Interesting article on Kotaku today in which activist Anita Sarkeesian expresses what she’s looking for from game developers.

Ultimately, she is looking for games to keep 8 guidelines in mind when making games:

1. Avoid the Smurfette principle (don't have just one female character in an ensemble cast, let alone one whose personality is more or less "girl" or "woman.")
2. "Lingerie is not armor" (Dress female characters as something other than sex objects.)
3. Have female characters of various body types
4. Don't over-emphasize female characters' rear ends, not any more than you would the average male character's.
5. Include more female characters of color.
6. Animate female characters to move the way normal women, soldiers or athletes would move.
7. Record female character voiceover so that pain sounds painful, not orgasmic
8. Include female enemies, but don't sexualize those enemies

So how does Stardock do?

Let’s take a look at Stardock last released game, the popular, critically acclaimed PC strategy game Fallen Enchantress:

1. Avoid the Smurfette principle (don't have just one female character in an ensemble cast, let alone one whose personality is more or less "girl" or "woman.")

Our last game, Fallen Enchantress has female leads and allows players to design female units in total equality with males with equal resource allocation (i.e. we spent an equal amount in the form of hundreds of thousands in art costs) on separate clothing, armor.

Stardock spent hundreds of thousands of dollars creating unique character models and assets to ensure that both males and female units could be created by players.

2. "Lingerie is not armor" (Dress female characters as something other than sex objects.)

Same. Fallen Enchantress female armor was functional, practical. As you can see in the above screenshot, the armor is not only not “lingerie” but it lacks breast definition because real female armor wouldn’t have that.

3. Have female characters of various body types

We include multiple models for male and females in the game. As any game developer can tell you, this was a non-trivial cost, especially to a small studio because it meant we had to create different types of armor (our armor is not a texture being applied).

4. Don't over-emphasize female characters' rear ends, not any more than you would the average male character's.

We modeled our units proportions based on real world measurements.

In Fallen Enchantress, players can design their own units, leaders, etc. Multiple body sizes included.

5. Include more female characters of color.

Done.

Literally any color you’d like. Even blue.

6.Animate female characters to move the way normal women, soldiers or athletes would move.

Done.

7. Record female character voiceover so that pain sounds painful, not orgasmic

Done.

8. Include female enemies, but don't sexualize those enemies

The Villain, Ceresa was female

and

according to statistics the most popular HERO of Fallen Enchantress was…

Procipinee. Queen of the West, heir of Amarian. The world’s most powerful channeler of magic.

But wait…that’s not all…

>50% of the source code in Fallen Enchantress was written by women (plural) and much of the art in the game was created by women.

I look forward to Ms. Sarkeesian holding Stardock up as the model of what game studios should be doing.  In fact, her and her allies are welcome to find any modern game or studio that has comparable representation of women both in terms of in-game characters as well as development.

I won’t hold my breath.

Disclaimer:

I work for Stardock which makes Start10.  That means I have a vested interest in the quality of the Windows 10 start menu.  The better the start menu is, the fewer copies of Start10 we sell. On the other hand, the worse their start menu is, the fewer copies of everything else we make will sell.  So overall, I would prefer that Microsoft make Windows as good as they can.

At least it’s there

Windows 8 didn’t have a start menu at all. It had a start screen. As a result, Stardock’s Start8 got tens of millions of downloads.  This time, they have brought the start menu back…sort of.

The Good

I like Cortana as a concept. It’s a good idea.  The implementation needs work but I look forward to one day being able to say “Computer, order my wife a dozen roses for tomorrow, put on the note, ‘I’m sorry about the chicken..incident.’”

Cortana is a great idea even if I have trouble spelling her name.

I also really like the expand start menu option.  If you select it, you get a quasi-start screen.  This is a great UX and one I wish had been in Windows 8.

There’s an expand button in the top right that lets you expand the start menu.

I also really like the Recently added item.  This was a brilliant addition in my opinion.  You install something, it shows up right in the Start menu.

The “Recently Added” option is great!

I also like the general design of Windows 10 better than Windows 8 or Windows 7 in the sense that Microsoft is making a better distinction between consumer users and power users.  For example:

The Start menu right click menu is helpful in getting you to core management features. First introduced in Windows 8.1.

Take a close look at what they display here.  If you’re a power user or someone with just a lot of experience, you know every one of these.  There’s no need for these to be jammed into the Start menu as some pretty icon. These are the low level controls of the machine.  Note that even the CLI is there.

The Bad

So there are definitely some good things in the new Windows 10 start menu. Even things that Windows 7 users could appreciate.  But if this start menu were to go out as the final, there will be many millions of new Start10 customers.  Here’s where things go bad.

Ditching the document centric purpose of a desktop

First, the search bar has zero usability.  Let me walk you through just how terrible it currently is:

I have a document called “My Budget” . The point of a desktop PC is to manage my stuff. A lot of stuff. Otherwise, I’d just a tablet. 

So I type in “My budget”.  Now what.  Now nothing. There is no context menu.  Let me be clear: THERE IS NOW RIGHT CLICK MENU.  That means I can’t even pin that item to my start menu or open its file location or choose to open it with a different file.  I work with XML files all the time and what program I use to open it with changes.

I’m going to assume that Microsoft will fix this before release.  But I point out this issue because I’ve seen people who are supposed to be technical, poo-poo Start10 even thought Start10 beta lets you type in this sort of thing and right-click to get that file type’s context menu, pin it to the Start menu, etc.  

No jump lists

I use a desktop to do work. Not having jump lists is a problem.

Jump Lists are a big deal because they allow users to go directly to the most frequently used documents of a particular app right from the Start menu.  So if I’m using Word, that contract I was working on is visible right away, for Visual Studio, the 2 projects I’m coding on are readily accessible.  That’s simply gone here. 

The left hand and right hand don’t know what they’re doing

The left side and the right side have nothing to do with one another. You can’t drag and drop things to the right or the left.

The left side and right side might as well be separate programs

This is actually two problems in one.  First, I would expect to type into the search bar (which I’d prefer to be in the Start menu itself but I digress) and when it brought up the document or program I’d expect to be able to pin it to either the Start menu or “add to places”.   Second, I would expect to easily drag and drop things from Places to the tile list based on what I am working on a lot that week. 

Speaking of Places…

First off, you have no say in what shows up in places.  I bet a lot of users assumed that places were the same as the pinned items in Windows 7. They’re not.  They’re currently hard coded.

A minor semantics quibble

Right now, you can’t add or remove things to “Places”.  I would prefer to see it named “Favorites”. A user could then pick and choose what shows up in Favorites.    Not to mention, File Explorer and Documents are essentially the same thing. One just opens Explorer to a particular location.

All Apps

The All apps option is one of the most frustrating things about the new Start menu.

Luckily users rarely have anything that starts with an Mi.. on their system…

First, there’s no way to organize this.  You can’t simply create a “Stuff” folder and place all the things you rarely use in it so that when you do need to view apps that you don’t have on your start menu, there’s some semblance of organization. In fact, there’s no ability to organize it at all.

For example, let’s say you’re one of the millions of people who don’t know about the right-click on the Start menu trick.  For a long time you’ve been trained that if you want to remove something on your computer you go to add remove programs.  On this Start menu, too bad. The search won’t find it and it’s not in the “all programs” list.

The Elephant in the room

Live tiles on the desktop are a bad idea.  Nobody knows this concept better than I do.  Stardock, makers of ObjectDock, DesktopX, ObjectBar, Tiles, ControlCenter, Desktop Gadgets, etc. know something about this concept having been doing it for going on 15 years.  Weather temperature, stock prices, calendar info, news headlines and email notifications are what you’re going to get.  It’s what you always get.

Can someone really make the case that this is a good UX for a mouse using desktop user?

For 95% of the Windows 10 installed base, live tiles are, in effect, poorly made, gigantic icons.  If we thought that a wall of ugly icons was a good idea for UI, we would have had them years ago.  The only purpose for tiles is to make touch computing easier.  Of course, I would also point out that 2 color tiles are a bad UX as well.  Humans are great at recognizing patterns. The more distinction you can make from one tile to the next the better.  Instead, they all look roughly the same.

Bottom line

While the Windows 10 start menu is an improvement over Windows 8, it is still a substantial step back from what has previously been available.  I think it would be very hard, if not impossible, for someone to make the case that the Windows 10 start menu is better. From a sheer usability perspective, it objectively has less functionality while using substantially more resources and screen space.

Windows 10 is still a work in progress. Hopefully the problems in this article will get addressed before release.  For those who make that charge, I will remind them that when Start8 came out, people made that same argument – Windows 8 was still in beta and they would “surely” add the start menu back before release.  They didn’t.

I have seen the future and it is good.  I like Windows 10. A lot.

I’m not loving their Start menu and while there is hope it will improve, it is good to know that Start10 is available.

Here is the current Windows 10 build with their Start menu:

I have a lot of problems with this.  First off, most desktop users are using the start menu to get to their stuff.  Stuff is more than just apps.  The Windows 10 menu is a “Modern” app which means no context menus. No jump lists.  It also tries to jam in the old Start screen’s tiles.  The tiles are fine for a touch mobile device.  But in a menu? They serve no purpose other than for clutter. YMMV.

Here is my Windows 10 desktop with Stardock Start10 beta 1 installed:

Starting from left to right:

What I choose to pin onto my start menu is my business. I don’t need Microsoft or anyone else to tell me that this should be reserved for “places” (whatever that means).  I’d prefer MS to set it to “Pinned” and let users pin and unpin whatever they’d like there.  I am hoping that is their goal.  Right now, it’s not very configurable.

Going down, you will notice the arrows next to the apps. That’s the jump lists. I have no idea why Microsoft would remove such a useful feature. 

Jump lists are one of the best Microsoft innovations in UI.  They’re MIA in the current Windows 10 start menu. Maybe they’ll bring them back. I hope so.  But if they don’t, there’s Start10.

A picture is worth…

Just look at the two screenshots.  Honestly, which one would you prefer to use on your desktop? That’s really the ultimate answer.

You can get Start10 right now via Object Desktop. It’ll be available stand-alone this Spring for $4.99.

Website: https://www.stardock.com/products/start10

I am thinking of creating an Arena mode for the game where players could start and finish a game in 30 minutes.   I know some people, in fact, most people here are more into the really big maps (and we have those and they're getting more and more sophisticated -- wait till you see the big maps in beta 5) but I want to really sharped the game mechanics such that we can set up a game that has a lot of replayability and quickness.

This is an outgrowth of the conversation we're having on what the advanced setup options for the player should be.

Here are a bunch of advanced options that I've thought of and I'd like to see what others you guys have in mind (there's another thread that touche son this)

1. Doomsday mana from destroyed yards (set how much the doomsday counter goes up when a shard is destroyed)
2. Magic (the current slider) will determine how many shards there are in the world
3. Doomsday from heroes dying
4. Doomsday from passage of time (every 10 turns the doomsday counter currently goes up by 10 right now, this could be settable by the player)
5. Lieutenants (yes or no, if no, CRAFT the key)
6. World Health (how many fertile tiles are in the world)
7. Dire Shops (shops run by SK cronies where you can spend doomsday points to get certain, special equipment)

One of the things we were excited to add to GalCiv III was more detailed race customization.  This time around, we’ve made it a lot easier for people to create their own truly unique civilizations.

You can set your leader to be different from your species

Right now, you’re doing the eating but later, they’ll be eating you.

Of course, when making a GalCiv race you get to play AS that race and then later play against it if you so choose. So when designing them, you also can set up their AI personality.  It is in this way that players can

potentially have games with hundreds of players.

Why can’t they just be happy for me?

Unleashed into an unsuspecting galaxy

With your custom races, they can look at good or hideous as you’d like.  I suspect there will be a nice cottage industry of modders making cool looking races.

Not sure if the public beta has this yet but the AI is starting to interact more with the player.

More to come!

Re feedback:

1. Doomsday clock speed. I was thinking of hooking the Magic slider at the game setup to this. You would get less magic from the shards but the SK would get a less doomsday for breaking one. This would allow the player to have a great deal more say over the pacing of doomsday.

2. Empire building. This is a really good discussion because really, that is the crux of the argument for the game: Is the game about your EMPIRE or about the Party of heroes you're putting together? I.e. where should the focus be.

I don't think there's a "right" answer here other than to say that one direction will satisfy more people than others. I also think that there is a lot of wiggle room where more can be added to one without diluting the focus of the other.

For instance, I have been adding more types of administrators to the game as time has gone on. These administrators could be further enhanced to allow for more differentiation in the city.

Similarly, I'd like to see more magical spells that affect cities put into the game. I don't think I'd want to get into the farmer/worker/elvis scenario but instead would prefer to see the player be able to spend magic to enhance their city based on what tiles they have. 

Nevertheless, I do feel like there is room for expansion on the cities themselves but I suspect that would have to wait until post release where we can see the game is going to go.

3. Expansions. We have 3 expansions for this game planned over the next 3 years or so. What goes into them will be up to you guys. I can tell you that Sorcerer King is the beginning of a series and not the end of one.

4. Early game setup. One of the things I'd be interested in hearing from you guys on are "advanced setup" options for hard core players. Since I write the code that woul dhandle this, I would be delighted to put in interesting things here. So based on your hours in the game, what sorts of things would you want (besides Doomsday adjustments which I plan to handle through the magic slider).

5. Re Crafting vs. Finding. There seems to be a slight preference that works like this:

I should be able to craft up to great things. But AMAZING things should only be findable and rare. Would this represent your view?

-brad

I saw some people asking if they can monetize their streaming of Offworld Trading Company. The answer is yes. We have no problem with that.  Have fun!

I don't really have a dog in the console wars. Personally, I think both the new consoles are pretty outstanding from a hardware point of view.

That said, a few uncomfortable truths:

1. The PS4 hardware is better. Significantly. There's no amount of hand waving that make XBO's choice of DDR3 go away.
2. People are too hung up on hardware. Hardware mattered more in the 90s but software is king. All the HW in the world won't make a DirectX 9 game be able to deliver more than 10k batches per frame today.  
3. The visual difference between an XBO and a PS4 game are going to ultimately be trivial. 
4. DirectX 12 will make a big difference for the XBO in the long run.
5. Sony will almost certainy adopt the next OpenGL spec (or Mantle) which will even the playing field.
6. The graphics stacks on the PS4 and the XBO currently are not very parallel so there's a lot of room to grow.
7. The raw computing power of the XBO and PS4 is about 6 times the previous generation was.
8. The previous generation graphics stack never maximized the use of the hardware or came very close imo.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about DirectX 11 vs. DirectX 12 and how they worked.

Bottom line: DirectX 11 stuffs all the commands to the GPU through a single pipeline. DirectX 12 makes it parallel. In theory, you could see an Ntimes boost (N = number of cores). 

The article got a lot of coverage with some people arguing that such massive gains due to a platform change were impossible.

I had the advantage of knowing that Star Swarm was going to be benchmarked on DirectX 12 vs. DirectX 11: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8962/the-directx-12-performance-preview-amd-nvidia-star-swarm

In the AnandTech article: The AMD GPU (which is the brand the consoles use) got a 5X (500%) performance boost just by having the game (which was originally optimized for DirectX 11) updated to use DirectX 12 instead.

You can see their video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilVq4kRedcw. Note that this is just a quick engine demo. Having decent textures and such wouldn’t have affected the performance.

The software matters: DirectX 9 vs. DirectX 12 on same hardware

Hardware is only part of the picture and in fact, these days, a relatively small part of the picture.  The biggest monster machine I have available to me (Core I7 5960X with a Radeon R9 290X) is still going to top out at around 8000 batches on DirectX 9 for the typical developer.  On Mantle or DirectX 12, however, that same hardware can do >100,000 batches.

Terminology: Number of batches. 

This is how much information can be put on the screen in a given frame.  The more batches, the more sophisticated the scene. The next big debate will be how many batches does a scene need before the typical viewer will think it’s “real life”. they’re looking at.

You want >30FPs (or better yet over 60FPS) so then it’s just a matter of how many batches can you shove into a scene and keep it at that speed?

Batches directly tied to on screen sophistication

Look around your room. How many sources of light are there? I have 3 monitors and about a half dozen light bulbs in this room. Those lights are bouncing off drink glasses, my desk, the monitor, etc.

Now, how many light sources does a typical game today have? 4? I saw someone on a forum laughing because I didn’t know what I was talking about because they saw an example of 8 light sources. Eight. 

A real life battle scene would likely have hundreds or thousands of different light sources involved.  In a game today, only 4 (or EIGHT) of those lights are going to be real. You may not notice this but your brain will.  And that’s just lighting. Plus, real world temporal anti-aliasing, much greater material sophistication and all the other things that are pre-requisites to have something that looks real or at least not blatantly plasticy. And as Oxide’s Dan Baker points out, we haven’t really touched on lens effects.

Batch count survey

Best guesses below.  Would be great to get exact numbers from some enterprising game developer (hint hint).

This presumes 30fps at 720p.  I haven’t tried out DirectX 9 at 1920x1080 with that level card and am too lazy try to now.

Frames per second needs to die

FPS needs to die as a benchmark result.  Let us presume that 30fps or 60fps is a prerequisite at this stage of the game.  The question is therefore, how many batches per frame can a piece of hardware or software deliver and still hit those 2 minimum qualifiers?

Using FPS at this stage is like arguing processor power based on MHZ.

When is it Star Wars prequel level?

I got quoted as saying that by the end of the current console generation that you’ll have games that are able to do LOTR-like battle scenes.  I stand by that. I’m putting it here, in writing, on this blog so people can point back to it in a few years and see if I was right (or tragically wrong).

But we can have a useful debate on it now: Is 50,000 batches in a given frame enough to produce a scene of sufficient fidelity that the typical viewer will find it realistic?  We have had this debate internally a lot over the past year.  Our lead graphics dev says you’d really need more like 300,000 batches.  My position is that at 50,000 you reach well into the “good enough” range provided that the engine is doing a lot of optimizing (LOD, good use of built in hardware features, etc.).

I’m pretty sure this can be done with 50k batches at 24fps. They don’t even have real light. Seriously, go back and watch the prequels, most of their explosions might as well be cartoons.

This is very doable at 50k batches.

With smart LOD, yea, I think this can be done with 50k batches per frame to a level as to make the typical viewer not tell the difference. (this scene is admittedly vastly more sophisticated than that, look closely at the light reflections on the people then point and laugh at the Gungans above. It’s okay. They’re used to it.).

Next Up: TXAA, GPU computing

As GDC gets closer, I am going to try to dive into why Mantle, DirectX 12 and other upcoming architectures are a big deal besides just in making the screen prettier or faster in a given frame.

AMD and NVidia have some amazing features built into their hardware that are scarcely used because of the CPU to GPU bottleneck that is now being addressed.   In addition, a lot of interesting things start to become possible when the CPU and GPU total computing power can finally be effectively merged instead of segregated as they are currently.

Greetings! We need your help!

This year we have SIX games (not including Star Control) that are being released or going into early access this year.

We want to make sure we highlight the coverage these titles get on the major game sites that would traditionally cover these titles.

Please comment below on any sites you think I’m missing that have substantial traffic that you think are likely to cover PC games as well as ones you would like us to talk to.

Game Sites:

Game Sites:

Game Sites:

Game Sites:

Game Sites:

YouTubers / Let’s Play

YouTubers / Let’s Play

Also, if you see coverage, please add it to the comments. Thanks again!

Screenshots:

What: Sorcerer King: Build a kingdom in a world dominated by the malevolent Sorcerer King.
Who: From the team that made Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes.
When: Release date: March 2015

What: Galactic Civilizations III: You are the leader of an interstellar civilization that must expand into the galaxy.
Who: Er, the team who made Galactic Civilizations II.
When: Release date: April 2015

What: Offworld Trading Company: Build the most powerful company on Mars no matter what it takes.
Who: From the designer of Civilization IV
When: Early Access begins: February 2015

On deck:

[A] From the team that worked on Age of Empires I/II/III and Age of Mythology

[B] From the team that helped make Civilization IV, Civilization V, Railroads and much more.

[C] Stay tuned…

(and wait till you see what we have in store for 2016…)

***Updates***

2/23: Added The Escapist, Geeks With Wives, GWW GalCiv3 preview, Giant Bomb OTC preview video.

2/24: Added: Game Informer Test Chamber video (OTC), USGamer Soren Johnson interview, Day[9] to YouTube and OTC videos, IGN preview (OTC), added Kokatu and OTC article.

2/25: Added Destructiod OTC preview, Games Arena OTC preview

3/5: Added Servo and Ashes of the Singularity to the lists. Niche Gamer, IGN, PC Gamer, and GamesBeat previews. News posts from IGN and PCGamesN.

3/6: Added Game Informer preview.

3/9: Added The Escapist Ashes of the Singularity and Servo news.

3/11: Added PCGamesN news, RPS interview about OTC.

3/19: Added Niche Gamer Servo preview.

4/1: Added Servo preview from PCGamesN.

4/7: Added Ashes of the Singularity preview from PCGamesN, GameSpot OTC Early Access review.

4/10: Added GameSpot article about Ashes of the Singularity and Servo.

4/24: Added GameSpot video of Galactic Civilizations III.

4/27: Added IGN video of Galactic Civilizations III

5/8: Added PCGamesN interview for Galactic Civilizations III.

6/11: Added various Galactic Civilizations III reviews.

8/14: Added various Sorcerer King reviews

9/3: Added GameSpot review of Sorcerer King.