Far be it for me to invite scorn and ridicule on our hard work in the form of Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor but let's face it, GalCiv has long since stopped being any sort of traditional "product". We love working on it. If I didn't work at Stardock, I'd be modding it in my spare time. But I do work at Stardock so that means I still get to mod it in my spare time but I have the source code.
That said, in this post can you list the 5 things you would ...
Tonight (4:28am so technically this morning) I'm hanging out on the GalCiv II forums between compiles.
The above is the issue editor for The Political Machine 2008. In it, I must go through every conceivable issue, write a description and then put in the values.
The values on position are between -10 (strongly against) and positive 10 (strongly in favor). The other variable (new in this version) is how important the issue is which is on a scale from 1 to 10.
I also ha...
We're in crunch mode and yet I have a lot of free time too. That's the nature of development in crunch mode - hurry up and wait. Right now, I'm waiting for some changes to the issues editor so that I can begin putting in new political issues for The Political Machine 2008.
Hard to believe that this UI was done with DesktopX 3.5. The game is going gold in about a month and there's a lot to do to get it ready. We've got pre-orders from most of the major retailers so ...
Well today I've got a lot of coding and forum work to do. We released Twilight of the Arnor and people seem happy. But I'm not convinced that all the final strings got in (i.e. tech descriptions). And while we did release the info guide and a twilight manual, I want to keep updating them as well as hang out on the forums answering questions and helping.
Unfortunately, my middle right finger is swollen up. As some of you know, I keep bees. I've got 6 honey bee hives this ye...
Our friends at Ironclad are experiencing first hand what it means to make a 4X game that has really good multiplayer.
Each time we do an update, users (almost exclusively hard core multiplayer users) come out and make posts decrying this or that change to the game. To the casual visitor of the site, you'd think the sky had fallen "1.03 is ruined!" or "We need an emergency patch!" but when you actually look at the content of the post, it's always some trivial tweak that users believe has...
We have something pretty cool being cooked up for The Political Machine 2008. It ties in with www.joeuser.com as well.
Check out http://beta.politicalmachine.com
At the end of the day, the people who "do stuff" will always have the advantage over the people who "don't do stuff". Pirates are slowly motivating ever increasing levels of DRM and in time, I hate to say it, DRM is going to win. That's because the people motivated to make the DRM work (the people who do stuff) greatly outnumber the motivation of the people who don't do stuff.
One can easily picture a future in 5 years in which the telecoms, the PC makers, the OS makers, and...
In the 15 years or so I've been making games I've found that there are three types of reviewers. That's a gross over simplification of course but I'm a grossly oversimplified kind of guy.
Drive-ByersThe first type of reviewer is the drive-by reviewer. If you're an indie developer, you are more apt to run into this. That's the review that makes you feel like, as you read it, that they were miffed having to take a time out from their first person shooter to play some lit...
A friend of mine at a big game studio once told me to be wary of giving users the impression that your design is open to heavy modification by user feedback.
Because in the end, you'll never satisfy everyone and it'll put people in the mode of thinking about game flaws that they might not have given much thought of otherwise -- and then suddenly those flaws bug them.
It akin to peer reviews in offices. For awhile, it was popular to have peers review each other. But then it was discovered ...
I hate doing demos. There, I've said it.
The reason I hate it is that you usually have to pick between a demo that people like and a demo that actually sells the game. It's tough to find that balance.
The best game demo we ever did was The Corporate Machine. In that demo, it was fully playable but you had to play on-line against other people. It was great because people got to see what the game was like and played people on-line. Of course, it required them to find people on-li...
As some people know, you can already mod Galactic Civilizations II quite heavily. We have a basic modding guide already up. The coolest mods are going probably going to involve the ship stuff. I've already seen people putting in high-polygon models that look really cool. All you have to do is load up Maya or 3D Studio, make your ship model or part or whatever and export it as a .X. Hard points are just dummy nodes that we did with 3D Studio. There's no polygon...
As some have noticed, we've been pretty much living in the forums. The support team has been keeping statistical track of how many users run into problem X, Y, Z.
In our non-game stuff, any serious problem that affects more than 1% of the user base is considered serious. Anything that affects more than 5% of the user base is considered critical.
One problem that has fit just over the serious but just below the critical has been game crashes. And the logs have confused us becaus...
To many people reading this, a company is a company is a company. We don't really give it a lot of thought about the people -- the individual people who work at a given company.
Today was a good day. I've never been as proud as I was today when I came in. I had a meeting with some out of town guests from Redmond (non game related) and to my shock, almost everyone was there on a Saturday.
There was no memo sent out. No hints suggested. Nothing to encourage people to come in on their w...
GalCiv II is extensively moddable.
Everything in the game is in an open format of some kind. Screens can be modified with DesktopX (www.desktopx.net). The models are .X files, the graphics PNG and the data XML.
One user, Winterlight, has already figured out how to put in his own .X files.
Look closely at the ship since it's not textured. There's no polygon limit in GalCiv II.
Most games tend to start to look dated because they limit how many polygons they can do in t...