After 3 years, Ashes of the Singularity is about to go gold. It’s been an amazing journey both as a team and with our community of players.  I

On March 31, 2016, we will see how the general gaming public feels about our creation.

Below is a table of common video cards as well as how well they do at 1920x1080 with high graphics settings.

Note, these aren’t official but rather a sampling of our Benchmark data from March 2016.

You’ll be able to go to https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/metaverse#/ladders/benchmark/overall/Crazy_1440p?viewType=myself and sift through this soon enough.

Greetings!

The team is about to put v1.7 into public beta.  This new version will be the single biggest change to GalCiv that we’ve probably ever made in a .update.

So what’s the big deal with 1.7? We’re redoing the way starbases are managed.  Starting with 1.7, players can click on a starbase, choose what they want to build and then send out an order to the shipyards that sponsor them and mini-constructors will be produced and automatically sent to the starbase. 

Obviously, that’s not the only change in 1.7 but that’s certainly the headline.  More sorting options for ships, general AI improvements, some multiplayer love, and lots of other goodies are part of 1.7. 

So the first beta will be this week.

Coming from Total Annihilation? Ashes is very different in many respects but some of the units have some similarities.

Not a perfect list but hopefully enough to get you started.

Your cutting laser has FOUR lights!

In no particular order:

1. GoGo Inflight is unreasonably slow at this stage. I’m writing this from the plane and it’s about the same speed it has been since the start which is to say, it has fallen relatively behind in usability. I’m not trying to watch a video or anything, just browsing web.
2. Apple’s usability has declined since the death of Steve Jobs. The more I use the iPhone 6 the more convinced I am that he would never have approved this design. The off button being on the side is really annoying for a variety of reasons. 
3. While I love my Surface Pro 4, it is not always easy to recommend it due to the amount of tweaking it takes to make it work right. It’s most a series of poor choices in the defaults and some tuning issues with SkyLake.
4. I’ve been playing the MOO beta.  It’s still in early access so it’s not fair to judge it.  But I will be curious to see how those who poo-poo’d GalCiv III treat MOO.
5. I can’t believe how little I care about the 2016 election. There is just no winning. Frankly, all of the candidates are awful.  Trump is ghastly. Hillary is a monster. Bernie has clearly never worked a real job. Cruz is probably an actual psychopath and Rubio looks like a deer in the headlights.
6. I’ve decided I don’t like getting old.
7. People getting obsessed with their particular piece of computer hardware astounds me.  They’d probably consider me a hardware whore then. I swap out NVIDIA and AMD cards in my machines daily. 
8. My current go-to card is an NVIDIA 980. Why? because there’s no AMD card I can find with 3 freaking display ports on it. All my 390s have DVI. Seriously, what high end gamer is using DVI still? DVI needs to die.
9. On my recent media tour, every game site I visited relied on a VGA connector (not even DVI).  It’s 2016, it’s at least use HDMI.
10. Why is it taking so long for Display Port 1.3 parts to come out? 4K monitors are wonderful. Everyone should get one – as soon as Display Port 1.3 comes out.  Look for that.
11. I recently got a Dell 5k monitor. It is absolutely amazing.  Windows 10 actually works fine on it.  High DPI on Windows is viable.
12. I ran through my games to see who handled 5K well.  Civ V needs a UI update.  GalCiv II’s UI scales but it tries to stretch horizontally which looks ridiculous. Sorcerer King is perfect – detects display, uses Super high DPI UI all automatically. Sins of a Solar Empire is unplayable. Ashes of the Singularity works great but you currently have to manually increase the UI scaling which is annoying (hopefully fixed by release). GalCiv III works great but it needs an even larger UI option.  Supreme Commander FA actually did ok. 
13. All the traveling I’ve done lately has made me miss my family to crushing level.
14. I now use an ad blocker. Why? Because too many sites have ads that suck down all my battery. I don’t mind the ads, but ads that use 30% of my CPU on a Skylake processor isn’t acceptable. Fix your problem and I’ll turn off my ad blocker. And yes, I have turned off Flash.
15. I was never cut out to be a manager. I’m just too mean. It’s a weird thing. I really like people. I’m an extrovert. But as a manager I have terrible people skills. I apologize to anyone who has to deal with me. I know how hard it is, I have to deal with me 24/7.
16. I recently discovered I have Aphantasia. That is, I can’t picture things in my mind. This has always been the case, it’s just that I assumed everyone was like this. When I discovered this, I was skeptical that other people could actually conjure up a vision of an apple or a person in their mind. “You’re suggesting you hallucinate on demand?” I scoffed.  Apparently, I’m the freak.
17. I’m ready for a 10 core CPU, Intel.  I swear, given how much Ashes of the Singularity does to push the hardware, the game should ship with every high resolution monitor, 6 core or more CPU, video card, etc. 
18. I am spending more and more time on Reddit and less and less time on Twitter.  I feel like I have to walk on egg shells on Twitter now or their SJW gestapo will obliterate my account.  That’s being overly dramatic. But I’ve been pretty disgusted seeing people who spent years siccing their dogs on isolated people onlne now in involved in “stopping online harassment.”
19. I’m surprised at how primitive Siri remains.  I would have expected to be able to ask her “What time is my flight today” and for her to know.  Google Now not only reminded me of my flight but told me how long it would take to get to the airport due to an accident on the freeway. 
20. I’m pretty excited about Vulkan (new graphics API) but it seems like people should be giving MS more kudos.  DIrectX 12 is actually pretty damn impressive.

I feel…cleansed.

And the plane has landed.

Click on the thumbnail to see the detail you get when running at high resolution.  While 5K seems like a crazy resolution, even 4K monitors are already selling relatively inexpensively.

This second image is interesting because the resolution is high enough to see that each drone isn’t just some little dot but rather a full blown unit complete with hover pods and antena.

Greetings!

Yesterday we released 0.92 which had a ton of improvements, fixes, balance tweaks, etc.(http://steamcommunity.com/app/228880/discussions/1/412448792372191389/).

So what's next?

The next public update should have the Tutorial in it. We'll be looking for your feedback on it.

After that, we'll be heading towards release. Bug fixes, minor usability improvements, safe feature additions (we're testing engineer assist for instance)..

What cool stuff is going to be in the release version?

The Ascendancy Wars campaign is the main one. It's a story driven, campaign with missions that are quite unlike the normal skirmish game.

In addition, there will be a set of scenarios that highly customized single player games for people to play. For example, one is called King of the Hill where you fortify a hill as best you can as wave after wave of ever increasingly powerful enemies attack. The goal is to see how long you last. It's pretty fun.

What happens after release?

As some of you know, Stardock is the oldest independent game studio in the industry (20+ years and counting). This fact means that this game wasn't funded by a publisher or by a Kickstarter campaign. 

Thus, for us, 1.0 is simply the beginning of Ashes of the Singularity. We already have post-release features and content that we'll be working on after the game goes 1.0. Most of these things we will be releasing for free.

A few things at the top of our list of free features includes:

* Customization of single-player scenarios
* Multiplayer-scenarios
* Modding (make your own AI personalities)
* Replays
* Observer mode
* Scenario creation (make your own scenarios) - we're working on a tutorial

On the near-term DLC front we'll also be looking at things like:

* Player requested units
* New map environments and features
* Scenario Packs 
* New construction projects

And on the longer-term road-map we have:

* The third race
* Naval combat
* Environments that require other classes of units (crawling, treads, bipedal)

Why the long-term roadmap?

I suspect I'm not the only one who has fallen in love with an RTS only to see it orphaned for whatever reason.

I think it's important for us to be transparent with you guys in knowing that this will not be happening to Ashes of the Singularity. For example, Stardock recently updated Galactic Civilizations II (which came out in 2006). We still do updates for Sins of a Solar Empire on occasion.

We only answer to you: The customer

That statement is usually an empty phrase. But in this case, it's literally true. Stardock is a privately held company. I personally own the company. All of it. I answer to no publisher. No investment group. I only answer to you and I live on these forums and elsewhere. You have direct access to me.

Hence we absolutely welcome people posting mockups and ideas on things they'd like to see in the future. 

Why the Ashes tech matters

You hear a lot about Ashes tech and there's a reason why it does really matter. How often have you seen a game that has stopped being able to be updated because it hit a technological brick wall?

We've run into the tech issue with our own Sins of a Solar Empire. It's an amazing third generation engine (single core, DirectX 9, 32-bit). But even though we (Stardock and Ironclad) would love to do a lot more with that engine, we're up against the tech wall.

Have you ever loaded up a great old game and found it wonky because of your resolution or because it can't use your hardware properly? This is why Ashes matters.

Ashes of the Singularity is the first, and so far, only strategy game that is multi-core neutral. That means, as you add more CPU cores to it, it gets faster. In 5 years, when people have 12-core systems, Ashes will be able to support map sizes that make what we have today look like a joke. 

Similarly, Ashes will run on a 5K display. I know because I'm running it on my NVIDIA 980 right now at 5K. UI scaling and all. While it seems crazy, in a few years, 4K, 5K and someday 8K monitors will be as common as 1024x768 was.


Ashes of the Singularity is crashing on me! How can it almost be done?

I have some good news and some bad news on that front. The good news is that every time the game crashes, we get a really cool crash log sent to us. For you devs out there, it's actually pretty amazing. We get the dxdiag of the system, the stack, the process list, etc. It's just nuts. In MY day, when a game crashed you would have to send out debug builds. 

Anyway, the bad news is that the vast VAST majority of crashes are being caused by third party programs inserting themselves into the game's process. This isn't an issue on DirectX 11 but on DirectX 12, it's a big deal (and very very annoying). 

We're working with Microsoft on this issue as there's not much we can do. DirectX 12 just doesn't like other programs being in the process. The most common ones are video streaming apps. After that, third-party overlays. And after that, I kid you not, malware. The data we get is anonymous so we have no way to contact the person to tell them their computer is infected. But a startling percentage of players have malware in their processes. 

If Ashes is crashing for you, check your system tray and make sure you don't have things attaching themselves. Then, run a virus scanner.

Basically, Ashes 0.92 never crashes in single player on any supported machine (I mean as in, statistically) with the above exceptions.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer, by contrast is still a challenge. 1 on 1 is doing great. 2 on 2 is doing...fine...Beyond that it gets murky. 

As you've probably guessed, it's largely based on inconsistent performance from the different players interacting with the simulation. 

Luckily, this is something that will get better as we get more data. I will be online a lot playing 3 on 3 games so look for me.

Thank you guys!

Many of you have participated in various RTS communities over the years. I know I have. I don't know specifically why this community is so excellent. It may be a demographic thing (i.e. average age or something). But whatever the reason is, thank you.

I can't even begin to tell you how much we enjoy talking to you guys. I love being able to talk candidly with other players on the various issues in the game. 

We really enjoy being able to talk to people who know the pros and cons of different RTS games whether that be Total Annihilation, Dark Reign, C&C, CoH, StarCraft, Supreme Commander, Grey Goo, Planetary Annihilation, Kohan. 

As a development community, we're a close nit group. If I get stuck or have a question I can ping the Uber guys and the designer of Grey Goo is only 30 feet from where I'm sitting. Soren Johnson (Civilization IV) sits even closer to me and Jon Shafer (Civ V) is in the next room and Chris Taylor is always willing to talk shop. We (you guys and us) are part of one of the best technology communities there is.

We look forward to talking to you over the next several years!

The Escapist is running a series on the development of the Ashes of the Singularity universe.

The first entry can be found here: [ENTRY 1]

Ashes of the Singularity takes place in the year 2178. Longtime Stardock fans will recognize that year because it is also the same year as Galactic Civilizations starts.

Galactic Civilizations imagines a future in which humans travel the galaxy in starships

Where Galactic Civilizations imagines a Star Trek like future in which human beings, very much like ourselves colonize new worlds and encounter alien civilizations, Ashes goes the opposite path.  It imagines a post-singularity future in which humans have begun to transcend their biology entirely and colonize worlds not through space ships but through constructs.   Post-Humans are, by our 21st century standards, practically godlike in their knowledge and capabilities.

The Escapist series will attempt to help people see how we got from here (2016) to their (2178) as well as get to see a ton of cool art concepts.

Through the series people will discover the technological evolution of human evolution in the Singularity universe.

Anyway, check out [ENTRY 1].

I got the Dell 5K monitor. It’s only 27 inches but it’s just gorgeous.  I hooked it up to an NVIDIA 980TI and have been playing Ashes with it.

Below is a screenshot I took that I lowered to a more reasonable resolution so you can see the extra detail you get when running at that resolution.

Recommended!