Greetings! I hope you had a Merry Christmas.

Preliminaries

http://youtu.be/QIWyf8Hyjbg

(note that the video demo of “Star Swarm” was from November, it looks even better now, we were able to throw that together in basically a month or so with Nitrous).

Now…

I have a confession to make. For the past year I’ve been seeing other people.  Don’t get me wrong, I still love Stardock. It’s what I still spend most of my time on. But as the next couple of years are going to make apparent, the game industry has entered a new age.  The age of 64bit, multi-core games has finally arrived.  And I’m lucky enough to be able to work with and help some of the best talent in our industry convert the potential of this age into actual new games.

Two gaming genres in particular are poised to leap ahead thanks to having more memory and more cores available to developers:

(1) Strategy games.  Strategy games hit the 32-bit memory limit a decade ago.  That’s because unlike a first person shooter, we have to keep the entire game world and all units in memory all the time. As a result, strategy games have had to get simpler and simpler in order to be visually competitive.

(2) Role Playing Games. Role playing games, in order to be visually competitive, have had to switch to being in first-person mode.  But with 64-bit and multiple cores combined with a new engine that utilizes them we can create living breathing worlds of massive scope and depth.

How we got started

About 18 months ago I was talking to friends of mine who had developed the engine for Civilization V. Everyone in our industry is painfully familiar with hard limit of 32-bit memory and the old DirectX 9 age limitations.  

Unlike my friends, there was nothing I could do on my own about it. I couldn’t write a 3D engine to save my life. But they had been giving the problem a lot of thought. The problem they faced was that starting a new company that would take multiple years to create a new 3D engine was very risky.  How would you explain to people why you didn’t just license Unreal or Unity or something else?

This is where combining our capabilities together has made something wonderful happen. As the CEO of Stardock and principle stock holder, I have the opportunity to still take risks. Except, in my mind, I didn’t see it is a big risk because I knew the people involved.

Oxide is born

So a little over a year ago, in secret, we started a company called Oxide Games.  Our mission: to build a next-generation 3D engine that can handle  thousands of high fidelity objects on screen simultaneously. The goal would be to be able to show a battle from say Lord of the Rings with the same fidelity and same quantity of units but in real-time.

The rendering system would be different as well. Since we were starting from scratch with multiple cores, 64-bit and DirectX 11 as basic requirements, the team could design an engine that rendered the same way that CGI in movies are rendered except in this case, in real-time.  As a result (and you really have to see it to believe it) the actual visuals look…different than what you may be used to seeing in a game. Even in the Star Swarm demo, which is a very simple, quickly made example, the movement, the lighting, etc. look like a movie scene rather than a computer game. There is no particle effect system. Instead, every laser blast, every light, every effect is an object. 

Click on this to see a larger version. Notice how things look blurred? That’s not me moving the camera. It’s motion and it’s not a post-processor effect.

With SWARM (i.e. every core gets used) you can do cool things like have moving turrets on every ship in the universe with their own physics. Look closely at this shot.

The team in action

To give you a better background on the amazing engineering talent at Oxide check this page out: http://www.oxidegames.com/about. 

For instance, Dan Baker was the guy who led the effort at Microsoft on HLSL for DirectX 10 which is what our industry uses now.  Tim Kipp has developed 3D procedural engines for Microsoft, Firaxis and the military. You’ll be hearing a lot about procedural based content generation in the next few years. If 64-bit/Multicore is today’s revolution, procedural generation is the one on deck.  Marc Meyer is the guy who largely invented the technology that many of us in the industry have borrowed from in terms of how to create dynamic user interfaces in games. As someone who’s passionate about user interfaces (don’t confuse UI design with the underlying tech that makes them possible) I can tell you that what Marc has done is crucial for game developers. Historically, making UI in games has been a huge pain. Marc’s work is making UI creation a treat. Brian Wade was my counterpart at Firaxis. He was the lead developer on Civilization V and is specialized in AI engineering (what AI do at Stardock is slightly different in that I’m responsible for the engineering and the design, at Firaxis their AI structure was a bit different).  Brian is a much much better developer than I am.

Last Fall, Stardock announced that Derek Paxton was taking over day-to-day leadership of Stardock Entertainment. Now you know why. Derek’s amazing talent as the head of the studio allows me to work on projects like Oxide. For the next 2+ years, I’ll be the “interim CEO” of the company while we take Nitrous and turn it into something that can be licensed to third parties (we’re not remotely ready for licensing yet) as well as make it into something that Stardock and its studio network are able to utilize to make truly awesome new games. 

I don't know about you but when I get time off of work, I end up thinking about lots of random things.

In no particular order:

• Very proud of the people my kids are becoming.
• 20 year wedding anniversary is in a few months. Gotta start thinking about what to do about that.
• Very excited about some January announcements Stardock will be making
• I wish I had more time for skinning
• I am addicted to Battlefield 4.
• I suck at Battlefield 4
• I am grateful for the friends I have.
• I wish I had created an alias to debate and participate on our forums rather than making people uncomfortable by posting as myself.
• We're taking care of Paul Boyer's (GalCiv III lead designer) dog for the break. She's incredibly sweet.
• Soren's new game may be the funnest game I've ever played and yet I have no way to describe it as there's nothing similar.
• I can't believe how good the development tools have gotten over the past few years.
• I need to tell Spyed (deviantART) that my sons are using his site independently of me.
• The Russian Tortoises ate all the foliage in their terrarium while I was in Maryland last week.
• I need to wrap the bee hives still for the Winter. They don't really need it but it helps keep them warm.
• It was probably a bad idea to give myself a haircut yesterday. 

What do you do if your troll husband gets banned from a forum for being an obnoxious dick? Well, most people might ask their husbands what has gotten into them. Why would they put so much effort to alienate people that they would get kicked out of a forum that they’ve spent years on?

But if you’re Angie Gallant and you run a site dedicated to smearing other people, you respond by putting up a fake review of the book written by the person who was the target of your husband’s trolling. In Crazy Land, this apparently makes sense.

Angie Gallant, aka The Unamommer managed to summon enough bile to write a multi-page trashing of my little fantasy book I had written.  Let me emphasize this, she chose to target me specifically because of her husband’s obsession. I had done nothing to her (or her husband for that matter).  To this day, I have no idea how I became the focus of their family’s obsession.  Since 2010, she’s only had time to crap on 3 books (including mine) so the choice of going after me was no coincidence. Her husband got banned, she decided to blame the victim of her husband’s relentless trolling and spew forth her venom in a review that was presented as objective to the unwary.

One could almost respect her misdirected bile if it weren’t so petty, small and nasty.  While one could argue the strengths and weaknesses of the book all day, I will say this: Her venom is mostly directed at the grammar in the book and a political subtext that only exists in her imagination. Mind you, this is a book that was edited and published by Del Rey and had the same editors as Game of Thrones.  Anyone, including myself, can pick out bits and pieces of the book to ridicule but the same can be said for pretty much any book.  She doesn’t really target the story or the characters very much.  One hopes she hasn’t read Huckleberry Finn or we’d need to get her a fainting couch.

While it’s pointless to discuss the subjective merits of my book, I think it’s safe to say that the average reader would probably find her criticisms much more enlightening if they knew that they were written in response to her husband’s banning from a popular gaming forum. 

To illustrate some of the absurdities of her “review” let me point out a few lines from it to give you a taste.

Yes, he wants to build a border fence to keep the dark people and mutants out, and if that doesn’t work, he wants to burn the magical bridge.

If you’re bat shit insane enough, I suppose anything can be read into everything. In the book, there is no fence. There are no mutants. The people she represents as “dark people” are actually very light gray. I suppose you could call the bridge “magical” in the sense that the bridge has enchantments on it to make it more robust. 

So how does her interpretation match with the actual book? You have a continent that has been split into two. On the West side are the Kingdoms of Men and on the East side you have light-gray skinned beings called the Fallen.  Think of them essentially as Orcs from that well known white supremacist series called Lord of the Rings.

Now, you might wonder, how did she somehow imagine this story as some sort of illegal immigration allegory? That brings us back as to why her husband (and later her) got banned. There are right wingers. There are left wingers. And then we have…well I don’t know how to describe them. But to them, everything is seen through the eyes of politics.

To give you an idea, our olive-skinned hero is described as a “minority”. I kid you not. On a fantasy world we now have identity politics.  Here’s a quote:

There’s also the Handsome Knight Who Is Secretly A Titan and the Token Member Of The Minority With Special Powers…[emphasis mine]

A “Token Member Of The..” Now, I want to point out here that we have someone who’s lampooning my book because of my grammar while At The Same Time Is Capitalizing Every Word In A Sentence. I could go into some detail that most of her grammatical trashing has to do with the inner monologues of characters who speak in their own distinct ways but that would be too easy.

Let’s imagine a book where the good guys have built a fortress, let’s call it Minas Tirith. The fortress is built to keep an eye out for any hint that the bad guys, long defeated, might come back.  A normal person would probably not think twice about that.  But if you’re a left-wing moonbat you might write:

There’s even a point where one character, the lord of a white person keep built on the non-white people continent, has thoughts on how he would like to resolve the matter. [emphasis mine]

That’s an actual quote. The evil white people are stealing land from who? The native Elementians? What?

You see, in her mind, the land is divided based on skin color.  We have white people and “non-white” people (even though the Fallen are actually lighter than most of the Kingdoms of Men in Elemental and in fact some of the Kingdoms of Men are very dark skinned but that wouldn’t fit her narrative).  She probably realized at some point that crapping on the book for sentence structure of the inner monologues of different characters was too ridiculous to swallow and thus had to insert some bizarre racist/bigot subtext in order to justify her screed. 

What’s funny is that I’ve seen her and her friends talk about how it’s not cool to go after people in “real life”.  Apparently, that rule didn’t apply to me. I mean, I deserve to be hated because, I…because…um, I don’t share her political views I guess (I’m one of those evil libertarian types – look out or I’ll advocate that the government not do anything to you!). Therefore, I deserved to be trolled on a video game site and when her husband got banned for it (not at my request mind you, I had nothing to do with his banning) she decided to try to strike at me in a way that would hit home. 

So why do I bring this up now? Because, ironically, 3 years later I still hear bullshit from people who hear I wrote a “racist” book.  My fun little fantasy book, was twisted by her and her ilk into being something it’s not.  I had years and years of notes and concepts for the book in question.  It is a world and a story that I’ve long wanted to share and it has nothing to do with politics or race.

While I suspect she’s incapable of any degree of empathy, can you imagine how exciting it would be to have a book you’ve dreamed of writing be published by Random House only to have someone orchestrate a trashing of it because their husband got banned from a forum after they, for reasons no one understands why, trolled you for months?  It’s not like I did something to these people. 

In my career I’ve dealt with a lot of criticism. Some justified, some not. This was a case where someone went out of their way to target me in the hopes of harming me well outside some forum discussion.  And guess what? It worked. Congratulations.  Her and her friends managed to get my book review score down to 3 stars.  I have no idea what score my book would have “naturally” got.  But a half dozen 1-star reviews, led by her husband and with followers from her blog certainly ensured we’d never find out.  At various times, I considered organizing a counter to it. With millions of people to reach out to, it would be relatively easy to get a couple hundred positive reviews. But I decided not to. Whatever score it got, trolls and all, is what it got. I won’t even link to it here to emphasize I’m not trying to encourage reviewing it (it’s irrelevant now, 3 years on, nobody cares anymore about the book itself).

Anyone who’s played any of the Elemental games knows there’s no political overtones to them.  You could criticize it for not innovating on the classic fantasy tropes (Trogs and Urxen being various types of Orcs for instance) but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

What amazes me, is that someone who is supposedly a functional adult, a parent even would take the banning of their husband’s as an opportunity to put time and energy into trying to harm someone who had done nothing to her or her husband.  In hindsight, I should have vigorously responded to her disgusting, obnoxious and petty review.  You can’t let this crap stand or else it’ll take on a life of its own. It’s not a mistake I’ll be repeating.

Greetings!

I just wanted to give you guys a quick update on where things stand with Galactic Civilizations III.

Internally, the game is fully playable at this stage (except the AI is really stupid at this point as we won’t really get started on that until January). 

While this isn’t a promise, we anticipate the Alpha version being made available in late February.  Those of you with Founder’s Elite access will receive a Steam code around that time and be able to download it.  We expect the beta version (the standard Founder’s Edition) will go out in the Spring.

The Alpha version will be very rough still, as you can imagine. Here’s what it WILL NOT have in it:

• Ship Design
• Different tech trees per civilization
• The cool reporting stuff
• Multimedia (i.e. no cut scenes, etc.0
• No fleet battles (battles will be handled automatically on the main map ala Civilization or GalCiv I)
• No diplomacy (it’s war all day, all the time).

In many respects, it’ll be a very different game since it’s a pure war game.

However, the Alpha WILL HAVE:

• Multiplayer
• The core game mechanics (minus the ones I mentioned or ones related to the ones I mentioned)
• Some basic AI intelligence at war fighting

Now, in the past, we tried to make the betas not fun.  However, this time around, we are striving for the alpha to be playable even though it’ll be extremely limited. But we are going to try to treat each phase of the game’s development as a test of the game’s fun. We are not going to treat it as a painful crapfest (which is what we’ve done in the past with our other games). 

In other words, the alpha is not designed as a technology preview. The Founders should absolutely post their complaints on game play and fun levels as long as they keep in mind that the other stuff (fleet battles, diplomacy, trade, culture, etc.) are on the way.

Cheers!

My day job is in Michigan at the Stardock building in Plymouth (just outside Ann Arbor).  But we’ve got a bunch of activity going on in the Baltimore area with the launch of Oxide Games and Mohawk Games.

Rather than living in hotels for weeks at a time, I decided that we would buy a house in Maryland (Towson).  If you know any game developers or artists in Maryland who are looking to work on really cool stuff, apply here: https://www.stardock.com/about/careers.asp

Ignore what the page says, it just hasn’t been updated.  If you’re a game developer or an artist with a lot of experience looking for a place that provides a lot of job stability (we’re 20 years old and on with almost no turn over) then look us up! The closer to Towson MD or Plymouth you are, the better.

Over the past 20 years there has been a lot of changes in how games are made.   When I first got started, I had Deluxe Paint, Vista Pro and graph paper as my non-compiler tools.

My latest, favorite gadget is the Wacom Cintiq which lets me, very quickly, whip up UI designs to pass on to the team for critique.  Below is a screenshot of a UI mockup for something we’re working on.

Greetings!

For those of you not familiar with our Elemental game universe here it is in brief:

Elemental is a fantasy world made up of many different civilizations vying for control the world. There is a great deal of history and lore to tap into and we decided to begin making games in this world back with 2010s release of War of Magic.  Unfortunately, when it came out, it was pretty buggy and got some negative reviews. We fixed the bugs but the game itself was still pretty meh.

So in 2012, we released the second game in the Elemental universe called Fallen Enchantress which was good and we're pretty proud of that game.  We followed it up with an expansion pack called Legendary Heroes that further refined the Fallen Enchantress game mechanics.

We do intend to follow Fallen Enchantress with a third strategy game in the Elemental universe but it'll be very different from either War of Magic or Fallen Enchantress as it focuses largely on, well I can't really go into that yet. 

When Fallen Enchantress was released, we discontinued War of Magic. I don't think it's available for sale anywhere anymore.  My question is, would anyone be interested in us revisiting War of Magic in the future to release a kind of "War of Magic: Director's Cut" or something where we refined the WOM game design, updated the visuals.

WOM had some interesting game mechanics such as a pretty big emphasis on a dynasty system and a number of other distinctive mechanics that could be refined further.

Let us know what you think. Would we be opening up "old wounds" or would be restoring faith to those who believed in the original "not-MOM" concept?

vs.

Actual impressions (putting aside the specs)

• PS4 has a much better controller
• XBOX One has slightly less sucky launch titles
• XBOX One UI is more powerful
• XBOX One has integrated Skype (this is actually quite useful)
• PS4 has much better indie games market
• I can’t visually tell the difference in graphics between them (I know the specs, I’m just saying in real world, I can’t tell the difference so far)

Got any questions? I’ll answer as best I can.

I haven’t got to design an AI since…well 2006.  It’s been a long time and the Stardock games team of 2013 is insanely awesome and the tech is just amazing too.

Now, I programmed the AI in Legendary Heroes and helped on the AI in Fallen Enchantress (I wrote worker functions for War of Magic).  But I haven’t got to sit down and make something from scratch since GalCiv II.

And wow, things are so much better now.  Virtualization, lots of cores to handle threads (GalCiv II was written for a single core with 1 hyperthread).  The things I can do now are, well they’re just plain sick.

While I am quite proud of the AI in Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, it was something I had to retrofit onto Elemental: War of Magic. It was a miracle to get it to work as well as it does because War of Magic was single threaded.  I had to make it multithreaded after the fact (if there are any programmers here, please feel free to comment to explain how nasty that is).

In GalCiv III, the AI is able to operate on a virtual machine version of the game state. So I can monkey around in real-time without it affecting other players. I can not only have every computer player have its own thread, I can have different components of the AI have their own threads and in multiplayer, I can distribute the work up across the different players.

There’s a lot more too. From crowd sourcing ship designs, tech tree strategies, planetary improvement strategies, etc. to throwing raw number crunching stuff onto the player’s video card.  We’ve come a long way from 2006.

It's Thanksgiving!

And I have a lot to be thankful for.  In no particular order, here are some things that I am very very thankful for.

#1 My Wife and kids.

My wife and I have been together over 20 years. I love her so much. We met in college during an..incident in EE lab (you do not want me to work on anything that actually involves electricity).  Since then, we've had 3 wonderful children.  I am very thankful for them in ways that I think many can appreciate.  My two sons love video games and are now old enough to play games with me.  In my office we have 3 PCs where we play as a squad in BF4 and played Diablo 3 together.  My daughter is sweet, kind and smart as a whip. She's the one who can tell when I'm stressed and will give me the kind of hug that only a 7 year old little girl can provide.

My wife loves Christmas. She's one of those people. But I tell ya, having someone with a pure, genuine joy for the holidays is contagious.  She's brilliant, beautiful and wonderful. 

#2 My friends

There have been some tough times for my family and I these past few years.  As some of you know, there was a frivolous lawsuit filed against me a couple years back that accused me of a laundry list of disgusting but totally false allegations. My friends, especially those who were familiar with the events, were very important to me in a world where lots of strangers were eager to jump on the hate bandwagon.  While victory in that case brought some vindication, it was my friends (and family) that carried the day for me.  I am very thankful for them.  

#3 My colleagues

This is kind of a repeat of #2.  I really enjoy the people I work with. They really are more than just coworkers. They're my friends too. I really enjoy talking to them. They're fun, interesting, and fascinating.  I get to go to work with them every day or interact with them online. It brings something to my life that I am very thankful for. They make every day an adventure.

#4 My health

This is totally selfish but I never want to take for granted that I have been blessed with unusually good health. When I look at the material success I've been able to achieve I never forget that my God given health was a prerequisite for this.  Never being tired, never having a cold, flu, or other physical obstacle makes a lot of things possible and helps keep me somewhat grounded as reminding me that my success isn't due only to my own hard work or cleverness but also a roll of the cosmic dice.

#5 YOU GUYS!

I am a creature of the Internet. I make no apologies for this. I've been continuously online since 1986 when I was involved in BBSes.  I know I say things on the record that get me into trouble from time to time. But that is part of the experience. I am thankful that I have the opportunity to talk directly to the people who like our software or play our games or about anything else under the sun. It is, and I mean this, the single biggest motivation I have to keep doing what I do.  Take away the ability to talk to you guys and I would have retired by now. There is no business reason for me to keep writing computer AI, for instance. In fact, it's problematic in that it keeps me from my CEO responsibilities. But it keeps me in the trenches talking to you guys and I love it.

No matter where you are, I hope this message finds you well. Thank you for sharing your lives with me. I want you to know I really appreciate it. It matters. You matter. Have a happy Thanksgiving!