I think by crash he meant netcode crash.

It's a ridiculously common thing for 2 players to randomly DC at the exact same time during a game.  Out of my last 10 games at least 4 of them have had this happen, 3 of those 4 were 3 games in a row and each time 2 different people dropped.  Usually around the 10-18m mark.  Those two players have nothing in common with each other, geographically or otherwise.  I've seen it happen at least 2 dozen times in the last couple months, around 30% of the time I'm one of the two that drops which makes sense since I only do 3v3.   It wouldn't be so bad if, like HoN, you could reconnect to a game.

On top of that P2P is the worst thing ever created.  Maybe when all routers sold can interface with ISP's directly and have built in default QoS setup it might be acceptable but until then I will never, ever buy another p2p game.  If i wanted to spend my entire life educating internet noobs on how bandwidth works I have multiple other avenues that don't cost anything.

Roger, forgot the publisher status you folks have. Of course the next thing to flow from my lips would be does *Chris Taylor* have any inclination to do more Demigod?

In any event, as usual, thanks for the info. Still enjoying the game, and will continue to do so for many many moons.

Why isn't Elemental done yet?

go away troll!

Because I had to assign my best developers to help with Demigod for some months.

But Elemental is coming along pretty well.

I love Demigod but I particularly like games where we can update them ourselves.

The whole Stardock/GPG thing really confuses the heck out of me. I thought SD only managed the lobby system? Were they helping to fix lobby crashing and glitches with invalid user/pass, or do you send them over to GPG HQ to do some work?

Just a quick question.

Are you commited to be "Impulse-only" ? I bet that community would be a lot bigger if u would sign up some deal with Steam and made a weekend sale or 2-3 days possibility to download demigod and play it online.

It worked out for many games and last one did this was new Aliens vs. Predator.

This game needs attention, some kind of positive scanadal would be good. Like...

"Demigod Developer jumps from building and survives - "Buy Demigod!" Were the first words he said after getting up uninjured"

We're as committed to Impulse only as Valve is to Steam only.

That said, I doubt the Demigod community would be noticeably bigger. Anyone who wants to know about Demigod knows about it already.  

When Demigod was first released, the multiplayer connectivity of Demigod couldn't handle anything beyond a fairly trivial load (i.e. more than the beta group). During development, we assumed the game would use GPGNet but late in development that option was no longer realistically available so we licensed a third-party network connectivity library which turned out not to work well with the P2P setup that Demigod uses. So I assigned Stardock's top developers to create an entirely new setup that fixed it.  But those developers had to come from somewhere (namely Elemental). 

Oh well, a delay was probably be good for Elemental. If it were released around the same time as SCII it would likely get stomped.

I bet it's a thorny issue for you when a lot of people don't realise you don't have direct control over the ongoing development of the Demigod franchise, it would be great to see more content released for it or even better a sequal. It would be easy for you to say "nothing to do with me" and blame the problems on GPG, then forget about the whole episode.

Could you not buy the intellectual property rights to do a sequal off GPG if they don't want to do it? Then you could produce the game you knew it could of been. I appreciate this may not be financially viable but you seem like the sort of chap that would get it right if you were in direct control. It's just a shame more people don't play it online although after the recent sale theres a good 30 games up and running most evenings and at weekends. I do think online games should be played on servers and not peer to peer as peoples pc's and connection capability differ so widely.

Looking forward to Elemental, i'm sure you'll bear in mind it's got your name tatooed on it...

Nice posts Froggboy.
I really can appreciate your open thoughts about the whole Demigod thing (positive and negative).
And so far so good you ( Stardock ) are trying your best to stick with previous statements,
like keep supporting long term.

Just to bad that GPG is making it feel like they are just ignoring DG and it's community...
The DG concept is just to good to let just die...

Stardock's name is on the retail box (at least in North America) so we are definitely share responsibility for the game's success (or failure).

With Demigod, I'm happy with how fun the game turned out but I had really really pushed to have a much larger single player game (including a single player aspect which was the result brainstorming by myself and a VP at GPG who had designed and coded the old Amiga game Defender of the Crown). But the ultimate decision was that Demigod was MP centric.  

Of course, the problem with a MP centric game is that we (Stardock) had never published a MP centric game so I didn't really have a lot of advice or suggestions to give to them on what features a MP centric game should have.

One of the reasons why Sins of a Solar Empire turned out so well (I think anyway) is because we were very familiar with that genre and could suggestion and craft a lot of features to make the game itself better.  In Demigod, the game itself was heavily influenced by us (the flags, the concept of upgrading your citadel, flags giving you specific abilities) but when it came to MP, we didn't have much to say on it because the last MP game I had played intensely was Total Annihilation.

I don't know what GPG's plans for Demigod's long term is.  I talk to them pretty regularly (especially Chris) but right now their focus is on an unannounced title and Kings and Castles along with helping promote SupCom 2 which comes out shortly. 

Stardock's business model as a game developer is very different from GPG's.  Our business model is predicated on releasing regular updates for YEARS because it generates additional sales.  GPG's is based on the more traditional publisher pays for development model.  With Demigod, the budget was over $5 million with GPG paying nearly half of it.  

The only realistic way they could do significant post-release updates for Demigod is if Stardock pays for them - which we did.  

The post-release support budget Stradock provided for Demigod was greater than the entire budget of Galactic Civilizations II.  

I don't think the DG concept will die. Demigod is a great game. Either GPG will make a sequel or Stardock will ultimately make a game that is in the same genre (with special pricing for Demigod players - you can quote me on that) to expand on the concept.  

Lame joke but I couldn't resist.

I've been saying this for a while. If you take lessons learned from Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends, and even Demigod itself and make Demigod 2 it would be incredible. I want want want want want it.

Very informative reply, thanks for that. Hopefully the game concept will get developed further eventually then, we just need to be patient!

Like you say it wouldn't have to be in the same theme as Demigod, I just think the concept, artwork, animation, strategy and overall "feel" of the game is so strong and so rich in great ideas.

I usually only play games in single player mode as i'm in it for the story & visuals rather than the interaction but Demigod is one of only 3 games from a bookshelf of over 100 (Battlefield 2 & C&C Renegade being the others) that I've taken the time to play extensively online as the multiplayer 'team' experience is so entertaining (when it works right!).

I will buy Elemental and Kings & Castles purely down to enjoying Demigod so much and these titles seem to take at least some inspiration from Demigod. Never really got in to Sup Com though so will have to pass on the sequal.

Just pre ordered Elemental and been reading the forum attached to this one, looks like it's going to be a great game!

Hi Frogboy

I just wanna thank very much for answering all the questions and showing that eventhough your the CEO you still take time out to address some of our concerns and questions:)

So for all the people that say crap about Stardock not caring, you are the leading example of that you guys do.  Plus look how many updates GalCiv 2 has gotten over the years(Awesome game by the way(added note I have heard rumors that you were concidering buying the rights to Master of Orion, that would be awesome!!)).  Keep up the Good work.

So once again cause you it never hurts to say it twice.

Thank you very much From Denmark

Ok, honestly Mr Frogboy I think you need to pull that best dev from wherever and send him back to the demigod netcode.

In the last 24 hours I've had several more games with 2 people disconnect at the same time for no reason, increadibly laggy games with 2 second pauses every 3-4 seconds while everyone in the game has 4-8 simspeed (maintained) and maintains <150 ping to everyone else, the games are so laggy I'm more interested in staring at the connection screen to monitor pings/sims than I am in actually playing.  On top of that the last couple days have had 10-20s delays trying to log into the game or join a game in the lobby. Then of course there is the fact that loading a 4v4 or 5v5 takes upwards of 3-5 minutes now for seamingly no reason.  I used to play 4's and sometimes 5's months ago and the load time would never be so long.  Sure it's possible that someone has a slow comp but I doubt every single 4's and 5's game in the last month someone has had one.  I imagine it's some sort of inefficient P2P syncing issue.

On the flip side, yesterday I played one game that was so increadibly smooth I couldn't even play the game properly because I wasn't used to 0 lag situations. Coincidently this happened right after the increadible lag to log into the game went away. Oh well...

(Yep I made all of those faces, even the question mark...)