I’ve been making the journey from Michigan to San Francisco for literally 23 years now.  I know San Fran better than I know the downtown areas around here.

Second Street in San Fran is a location I have become very familiar with over the decades.  And now I go for the first time in a long long long while.

I have mixed feelings about it.   On the one hand, I do enjoy showing off our software and games and there’s the opportunity to see old friends.  But on the other, nothing makes you more conscious about time than doing something for 20 years. 

I have my polo shirts.  Though, actualy right now I’m wearing my Gas Powered Games sweat shirt.  I always wondered why Chris had sweat shirts made. GPG is located in Seattle. Do they wear sweat shirts in Seattle?

Anyway, hopefully my demo skills aren’t too rusty.  More to come.

I’m officially a cranky old man.

Everything. Is. Crap.

Sometimes I just feel so much despair because of the sheer incompetence I see with companies with vastly more resources than I do wallow in.  If, for instance, Microsoft can’t write a freaking search algorithm for the Windows store or some high profile game’s trailer looks like it was put together by marketing interns it tells me that my dream of retiring and throwing money to hire people to do the things in the areas I have 20 years of experience is just a dream.

There’s an interesting book called Outliers. It makes a compelling case that people who are awesome at a given thing (hockey, music, etc.) are that way only partially due to native talent but mostly because they’ve got 10,000 hours of expertise in that area.  At some point, after that level of expertise has been reached, the individual moves on.  They sell their business or change careers or retire. 

So I’m pretty depressed about the whole thing.  I’ve been doing this for 25 years now.  You can collect a lot of 10,000 hours in lots of areas. Some useful (budgeting) some not so useful (OS/2 device drivers). But at some point, everything starts to become frustrating. You don’t want to have to re-explain, for the thousandth time, an algorithm you’ve written dozens of times or the tricks needed to do video editing fast or the right tools to crank out an article quickly or how the proper layout for a website or any other number of things.

I have seen this issue creeping up for years. I just had hoped that I would eventually just throw money at the problem.  What really brought the despair home was seeing the new Star Trek Beyond trailer.  Such total crap. It means even marketing departments with massive resources still can’t grasp their own demographic. There’s no hope.

Anyway, I’m just ranting.  I’m getting old.  I can’t believe it’s happening but it’s true.

For some months users have complained about the Surface Pro 4 consuming several % per hour of CPU while sleeping.  In December, Microsoft indicated that they were working on the problem.

In December, Intel released a driver update to their Skylake drivers. By default, these drivers won’t work on a Surface Pro.  However, users who download the .ZIP version, extract and then update the drivers via device manager can enjoy the benefits today.

 

The Results

As you can see, the new drivers result in sleep using less than 2% per hour (instead of 6%). 

 

Previously, the chart below would have two Intel related processes consuming substantial power during sleep.  The December drivers seem to have addresssed this.

 

To Install

So why haven’t these been released yet to Surface Pro users? They’re not yet validated by Microsoft.  Thus, the only way to get it is to download the .ZIP file and extract it and install them the old-fashioned way. 

  

 

Use these at your own risk.  That said, I’ve been using them on my Surface Pro for about a week to test the changes they’ve made.  For those who were suffering from excessive power drain during sleep, these appear to address it.

 

[Download here]

 

This year marks the 25th anniversary of our spectacular product, Ozone-away. 

Is Microsoft serious about its online media stores?

 

Movies & TV

Let’s say you want to buy an episode of Rick & Morty.  This is what you get if you use the Microsoft store:

No previews. No star ratings.  Not even movies get a star rating.  The little “i” brings up a barely formatted tooltip. How did this even ship?

This is what the home page looks like:

 

Music

Going over to music the situation is better.  You get a few highlights and you quickly get to the top sellers as a LIST.

If you click on a song you can preview it. Better.

But what does it lack? Once again, no ratings and no popularity concept that lets you know that this particular song is the one that everyone’s referring to.

 

Games

In the games section you are treated with yet another UI. I want to emphasize that each of these screenshots represents going to a different tab in the same Store app. 

So now they have picked games out for me. I suspect they picked the same games for you too.   So now they’ve discovered ratings which is a nice start.  So the games section of their store does seem to be decently made UI wise.  If you click on a game you get to see reviews, related items, and lots of other useful info.

 

Apps

Click on apps and you are treated to yet another layout.  Remember, this isn’t supposed to be some web page.  I am running their “store app”.  Imagine using the Android store or iOS store and having the layout and features drastically change like this.

The selected app page is identical to the selected game page which is to say it’s pretty good.

You can definitely tell that the Apps and Games part of the store is more mature than the others.  That said, there’s no excuse for Microsoft allowing their user experience for the media content to be in this kind of shape in a shipping product.

Apple’s Turn

This isn’t to imply that Apple has it nailed either.  Their music, TV and movies app suffers similar layout inconsistencies.   But here’s the thing, they make it very easy to get to the top charts, they have ratings, they have samples.

Here’s what their TV show equivalent looks like:

 

Compare that to:

On the Windows store if you click on the little “i” you get something like this:

No preview.  as basic as it gets.

Here’s what it looks like on iOS:

You can watch a prevoew of it. It has an actual layout.  It’s just more polished in every way.

It’s baffling that Microsoft would invest so much in an area that they clearly have set themselves for failiure.  They have a great product with the Surface Pro and the upcoming Surface Phone could woo people away. Except, of course, who wants to migrate to this awful media ecosystem? 

For now, I’ll happily use my Surface Pro as my go-to mobile device but I don’t see myself buying any media for it.

My Microsoft Surface is a constant companion.  It is absolutely central to my workflow.

One of the challenges I’ve had with it is battery life.  There’s a lot of things you can do to help with your battery life but one simple thing I’ve done, for now, is to set the max CPU when on battery to 99%. 

Setting the max CPU to 99% prevents the CPU from going into Turbo mode.  For me, this accomplishes two things:

(1) I get roughly an extra hour of battery out of the system

(2) I don’t get the annoying fan when I watch videos

 

Set your maximum CPU while on battery to 99%

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Download and run https://draginol.stardock.net/files/SP4_Max_Processor_State.zip 

 

Step 2:  Go to advanced power settings and go to the new option: Processor Power management

Set the on battery to 99%.

 

There is no step 3. 

You should notice the behavior difference fairly quickly on battery.  For one thing, when you have Edge running on an ad intensive site or are watching a video your CPU speed will not go nearly as high (on the other hand, it won’t get power throttled to 0.5Ghz either which is a big benefit).

 

 

Hope this helps.  Feel free to comment if you have questions. 

This week I did a blog over at Gamasutra talking about the importance of interesting choices:

Read the whole thing here: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/BradWardell/20160104/262961/Ashes_of_the_Singularity_PREmortem.php

 

Let’s look at StarCraft II:

In Starcraft, you have to build a Supply Depot before you build a Barracks.

 

Now, look at Ashes 0.71 alpha:

 

See the red lines? Those are poison choices.  Newbie traps. 

 

So we’ve made some changes that you’ll see in the beta:

We’ve renamed the “Cruiser Factory” into the Armory.   You have to first build the factory to build the armory.  You also have to build the Factory before you can build things like Smarties and many other things.

Now, you experts might think “Nobody would build missile defense structures as their first decision.”  Actually, yes, lots of people do.  And it’s always a bad choice.

Again, you can read the whole thing here:  http://gamasutra.com/blogs/BradWardell/20160104/262961/Ashes_of_the_Singularity_PREmortem.php

Greetings!

First of all, Happy New Years!

This is going to be rambling.  So please bear with me.

This Winter I plan to do a series of articles for The Escapist on Ashes of the Singularity.  We have a unique opportunity to talk about some of the things that makes this game unique.  I’m going to touch on a few of those topics here.  I’m no writer so please bear with me through this.

As Gamers, you’re getting ripped off

To a certain degree, gamers have always been getting ripped off.  However, in the old days, the company making the game still owned the game. 

Why does that matter?

Let’s use Supreme Commander as an example.   Supreme Commander 1 was developed by Gas Powered Games. It was published by THQ.  Back in those days, that was the business model.  The publisher would front tens of millions of dollars and the studio would make thee game for a royalty (that was never fully recouped from the advances).   The problem with that system is that sooner or later, it killed the game studio.

Supreme Commander 2 was bought by Square Enix but still developed by Gas Powered Games.   This was one of the first games of the “new” model (the shitty model imo).  That is,  Square Enix would put millions of dollars into GPG to develop it but at the end of the day Square Enix, not the developer, owned the game. 

And that, my friends, is how most games are made these days.

Think about that for a moment.  Think of your favorite big games.  Who “owns” them?

So no new Supreme Commander.  Total Annihilation was bought by Wargaming.net (the World of Tanks guys) from Atari.  They also bought GPG so there’s hope that they might be making a new Total Annihilation some day.  On the other hand, they might just shop it around as a WFH.

Bottom line: As a gamer, you want the people making the game to own the game.  As a greedy bastard business person, I want to own everything I can. In fact, you reading this means I own your eyes which I can then sell to a third world black market organ dealer. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Digital Distribution and the new model

So there’s been some good news lately.   Digital Distribution + Kickstarter + etc. has opened the door for developers to also own the game they’re making. Again: This is what you, as a gamer, want.

Things like Rocket League, Kerbal and Undertale better than any cure for depression that an old guy like me can get.

Why you should care?

Because games owned by the ones funding it mean that the game can evolve forever.  For those of you who are Supreme Commander fans, you know that if GPG still owned it and was still independent that we’d be on SupCom 4 by now.  Just kills my heart just thinking about that.

Bottom line: When the one paying the bills is also the developer you can keep evolving the game for years. 

What do you have to have to do this?

I’ve come up with 3 arbitrary but I think relevant pre-requisites for a game to continue to evolve:

1. Capital. Obviously you have to have money to keep making it.
2. Engine. You have to have a code-base that can still be extended.  That’s why we had to make GalCiv III instead of continuing to expand on GalCiv II.  The engine was ancient. 
3. Community.  Games that evolve have to have a community of people who want the game to evolve.  A built in audience who will want to buy future versions.

Pretty obvious right? And yet, how often do all 3 come together? Very rarely.

So let’s talk about Ashes of the Singularity and why (I hope) you should care a lot about it

Every developer wants people to care about their game. Some developers are arrogant enough to think their game is special…cough.

Anywhoo…

Hopefully I can lay out the case why you should care.  But feel free to tell me how terribly wrong I am in the comments.

I can’t really start this without talking about Galactic Civilizations III and the nature of game engines.  I’m going to be talking about this a lot because if anything scares me about our industry it is that we’ve largely given up on making our own tech which reduces the types of games we can make.

Today, pretty much everything is made with either:

1. Unity
2. Unreal
3. er need third bullet point here.

Rocket League uses Unreal.  Kerbal uses Unity. and Undertale uses GameMaker.

Their insane, and arguably illegal levels of awesomeness (I am quite certain that Undertale’s awesomeness may be affecting our local galaxy cluster’s space-time gravitational constant, if you don’t have that game quit reading my crap and go get it) show that you don’t need to make your own engine to make a great game.

But engines do create the box around new types of games can be made in.  

For example, we couldn’t have made Galactic Civilizations III with Unity or Unreal.  Not that there’s anything wrong with those engines. We use Unity for Offworld Trading Company and use Unreal for other projects. We like them.   And to be fair: We could have made GalCiv III as it shipped with either one.  I am particularly in love with Unity because of their tools and a general love of C# but that’s personal preference.

The GalCiv III engine

This gets back to the importance of combining engine + capital + community.  GalCiv is the oldest continuously updated space 4X series.  It has a big community.  After Stardock sold Impulse® to GameStop back some years ago, it had all the money it would ever need.  As some of you know, Stardock is over 20 years old and has one founder: Me.  I haven’t bothered to take a real salary from Stardock since 2009.  I’m here literally for you guys. My income comes from my stock portfolios. 

The reason I mention this stuff is because it means we can think really really long term.

GalCiv III is a really good game.  But it’s nothing compared to what it’ll eventually be (this is why marketing wishes I didn’t post). 

Consider this: GalCiv III is a native 64-bit, multi-core game engine.  That means, eventually, with mods and expansions and such you’ll be able to finally stream the Star Trek galaxy vs. the Star Wars galaxy live with every unit and detail made by fans.

64-bit matters because you have, effectively unlimited (for the next decade anyway) memory to work with.  That 32-bit game you want to play has to stay with 2GB.   2GB is about what an iPhone has in it now.  It’s nothing. In 5 years, it’ll be tragic. 

The Ashes engine

Nitrous, the engine used for Ashes of the Singularity, Star Control and…other games I can’t yet talk about is, frankly, sick.  For you developers out there, it is a core-neutral (meaning the more cores you add, the faster it gets), GPU neutral (similarly,  can jam 4 video cards in there? Go for it, it just gets faster), 64-bit, REAL-TIME engine.  Nitrous is basically Pixar’s renderman in realtime.

And now… the mechanics of the game

As I’ll be going into detail in upcoming articles, Ashes is 1/3 brand-new 1/3 taken from existing genres and 1/3 expansion on existing concepts. 

 

Something borrowed

 

Baby-daddy #1: Total Annihilation

 

Baby-daddy #2: Company of Heroes

Baby-daddy #3: Sins of a Solar Empire

 

This will be presented during deposition no doubt

Something new

Having thousands of units sounds exciting but it could also be a total mess.  Thus the concept of a META unit (join army in game) was born and is central to the game design of Ashes of the Singularity

 

From way up here, they all look like little tiny ants

You could argue that Kohan introduced the concept of a Meta unit.  Here’s the basic premise (it’s pretty obvious):

You select a bunch of units and form an army with them.  That army becomes a single unit that works together.  This can be tough to get used to because you’re allowing the AI to make some decisions that you might not always agree with (for people who really want to micro 7,305 units they can still do that…) but the the army then tries to accomplish your objective as if each sub-unit is an individual unit or arm or whatever of a single unit. 

Programmatically it’s not even that complicated.  For you coders out there:

You create a vector of units that you spin through and look at what the meta unit has been ordered to do. You then go through the tree and see if the medic should go and help someone being attacked or if the artillery u nit should back off or whether the melee unit should run out in front and defend.

The idea is easy.  So why don’t games do this? 

The answer: Multi-Core.  If you want your precious 60 frames per second it means the draw calls have to respond in…wait for it…1000ms in a second. I want 60 frames in that time.  In other words, the AI has to do everything in less than 20ms which is basically not possible unless you can spread it across multiple cores.  That’s why Ashes requires a minimum of 4 cores.

How good will this be at release? Meh. Decent.  Engine power does not equal strategic skill.   Every time I play I find a new tweak I want to do to improve the meta unit.  CPU power isn’t magic.  Time is magic. Or something.

Only many many games of us playing you online and entering secret hidden cheat codes to beat you will allow us to learn the strategies necessary to incorporate into the game.   Sure, you might think “Hey, that’s bullshit that he somehow spawned a dreadnought in my base when I was about to win.” but I can assure you, on my mother’s non-existing grave, that this was necessary from a research point of view…

This is just another example of why the evolution of these games matter.  For a lot of things, there’s no substitute for time.

Anyway, that’s my example of the something new. There’s tons of other stuff but they’re a little too dry and technical. Let’s go to the things enhanced on…

Something Improved

One of my favorite aspects of Ashes is the concept of Orbitals.    It’s the one thing I wish Total Annihilation had.   In TA, many end games boiled down to endless nuke races (or worse, Big Bertha races).  SupCom has a similar thing where one side is trying to get nukes or shields faster than the other side.

What we wanted was the idea that we could have an endless (well not endless but however much we can cram into our UI) number of buildings that you can build that require you to sacrifice short-term gain for long-term benefit by giving you global abilities.

 

In Ashes of the Singularity, every single shot is a light source. As in, not 3 light sources ala DirectX 9 games but rather one for each shot (as in thousands). Even if you don’t consciously notice this, your brain does.

When I play Starcraft, I often feel like my oldness in being able to get to the ghost or the now horrendously nerfed Raven’s special abilities were just too slow.  Which one is the unit? What hot key is it? Is he in this group?  I don’t like key clicks being what determines victory or not.

Company of Heroes had global abilities.  Ashes has something similar but you can build up an economy just to use them (they’re not tied to what regions you own, they’re the energy equivalent in SupCom).

Example of some of the oribtals/abilities we’re working on

The Future

To have a game like Ashes succeed you need the engine (Which we have) plus the capital (which we have) but we also have to have a good community.  So far, it’s pretty good.  It’s a delicate balance at times. I get pretty annoyed with SupCom super fans who literally want Ashes to be SupCom 3.  But overall, it’s gone well.

Modding will become a big deal over time as we find ways to let people create their own units and maps and UI improvements to the game.  The AI is already very moddable (I’ve made it my business to wreck it many times…for science).

One of the key things about being an independent developer that self-funds is that you can keep people on a given project.  The GalCiv III project continues development as if it were never released.  Ashes will be the same way. 

Right now, as I type this, we have 4 game teams.  One is on GalCiv III, one is on Ashes, one is on Star Control and another is on a brand-new unannounced game (and won’t be for another year).  It’s not like the old days where games were released and the teams went on to the next thing provided that the 3 criteria area met (funds, engine, community). 

So that’s all for now.

Post your thoughts below.

Hey there!

I've gone ahead and started up the Ashes of the Singularity Wiki page.

https://www.ashesofthesingularity.wikia.com/wiki/Ashes_Of_TheSingularity_Wikia

Feel free to contribute.  

I'll make sure regular, serious contributors get access to stuff way early to help.

Greetings!

Can you believe it's already been 6 months since release! I hope you guys are having as much fun with the game as we've been having taking your feedback and adding to the game.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm the CEO of Stardock. I designed and wrote the original GalCiv for OS/2 way way way back in the 90s. I also designed GalCiv I and GalCiv II and consulted on GalCiv III.

One of the reasons why I love making 4X games are the people who tend to play them. Anyone who is on a lot of forums can tell the difference between a 4X game forum and a regular game forum.

Another reason is that 4X games are updated for years. In fact, we just released a huge update to GalCiv II (2) this past week and that game was released a decade ago and much of the updates in it came from the fans themselves. 

With the Steam holiday sale here, we'll be getting a bunch of new players so I want to give some helpful links out here and welcome them to one of the best gaming communities on the net.

## Some Helpful thread to read ##

#1 The Wishlist thread.http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/598198173700392501/

We mine this thread regularly. We don't respond to it nearly often enough but we read it. A lot.

#2 The roadmap thread.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/

If you're new to 4X games, you may be surprised to find that we update these games as often as we can. There are actually more engineers on GalCiv III full-time than we had when we made GalCiv II. The main reason for this has to do with digital distribution but what's really wonderful about it is that when you buy a game, you can expect continued updates for as long as there is sufficient demand.

#3 The helpful links thread:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/620713633843484431/

This just gives you some help in getting started.


## What to expect next ##

You may hear the term "4th generation game engine". This is a technical term for what amounts to the move from 32-bit, DirectX 9c, single core designed games to 64-bit, DirectX 10+, multi-core. GalCiv III, as far as I'm aware, the first gen 4 4X. Which, in itself, means nothing other than that iit means there's really no limit to how far it can be expanded which is what we plan to do.

So let's get specific:

In the past 6 months we've a ton of new features which you can read about here:https://forums.galciv3.com/461047

The roadmap goes over the long-term plan but coming up we have:

#1 1.6 which is going to feature a lot of UI improvements. Now, UI isn't glamorous. It makes for a bad screenshot. But in a game that you may play for many hours, good UI makes a big difference between fun and tedium.

#2 The First expansion. I can't tell you what it is going to be yet but I can tell you that it is something that no GalCiv game has ever had before (or even something similar) but at the same time, it is a feature that probably should have been in every GalCiv game -- I just didn't think about it until now.

If you have any questions or thoughts, you can post here or post on the official Stardock forum where we hang out the most:

https://forums.galciv3.com/forum/1058

Have fun!