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Frogboy's Articles » Page 2
January 30, 2025 by Frogboy
With the benefit of hindsight, Tales of the Arnor should have been handled as a full expansion pack. It just has such a massive scope of changes in it.    For me, personally, it's the first GalCiv IV DLC I've got to work on since Tales of Centauron which I thoroughly enjoyed.  But this one...this one is just so much bigger. This will probably not be the last post I make on Tales of the Arnor so I will probably miss some things here. Of the Nyx So as some of you kno...
January 25, 2025 by Frogboy
So I'm working on the upcoming DLC called  Tales of the Arnor and it's going to go pretty hard into the background on the Yor. To do that, I really need to explain a bit about the background of this game which, since it's a 30 year old series there's a lot of bits involved. No pun intended. In the beginning... So at the start there were the Mithrilar.  These were beings that we would consider to exist outside our universe.  One of them, called Draginol (which is where ...
December 21, 2024 by Frogboy
It's really amazing how easy Ara: History Untold is for modding. The first thing to know is that all the source data files can be found (if you're on Steam for instance) in a directory like: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Ara History Untold\assets\SourceMods So say you don't like one of the balance of say...Recipes. Let's go find that. Recipes0.zdata is where all the recipes are. Now I happen to be a bit unhappy that the Feast recipe is defaulting to using money inste...
December 7, 2024 by Frogboy
I went ahead and sprung for the $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro as I do a lot of data analysis on very large and complicated data sets.   The first thing I through at it was last month's full Perforce logs with diffs and and all so that I could get a nice friendly report of the various developers, how many CLs they did and an evaluation on the type of work they did and how much work they did. Here are my results: ChatGPT 4o.  Basically useless.  It didn't even get the...
December 7, 2024 by Frogboy
I went ahead and sprung for the $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro as I do a lot of data analysis on very large and complicated data sets.   The first thing I through at it was last month's full Perforce logs with diffs and and all so that I could get a nice friendly report of the various developers, how many CLs they did and an evaluation on the type of work they did and how much work they did. Here are my results: ChatGPT 4o.  Basically useless.  It didn't even get the...
December 7, 2024 by Frogboy
I went ahead and sprung for the $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro as I do a lot of data analysis on very large and complicated data sets.   The first thing I through at it was last month's full Perforce logs with diffs and and all so that I could get a nice friendly report of the various developers, how many CLs they did and an evaluation on the type of work they did and how much work they did. Here are my results: ChatGPT 4o.  Basically useless.  It didn't even get the...
May 22, 2024 by Frogboy
When I look at the people who have gotten "canceled" over things they posted on the Internet, it's disproportionately GenXers.   Why is that? I think it's the awkward timing. GenX grew up on BBSes and Usenet which were a free for all.  It wasn't until the Millennials and later GenZ came on the scene that the raunchy, insensitive, or intentionally trolling behaviors of GenX got us into trouble.  
April 18, 2024 by Frogboy
v2.5 and the Warlords Expansion is now available, and we're excited to share the ins and outs. Check out my guided tour below: v2.5 and the Warlords Expansion is now available, and we're excited to share the ins and outs. Check out my guided tour below: [confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/1791918081/Guided+Tour+of+GalCiv+IV+v2.5+Warlords[/confluence]
April 17, 2024 by Frogboy
I've been saying this a lot to design teams lately: There is no subsitute for playing the game and then playing the game some more and then playing it still more. And Warlords really shows that. Now, those of you who get it right away are in for a particular treat that you should take advantage of as much as you can while you can:  There are a lot of absolutely crazy ship components in this that we have balanced as best we can but I can tell you right now, I there are going to be some...
March 12, 2024 by Frogboy
[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/1737392193/GalCiv+IV+Supernova+-+v2.4+Populi+Tour[/confluence]
December 11, 2023 by Frogboy
[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/1635549196/GalCiv+IV+Supernova+Dev+Journal+37+-+The+New+Biomes+in+the+v2.2+Ethnology+Update[/confluence]   ______________________________________________________ [confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUP/pages/1471414278/GalCiv+IV+Supernova+Dev+Journal+Links[/confluence]   ______________________________________________________ [confluence title=""]https://sta...
December 7, 2023 by Frogboy
[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/1634729996/GalCiv+IV+Supernova+Dev+Journal+36+-+v2.2[/confluence]   ______________________________________________________ [confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUP/pages/1471414278/GalCiv+IV+Supernova+Dev+Journal+Links[/confluence]   ______________________________________________________ [confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/p...
November 17, 2023 by Frogboy
We are currently working on the base game of the Epic edition.  This will come out at GalCiv IV 2.2 next month. To make it easy for future updates to it, we are going to be bringing the code-base up to the Supernova edition. So in essence, GalCiv IV 2.2 base game on Epic will be the same as Supernova except for the new content (and things like AlienGPT).
October 2, 2023 by Frogboy
One of Stardock's big challenges has been localizing our games.   GalCiv IV has over 180,000 words in it.  That's a lot to translate.  But that's not really the biggest issue.  The biggest issue is that we are constantly adding new text to the game which makes it hard for our linguistics team to keep up.   We typically use Trados for this sort of thing.  It's very powerful but it is not fast.  So I decided to write my own app called GC4TranslatorUI.  ...
September 25, 2023 by Frogboy
When utilizing Stardock's AlienGPT, one might naturally ponder the question: which animals are the most sought-after choices for building a civilization around? Well, here's the answer.     Nearly 40% of users opt for cats, followed by foxes, fish, dogs, snakes, and more. Animal Number of Mentions Percentage (%) cat 1445 30.90 fox 331 7.08 fish 320 6.84 dog 319 6.82 snake 258 5.52 bird 251 5.37 tiger 219 4.68 wolf 190 4.0...