For some months users have complained about the Surface Pro 4 consuming several % per hour of CPU while sleeping.  In December, Microsoft indicated that they were working on the problem. In December, Intel released a driver update to their Skylake drivers. By default, these drivers won’t work on a Surface Pro.  However, users who download the .ZIP version, extract and then update the drivers via device manager can enjoy the benefits today.   The Results A...

  This year marks the 25th anniversary of our spectacular product, Ozone-away. 

Is Microsoft serious about its online media stores?   Movies & TV Let’s say you want to buy an episode of Rick & Morty.  This is what you get if you use the Microsoft store: No previews. No star ratings.  Not even movies get a star rating.  The little “i” brings up a barely formatted tooltip. How did this even ship? This is what the home page looks like:   Music Going over to music the situation is better....

My Microsoft Surface is a constant companion.  It is absolutely central to my workflow. One of the challenges I’ve had with it is battery life.  There’s a lot of things you can do to help with your battery life but one simple thing I’ve done, for now, is to set the max CPU when on battery to 99%.  Setting the max CPU to 99% prevents the CPU from going into Turbo mode.  For me, this accomplishes two things: (1) I get roughly an extra hour of battery ...

Hey there! I've gone ahead and started up the Ashes of the Singularity Wiki page. https://www.ashesofthesingularity.wikia.com/wiki/Ashes_Of_TheSingularity_Wikia Feel free to contribute.   I'll make sure regular, serious contributors get access to stuff way early to help.

  This past week I was on Explormiate ( http://explorminate.net/2015/12/16/strategic-expanse-interview-with-brad-wardell-2/ ) and the subject of game engines.  Given the emails and feedback I’ve gotten it is pretty clear most people are not that familiar with game engine generations.   So consider this a basic primer on them and why they matter. Beginnings It’s important to note that historically, every game had its own custom engine.  Id was a pionee...

Be careful what you wish for. Next year all the 4X’s are going to come out.  What I write below is not under some NDA. I know it because it’s my job to know it. Let me walk you through the schedule: 1H2016: Stellaris, Master of Orion 2H2016: Civilization VI, Endless Space 2 I could be wrong on the dates. You could swap some of this around a bit but you get the idea.  Where is GalCiv III in this? Stardock will be announcing its first expansion in...

Hi guys,   Just so you know, I play Ashes MP a lot on Fridays.  Look for me as Draginol. Friend me on Steam.

Greetings!  Owning the company never stops me from complaining about our games. First: Add me as a friend as I'm playing MP a lot and am looking for people to play with. ## High Level Points ## 1. Incursion and Plasma storm are fun. Players are using them quite effectively. 2. I'm pretty happy with most of the balance. 3. Map resource distribution is too bland. 4. When someone is nearing victory via Turinium the music should change and the T...

Greetings! In October we released v1.3 of Sorcerer King which added a ton cool things like the build queue, a bunch of UI improvements, bug fixes and more. 1.4 is a somewhat bigger change and as a result has taken longer to get out.  Much of it is under the covers but should be pretty noticeable in play. Let’s take a look:   Three things to take notice here: 1. There’s an Auto-Equip button now to take out some of the tedium on new units. 2. Y...

Like many of you, I've been playing RTS games from the start.  Dune 2, C&C, Warcraft, Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, etc. I loved Starcraft so much that I made one of the expansions to it ( Starcraft: Retribution) .  Yep. that was me. I was "this close" to licensing the Total Annihilation engine from GT Interactive (who gained the engine after Cavedog died).   I bring this up so that people who are hard core strategy gamers feel free to bring up other games into ...

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What? Another update? It's only been like a few days since the last big update right? The Ashes team is on fire. Not literally. Well, maybe. That's an issue for the courts to work out. Anyway here's what we're looking at delivering EARLY this next week: * A new HUGE map with lots of open spaces. Anthys. * We got some big performance improvements going in thanks to some new memory compression techniques that have made it in. * First pass at ground damage. The boom b...

Zoomed out to the edge of the lower atmosphere (about 100,000 feet in the air) Realistically, the game just isn't meant to be played this far zoomed out.  And this isn't even covering the full map and isn't the largest map we even support. We will be doing a lot more to make the strategic situation map provide more information for players to make good strategic decisions.    

With GalCiv III v1.4, we’ve removed the per planet production wheel.   You can read more about that here . This has sparked a lively debate on just how much control a player should have on their economy.  Planet Specialization Planets in Galactic Civilizations III can be specialized much more than in previous versions.  An industrial world, through adjacencies, can result in massive bonus manufacturing.  However, on top of that, players can direct thei...