About once a month someone, somewhere, will comment on something I've written saying how "A CEO shouldn't act so unprofessionally in public". Over the years, I've gotten that message hundreds of times along with predictions of demise for my company due to my "public" behavior.
Now, I think the case could be made that we live in a different time. The new age of companies have executives who hang out on forums and mix it up with people. But I'm not going ...
I wish I had time to do a proper journal entry about Politicla Machine, but there's just too much work to be done
Next Friday I'll write up about some of the new features, but I have to say, the Bobblehead maker is pretty darn cool.
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...
Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor Info Guide By Brad Wardell
Designer and AI Developer
Title: Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor
Description:
Expansion pack to the award-winning PC strategy game, Galactic Civilizations II
Requires:
Galactic Civilizations II: Gold Edition or Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords + Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avata...
New opening cut-scene of course...
So here we go, we're in the final stages. Lots of features being tweaked. The computer AI has been enhanced. I will go so far as to say that it is about twice as intelligent as the last publicly available beta. If people find this AI unsatisfactory well, they can go write their own game.
So in my testing, I want to make sure that the AI personalities are doing a good job and just make sure all the new content is working right.
Setting up a custom civilization....
Final testing is going well...we're all pretty happy with how things are shaping up.
A few more days then it's onto Political Machine's cruch
It'll all be worth it when the team puts out 2 great strategy games in the same year! Cya Wedensday!
Who would win if the human player stepped out of it.
Let's find out if the AI improvements are making a difference..
Early game: Gray = Korx. Orange = Arcean. Dark brown = Korath. Purple = Thalan. Blue = Humans
Year 2: Gray = Korx. Orange = Arcean. Dark brown = Korath. Purple = Thalan. Blue = Humans
Year 3: Gray = Korx. Orange = Arcean. Dark brown = Korath. Purple = Thalan. Blue = Humans
Planets:
...
Over the past few months the AI has gotten access to a lot of new APIs that are letting me significant improve the computer AI in Galactic Civilizations.
Armed with these APIs, I am now ready to revisit the Korx and the Thalan who have fairly unique tech trees which provide different challenges.
One of the APIs now tells me how many of a particular improvement is on a planet. So now I can keep an AI from filling up planets with stuff I don't want it to have.
A lot of the AI issues...
We've got a week to go and things are looking pretty good. Our list of bugs fixed since the last update is actually longer than this, but I had to cut off what was going into the update or we still wouldn't have it up. At this point, we are looking for game breakers and typos.
Brad has locked himself in a room with a large supply of Coke and junk food and is making the final changes to the AI. Well, I'm exaggerating, but he is in AI coding mode as we speak....
Part 1, Lessons learned.
Around three years ago I was just getting my feet wet in the world of 3D modeling; we were working our buts off building the new 3D engine that became Galactic Civilization II, and I hoping to get in on making the ships. However as the newest artist on the team, I was mostly playing catch-up, I spent the bulk of my time on the UI, and stole a little time here and there to learn basic box modeling and texturing.
The team was only 6 of us, 2 Coders, 2 Artist...