Disclaimer:
This is an example of a game of Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes. For my own personal enjoyment, I create my own backstories and motivations for what occurs in a given game. In reality, Fallen Enchantress games are played in a “sandbox”. That is, the world is randomly generated and what happens changes from game to game. This story is about one particular game. The world you see described here will never happen again nor will the events ever be repeated because e...
Putting aside the debate over whether the I in Into is capitalized or not, the movie was terrific.
No spoilers in this post.
Having managed to avoid spoilers going into the theater I was surprised again and again as the movie progressed. It’s very much a character driven story. Sure, there are some great special effects and some surprisingly detailed depictions of Earth in the 23rd century (more than I think we’ve ever gotten in a Star Trek film).
Because of the massi...
Understand, I love Starcraft. But I finally got to the point where I can’t play it anymore and have fun. I’m a low-level “Gold” league player. And the problem (for me) is that at a certain point, it’s really about the micro of the units. I managed to get to the level I was at because I’m pretty good at macro – I play as a virus that is always trying to spread across the map and unless you counter me consistently, it’ll eventually all be mine.
But at a certain point –...
Our background orchard has an apriary. I lost most of my hives this past year. Some of it due to CCD and some of it due to kids with too much time on their hands who come over and knock over the beehives from time to time (and tear off the no trespassing signs). I could probably write a lengthy article on the cultural rot of upper-middle class teenagers who don’t have jobs, have never had to do anything and have a lot of free time to get into trouble. But that’s a different topic..
...
3D Printing seems to have crossed a major mile stone in that a start-up, called Defense Distributed, has used a 3D printer to create a working gun. It’s still mostly a curiosity since the cost to make such a gun and that it isn’t yet very robust still keeps it firmly in the early adopter era.
So here’s what I’ve found out so far :
No matter which printer you get, the materials for it are currently over $100 a pound. To me, that makes it fairly impractical for most uses. I could imagine...
Once upon a time… Thousands of years ago, the world of Elemental was filled with magic. This was the time of the Magi. In their quest to create ever more powerful magical devices, the Magi foolishly created The Forge of the Overlord. It allowed its users to bend the fabric of reality entirely. It also brought their world to the attention of the Dred'nir, immortal Titans who lived beyond the world. They arrived and utterly destroyed the Magi and enslaved manki...
Ok. So who’s going to see this?
So far, I’ve managed to stay spoiler free.
Stardock’s lead game developer, Cari “Elf” Begle, who led the effort in Galactic Civilizations I, The Political Machine, Galactic Civilizations II and part of Fallen Enchantress (until she went on maternity leave) will be leaving us on May 1 to focus on being a mom. She’s one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met. She’s an amazing developer, a kind hearted person and is always eager to take on new challenges. She was the one who did most of our network programming (including the multi...
My wife and I saw this on Friday. I won’t put any spoilers in this post but suffice to say I was fairly disappointed. Tom Cruise did about all he could do with it and the production values were amazing but the story fell flat for me.
6/10.
Stardock is pleased to announce that the release date to the expansion to its popular fantasy strategy game, Fallen Enchantress has been set as Wednesday, May 22nd.The expansion, Fallen Enchantress – Legendary Heroes, picks up where Fallen Enchantress left off. The world of Elemental is seeing new monsters invading the land and new champions have arisen to aid the player in their quest to bring order and civilization back to the people.The expansion is loaded with new features including a ...
Stardock is pleased to announce that the release date to the expansion to its popular fantasy strategy game, Fallen Enchantress has been set as Wednesday, May 22nd.The expansion, Fallen Enchantress – Legendary Heroes, picks up where Fallen Enchantress left off. The world of Elemental is seeing new monsters invading the land and new champions have arisen to aid the player in their quest to bring order and civilization back to the people.The expansion is loaded with new features including a ...
There are two main problems game developers, particularly *strategy* game developers are trying to deal with these days:
1. Memory
and
2. Feeding the GPU
There's almost a third which involves CPU starvation which has to do with the poor way we handle our data structures but that's a lesser issue.
Now, with regards to memory, we can say all day that graphics shouldn't matter but they do. Forums are full of people saying how much they still like some old game but the...
I was struck by how many Steve Jobs biographers have emphasized how important it was that Jobs got kicked out of Apple. That experience changed him and in the long-run, made him a much better businessman.
Pride before the fall is a truism and even being aware of it doesn’t prevent one from falling into into that trap.
Right now, as I write this, Stardock is doing better than at any time in its history. But it’s only doing so well now because of changes we made 3 years ago. Because 3 ye...
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Walt Disney recently and he tale is both amazing and quintessential. His professional life was a conflict between his desire to do amazing work with the challenges of running a business.
Early in his career, Disney was devoted to moving “cartooning” into being a serious art. His first true sound cartoon, the famous Steamboat Willy, required the invention of numerous new technologies in order to synchronize the sound with the animation. It was ...