Just got back from the tour in LA. I stayed in the loudest hotel in the universe. Holy cow am I tired. I’ve been a little (lot) irritable on the forums this week.
The team is working on a ton of things this week from tweaking how Caravans work to putting in the UI for handling saved games in multiplayer.
This weekend I have to really get on the AI. It’s still nowhere near where I want it to be for release. Heck, it doesn’t even do the “Your civilization makes me laugh, give us 50 gold or we’ll crush you!” type stuff.
Over the years, I’ve written so much AI that it’s amazing how it gets into your genetic memory. The algorithms just spring forth. 
Scott (Boogie) has been working on the cut scenes like crazy. I keep forgetting what’s in the public betas and when I go back it’s pretty painful because all the spirit is sucked out of them.
But I have to say, the public betas have been instrumental. I don’t think we would have nailed the memory leak issue without the public beta. Basically, Beta 4 is unusable if you have 64-bit Windows and certain ATI cards. It’s a pretty specific case but holy cow, can you imagine if the game came out with that? Though that’s not the only leak but there were people who couldn’t play more than 30 turns before it ran out of memory. That’s huge.
One of the valuable things on the forums has been the concepts and suggestions people have posted. Even when they’re mod proposals. There’s some great stuff there that we’ve been able to add in already.
Anyway, I’m going to make this short since I’m looking forward to just sleeping now.
Cheers!
