My old friend Steven Den Beste wrote this awhile back:

Let's talk about the Third Amendment for a moment. Remember that one? Probably not; in this day and age it's something of a Constitutional joke. "No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."

Remember now? The Bill of Rights which passed Congress had twelve clauses, and ten of them were almost immediately ratified by the states. Amendment Three was one of those. Why did they bother?

It's because memory of the Revolution was still current. It was only a few years after the Revolution succeeded, remember, and memory of British tyranny was still fresh. The British had done this, and the citizens of the nascent United States wanted to make sure their new government didn't.

The reason the colonies revolted was because the King of England was viewed as having become a tyrant. Having fought a bloody war to become free of his tyranny, the founders wanted to make sure the new government they created did not in turn become tyranny. Trading one tyrant for another wasn't what they had in mind. So the Constitution contains layers of mechanisms to try to prevent tyranny. And the last and best of these is the Second Amendment.

Remember how the shooting revolution began? The Battles of Lexington and Concord. Rebels in the Boston area had been stockpiling weapons, powder, and ammunition near Concord MA, and the British got wind of it and sent an armed column out from Boston to seize the stockpile. Superb espionage by rebel forces detected this, and word spread through the countryside for the militia (remember that word; it's important) which formed up and fought against the British force. The main battle was fought at Lexington MA, which repelled the British and caused them to retreat again back to Boston.

The "militia" was all able bodied men in the area, who were to show up with their own rifles (or muskets). Weapons of that era varied quite a lot, and of course they were muzzle-loaded using black powder. It took a lot of training to use such a weapon effectively (especially rifles, which were much more difficult to load than muskets) and that's why it was desireable that the men have their own weapons. It was assumed they already knew how to use them.

The earliest battles of the revolution were fought by such militia formations. Another was the Battle of Bunker Hill. It was only later that the Revolutionary Army was formed, and began training at Valley Forge.

Having just won their revolution, in which privately owned firearms played such a critical role, and mindful of the potential for their new government to potentially become tyrannical, the purpose of the Second Amendment was to make sure that the people of the United States would have the means to rise in revolt once again, should it become necessary.

That's what it's really about. It's not about hunting weapons; it's not about the "National Guard" (which isn't a militia). It's about everyday law-abiding citizens having the ability to resist a tyrannical government. And with that deterrent in place, we've managed 230 years without our government descending into tyranny (though it's come close).

 

I’m on as Draginol.

My love this game for so many reasons.  If you’re in it, friend me, it’s so much better when you are playing with friends.

For me, being “into” guns really adds to the enjoyment.  I am playing mostly as an engineer and I’ve upgraded to the ACW-R (Adaptive Combat Rifle) which, it turns out, I have in “real life” (though in real life it’s semi-automatic of course).  But it’s really cool to play the game with a weapon you actually own.

The game also has the CZ-75 pistol. I have that in real life but haven’t made it up the latter in the game yet to have it.

If you have BF4, look me up! Let’s play!

So I've continued to look into why it seems like the AI is able to get around monsters easier than humans.

I know what the code says but I also know what I see with my own eyes.  

I've finally reached a conclusion as to why it seems like AI players don't get attacked by monsters as much -- it's all in the movement.

Elemental games are based on a simulatenous move system. This is a hold-over from War of Magic which was a multiplayer game.  

The attacks, however, occur based on hit detection. That is, a unit moves into a tile, it sees if there is a unit there and if so, a hit occurs and that is worked out.

If human beings were fast enough, they could avoid getting attacked by monsters simply by moving their unit before the monster moves into that tile. As a practical reality, humans aren't fast enough.  But you know who are? Computer players.  

Picture this scenario:

for i = 1 to number_of_players

MoveUnitsforPlayer(i)

Where the monster player is the last player to move.

So what happens is that a monster will target say a pioneer on turn 50.  On turn 51, the AI player moves its unit and the monster moves to the tile the AI unit was in (missing it). This is exacerbated when they are off screen since movement is instant when there's nothing to animate.

That said, I can assure you that the monsters do attack cities just as often as human players. Statistically, it's the same amount and I have added code so that the AI will occasionally when when one of its cities gets destroyed by monsters to better communicate that yea, the AI has a real problem with monsters city-wise.

But unit wise, it's going to take some thought on how to do this.  Most of the easy solutions would result in late game turns taking much longer (everyone moving at once is great).

I may, just to be a bastard, reverse the order of moving so that the monsters move first.

I brought in frames of honey and extracted the honey from them. I then took the depleted frames back outside and soon discovered that the bees had followed me home.

Deadly Foes update released!

v1.4

Stardock is proud to announce the release of v1.4 of Legendary Heroes, the expansion to Fallen Enchantress. Version 1.4 adds dozens of significant enhancements to the game including but not limited to:

• The original Fallen Enchantress scenario has been added
• A host of new summoning spells
• Enhanced AI for handling the new summoning spells
• Significant improvements to late-game performance for multi-core PC players
• Rebalancing of monsters
• Stability improvements
• and more!

Elemental is a fantasy strategy game set in a time where civilization is trying to recover from a devastating cataclysm. Stardock released the second game in the Elemental series in 2012 (Fallen Enchantress) to positive reviews and a terrific player response. The Legendary Heroes expansion, released this past spring, refined the game mechanics of Fallen Enchantress.

Stardock has continued to improve and enhance the popular expansion with regular updates.

For the Complete Change Log: https://forums.elementalgame.com/448478

To Get Elemental: Fallen Enchantress and Legendary  Heroes go here:  https://www.elementalgame.com/fallen-enchantress/purchase

To learn more about Elemental visit: www.elementalgame.com

Screenshots:

Stardock’s Launch8 is a program that should, imo, have been part of Windows 8 in the first place.  On every other mobile device you have some sort of persistent quick launch bar that makes it easy to get to the things you use all the time.

Not only does Launch8 had this persistent, easy to use launcher to the bottom of the Windows 8 Start screen, it integrates the usability features first introduced into Windows 7 such as Jump-lists (Which should matter more than ever on a touch device!).

Launch8, like Start8, ModernMix, Decor8, WindowBlinds, Fences, etc. are all part of Stardock’s premiere desktop enhancement suite, Object Desktop.

To learn more about Launch8 go to www.stardock.com/products/launch8

I love Stardock. I really do. But I’ve been seeing someone else for the past year or so…

I don’t know exactly how it started.  But I was talking to friends of mine in the industry and we’ve all been frustrated with the direction of 3D game engines.   The hardware has been there for awhile that would allow us to have some amazing looking visuals and performance for strategy and role playing games but the software just wasn’t there. They’ve been focusing on first person shooters to the point where even RPGs now have to be made as first person shooters in order to have decent visuals (which if you think about it, is ridiculous).

Remember the huge battles in Two Towers and Return of the King? We should be able to have those kinds of visuals in our games. Today. Your modern video card is capable of it. You take 64-bit, DirectX 11 (or Mantle) and a modern video card and you can do amazing things in theory. Unfortunately, the software has tended to focus on first person shooters. In those games, the player only sees a handful of units at the same time.  Ask someone at Nvidia, AMD or Intel and they will tell you how frustrating it’s been to create this amazing hardware only to have it sit there idle most of the time.

So what could we do about that? That’s where I started talking more and more to Dan Baker, Tim Kipp, Brian Wade, Marc Meyer and later Nathan Heazlett.  What would it take to develop a new type of 3D engine that we could use and others could use to power strategy games and role playing  games where you could have thousands and thousands of high fidelity objects on screen at the same time. 

That’s where the idea of Oxide was born.  If we could bring together some of the industry’s top talent, put them in a room and provide them with enough resources, we could create something amazing. We’re calling the engine Nitrous and it’s spectacular. If you look at the the Oxide press release you will see quotes from AMD, Intel and Nvidia in there. They’ve seen it. And soon, so will you.

Today, we are finally ready to tell the world about Oxide. Mainly, we have to because some of the things we’re working are are about to get shown by our partners and people would wonder who and what Oxide was and where it came from.

Most game developers, especially ones involved in graphical game development, know, or can imagine, exactly the kinds of things Oxide is working on. But for everyone else who is reasonably technical, imagine a brand new, built from scratch, 3D engine designed with multicore processors and 64-bit from the ground up. No legacy code. No baggage.  Just pure awesome. 

To learn more about Oxide, visit www.oxidegames.com

I was playing Galactic Civilizations II last night. I hadn’t played it in a very long time and was stunned by just how much…awesome it has in it.  That awesomeness didn’t come from the original design. It came from years and years of iteration and frankly, labors of love.

The problem I see with Legendary Heroes is that it’s really hard to do iteration like that.  After all, it’s technically Elemental: Fallen Enchantress – Legendary Heroes. It’s a mouth full.  No one calls GalCiv II “Twilight of the Arnor”. It’s just called GalCiv.

But Elemental got off to such a rocky start that for good or bad, we don’t really call it Elemental anymore.  If the quality and fandom that supports Legendary Heroes could somehow be applied to Elemental that would be great.  But it’s not. It’s barely applied to Fallen Enchantress.

Frankly, from a purely a branding perspective – i.e. the THING that people remember playing, we basically call it Legendary Heroes.  It’s just really hosed up.

Then you have the DLC situation.  The DLC for Legendary Heroes doesn’t just sell well. It sells insanely well. There’s a huge demand for it because the installed base of the game we call Legendary Heroes (but is really Elemental: Fallen Enchantress – Legendary Heroes) keeps growing.

I know some people don’t care about the name.  But the reality is, the single biggest thing holding LH back is the brand confusion.  I’ve seen people on various forums say that LH is probably the best fantasy 4X that is currently available (though Age of Wonders 3 is looking pretty awesome). 

So we have this great fantasy game that we have the budget to keep iterating on that is artificially held down because no one really knows what to call it.

This past year we’ve been working to make the Windows 8 desktop more productive with Start8 and ModernMix.  Now, for users who live and play in the Windows 8 Metro environment, we have a new app coming: Launch8.

Launch8 adds a quick launch bar to the Windows 8 Start screen that is persistent as the user scrolls (as seen on iOS and Android).

Launch8 on the bottom

Launch8 set to be at the top

Launch8 will automatically be added to all active Object Desktop user accounts and be available stand-alone for $4.99.

My daughter said the Raptors don’t like to be pet.