Stardock: What we're doing..

So what the heck are we doing? Sure has been quiet on our part eh?

As the beta schedule indicates, beta 3 is due out soon.  In fact, it's due out this month.  So what sort of things can you expect? 

There's been a lot of changes over the past couple of months.  The ships look dramatically diifferent. The AI is starting to play the game - not well but is playing - and the first signs of basic play balance are going in.

We've had to make some...hard decisions in what we do and don't want to do.  Some good and some will be disappointing.

On the good side, the diplomacy, which won't be in beta 3, is going to be more sophisticated than in galCiv 2.  But probably not in the way one might think.  It's going to be sophisticated in the sense of the underlying AI in there.  We've developed a series of tools that allow us to have a lot more depth in how the player interacts with the AI players.

In GalCiv 1, you HAD to play as human. So all the text we precanned for dealing with humans.  But in GalCiv II, there's 10 civilizations and you can play as any one of them.  But we didn't want generic behavior from the AI.  So we made tools that lets each player have different reactions for each possible combination (10X10 grid X 3 for Good, Neutral, and Evil).  that means 300 different possible behaviors!  A LOT of work.  But what it means is that if you decide to play as the Torians and you are dealing with the Drengin, the Drengin will speak -- use different language -- than it would if you were a different race.

We felt this was important in giving the game an organic feel and increasing replayability.

..So what's the bad news? We had to jetison a feature that we just can't seem to get the playbalancing working out with -- space debris.  They may come back in some future expansion but the mining of asteroids and such was proving to be very difficult to balance with the rest of the game.  That is -- what's the player's focus? Improving planets or mining asteroids and other interstellar stuff?  This wasn't in GalCiv 1 so there wasn't any theoretical basis for balancing it well.  Worse, there's also the AI issue -- even once we did figure out a proper balance and context for asteroids and such, then the AI has to be developed to make use of them.

In GalCiv 1, the AI was IMO (and I wrote it) horrible at dealing with starbases because starbases weren't implemented until Beta 4 (the October 2002 beta) and there just wasn't enough time to develop proper strategies. 

I do still hope we can put some sort of space debris in there like asteroid fields and such.  But they won't be something you can get money and resources from.  The planets will remain the focus for that as well as the galactic resources from GalCiv I.

Another thing we're working on is improving the look of the ships.  We're almost done with the bump mapping of ships and we have specular lighting in.  We're pretty happy with how that's turned out but we'll learn qiuckly how compatible they are. 

We've made a lot of usability tweaks to the UI that we think you'll like.  Other places we're still struggling with.

Stability is much better than in beta 2 but as we add features, we inevitably run into other problems of course which we'll iron out.

One thing we think you'll be happy with is that all our output data is in XML.  NO BINARY files so if you want to change all the text or mess with the values, you will be able to do that all you want.  And unlike in galCiv 1, the metaverse games will use a different set of vlaues so you can customize your games for your single player games all you want and then when you play the metaverse it uses data from our servers.

If you have any specific questions, let us know.