[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/2609676353/Dev+Journal+3+The+Great+String+System+Overhaul[/confluence]

Let’s start with where things currently stand at Stardock in our remastering and reimagining of Elemental. We have ported the underlying engine and code base to 64-bit. We have upgraded the graphics engine to DirectX 11. We have brought over the Dynasty system from War of Magic (yes, this game had full on families, dynasties, and magical breeding). We have brought over the crafting system and global inventory from Sorcerer King. We have reexported the original textures at m...

Once upon a time… In 2008, right after we released Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire , we at Stardock felt pretty good about ourselves. We had assembled an amazing team of people that could make amazing games and we thought there was nothing we couldn’t do. Hubris attracts Nemesis. With space conquered, we set our eyes on making Fantasy Civilizations. It would be half Master of Magic and half what we had learned from making Sins and GalCiv. The game would be...

Just a quick head's up that we have Ashes of the Singularity 3.3 now in QA.  We'll have more news on it shortly but it's a pretty massive balance update.

This UI was made by AI.   So was this:   We are not quite at the point where AI can make the actual WindowBlinds skins themselves. Certainly not in real time. But I think we are getting close to where skinners will be able to make skins much more easily.

We don't generally allow politics on the forums.  With the obvious exception of The Political Machine.  The Political Machine - The Power of the Presidency Can Be Yours! Forums But the world trade situation is probably something worth discussing provided people can avoid assuming "the other" are stupid or evil or greedy or whatever.   Now, I'm a child of Michigan USA.  Detroit area.  That means cars.  And I can say, regardless of political association, t...

Today we were finally able to get most of the forums back from the dead.  2 weeks ago we didn't think we would be able to bring them up.  And to be honest, we probably will never get everything back.   Fun fact: These are (one of) the oldest continuously running forums on the Internet.  When we wrote the forums, back in the late 1990s, we had to do everything from scratch.  We built these to replace Usenet. So a few things: If you're forum account is "new" ...

I recently got back into Virtual Machines and found the performance terrible on Windows 11.    I couldn't figure out why.  There was noticeable input lag and even moving windows around was sluggish.   I looked on Reddit and elsewhere and got advice about installing tools or configuring the VM differently but eventually just had a feeling that it had something to do with security on Windows.  So after a lot of trial and error I found this option: Now, I...

Over at Reddit I saw this post. Now, so far this year, the best book I've read has been the new Bobiverse book. But what about you guys?

So you want faster internet speeds, eh? So did I. Let me tell you about my journey. It all started with Xfinity offering 1.4Gb/sec internet speeds. I wanted some of that. So I upgraded but noticed that my speeds were still maxing out at around 800Mb/sec. That's pretty good, but a lot less than 1.4Gb/sec. The first thing I did was get a new cable modem. It has a single 2.5Gb/sec output. My router actually had a 2.5Gb/sec input port. Victory! Or so I thought. Turns out every single output por...

So our friends over at Amplitude have announced Endless Legend II.  It's due for Early Access late Summer.  My good friend Kael (Derek P who was the lead designer on Elemental: Fallen Enchantress and did the Fall from Heaven mod) is working on it.  

These days I'm mostly playing our stuff.  There's just not a lot of time for other games.  So lots of Ara: History Untold, GalCiv IV, Sins of a Solar Empire II and even some Ashes of the Singularity. But what are you guys playing? Anything you would recommend I should check out?

You might’ve noticed we had a serious outage that took down our website, forums—everything. Some people have speculated on what could be so catastrophic as to take us down for WEEKS?  For legal reasons, I can't get into the details other than to say it wasn't ransomware but it was a total data loss. This catastrophe wiped out everything at our data center, including the on-site backups, so we lost over three decades of data in one hit. Fortunately, we run nightly offsite bac...

At long last, Galactic Civilizations IV v2.95 is here and it's a big one. I'd like to think it addresses most of the high priority feedback we've gotten on the game since launch, especially in terms of map generation. But well beyond that, v2.95 is a major improvement in everything from performance, balance, multiplayer stability, late game stability, AI, and more. Seriously, this is a big update. Assuming there's no issues with it, the next big update will be version 3.0, which is one tha...

My office has a lot of printouts in binders regarding the history of the universe (The Mithrilar Cycle) that both Galactic Civilizations and Elemental come from.   I once had the opportunity to write a book, Destiny's Embers  and that was quite an adventure.  My original story was 300 pages but my publisher, Del Rey, wanted it fleshed out and had an editor greatly expand the exposition of it.  One of these days, I hope to publish the original manuscript which, I should ...