.

So those of you wanting a SupCom style strategic view are still out of luck because that won't work here as it's not, well strategic enough.

With that in mind, we would like to send the call out to all strategy gamers on how you would want to represent such a map.

Here are the specifications:

Zoom level 1: What we have in Ashes of the Singularity:

Zoom level 2: Strategic view (forces, regions, resources are displayed as a sort of wire frame for maximum clarity):

Zoom level 3: Global view:

We ran into this problem with Sins of a Solar Empire which was solved like this:

zoomed out:

which is zoome dout to here:

And eventually:

So when we (Ironclad and Stardock) made Sins of a Solar Empire, we had to solve this issue up front because the game allowed you to control individual ships in fleets and zoom out to see multiple star systems in a single fluid zoom.

On a land based system, this gets a lot trickier because land is..untidy.  But you get an idea of what we are going to have to solve long-term.

Please post your ideas below:

A few topics I wanted to address based on forum feedback.

Re lore:  This is something that matters a lot to us.   Hopefully some of you check out Dawn of the Singularity. It is really really good.  http://amzn.to/1OQkvpZ

David Simpson, who is arguably the master of the singularity genre with his Post-Human series spent 2 years on this.  It's where Mac and Haalee and everyone else came from.

Re Deluxe campaign:  This will internally be done before the end of this Month and release early next month.  The voice overs and the new dialog system is now done. It does make it a lot better and having more missions and cut scenes to flesh things out further helps too.

Campaign 2, which won't come out until the end of the Summer, will shed a lot more light on the Substrate's motivations. 

Right now, there's only like a hundred Post-Humans.  There's still billions of regular old humans on Earth and the Substrate's position is basically that the there won't be enough "sentience" to escape the Milky Way if it's spread across billions of humans rather than a handful (or ideally single, super-intelligence).   Haalee's well on the way to figuring out how to leave the galaxy, she's worrying about how to leave our local group (a set of galaxies that are gravitationally bound while every other cluster is expanding away form each other).

Example dialog: https://draginol.stardock.net/files/Flowers.mp3

Re balance, SupCom, and progression

The key feature, imo, that Ashes needs to pick up is progression.  That is a feature SupCom added that was not really in TA.  For example, we should allow Quantum Relays to be upgradeable to Super Quantum Relays that do 4X (and cost 4X). Same on defenses.

Re the long long future

I don't think the answer to Ashes is to have "tons" of units.  Right now, Ashes has about 15 units per faction.  I think it will end up being around 25 units (not counting future naval).

Some of this will be when future version of Ashes have diplomacy and trade features (ala Sins: Rebellion) as well as more specialized units (e.g. transports, spies, etc.).

However, I expect many of the units you have now to go away as time goes on.  They will still exist in the campaigns and scenarios of course.  But this is a war and each side will be upgrading their armies.

Anyway, that's all for now.

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the Ashes of the Singularity community. Please introduce yourself.

I'll start:

I'm Brad Wardell. I'm the founder of Stardock.  I started the company back in 1991 (25 years ago) while a college student to pay for my EE degree.  Over the past couple decades I've written and/or produced a lot of software and games.

Ashes of the Singularity is a game I've been wanting to see us make for many many years but we lacked the technology to do it.  

We're so glad you're here!

Over the coming years, you'll see Ashes of the Singularity continue to evolve based on your feedback and I look forward to talking about ways we can build up the community.

* PHC Falcon AA armor increased from 8 to 16
* Substrate Nexus shield regen rate increased from 0.5 to 1
* Substrate Rengeerator shields increased from 760 to 800
* Substrate Regenerator cost reduced from 360 metal to 180 metal
* Substrate Drone Hive shields vision decreased from 600m to 500m
* Substrate Drone Hive metal cost increased from 210 to 310
* Substrate Mauler metal cost increased from 355 to 380
* Substrate Punisher max shields reduced from 900 to 800
* Substrate Punisher radioactive cost reduced from 350 to 330
* Call Avatar cost increased from 35 to 50 quanta but quanta increase reduced from 20% to 15%
* Substrate Avatar logistics cost increased from 12 to 20
* Substrate Avatar shield regen rate increased from 6 to 8

Stardock is pleased to announce that the book that helped shape the lore for the recently released Ashes of the Singularity is now available.

From Award-winning and best-selling Science Fiction author David Simpson comes Dawn of the Singularity. 

The Singularity - the point in human history when we begin to enhance our own intelligence with intelligent technology. As humanity merges with machines, will we forget what it's like to be human? From Fearless Publishing comes the first novel in The Singularity Saga, a set of stories set in the future where humanity begins to reach the technological singularity. Follow the story of the first sentient AI being, Haalee, whose task is to aid humanity into this brave new world. Set in the same universe as the recently released game Ashes of the Singularity, the book takes place in our near future and follows the creation of prerequisite technologies that will lead humanity to a future that we can scarcely imagine. About the Author: David Simpson has written nine novels, including the award-winning Post Human series. Dawn of the Singularity is now available! Purchase a digital or hard copy on Amazon today.