Dopplex

There's a distinct difference, I believe, between "expansion" and "spam". Expansion is indeed a key part of any 4x, and part of what makes the game fun. A large part of why it adds so much, however, is because expanding can typically be quite difficult, which makes expanding successfully much more of an accomplishment. The point at which expansion turns into spam is when expanding is so easy that you don't need to make significant trade-offs in order to acco

I was experiencing similar - I'll try changing my mip map levels and see if it fixes it. EDIT: Strike the original edit. Seemed to have fixed it after initially changing it, but I think I just got lucky for a minute. Stripes and various graphical weirdness seems to be back.. Dxdiag is below: ------------------ System Information ------------------ Time of this report: 9/17/2009, 19:39:20 &n

Video – GFX – Disable Point Sprites moves me back to the audio tab when I click on it. Audio – Volume setting for layered music appears to only be affecting one layer. (I set the slider to 0 and still have music. When I uncheck “Enable Layered Music” that music goes away. Hardware Mouse Cursor – Having enabled this, disabling it makes the mouse cursor disappear. Subsequenty, alt-tabbing out and coming back caused the

That's awesome Kryo - I don't think I ever noticed it in Demigod... (then again, I spend much much more time on the turn based games)

Finally got mine! Now I just have to wait to get out of work so I can fire it up on my work laptop. Watched the opening cinematic though, and I have to say... Wow. Just state of the art CG in there. Loved it :-)

I'm not a big fan of windowed mode, even though I generally do run on a very large monitor... I just find everything else on the screen to be distracting in a way that it wouldn't be if the communication didn't involve a need to context shift out of the game.

Also take a look at Wings3D for modeling. It's another free tool, and I've heard generally good things about it. (And if nothing else, it's probably more intuitive than Blender...) It's *only* modeling though, so you'd probably need to take the model into Blender for UVing, texturing, and rigging/animating. For those willing to lay out some cash, Silo is another well regarded modeling program, and won't break the bank ($100-$150, I think the $150 one's main d

It would be really cool (possible unrealistic though) if an IRC (or some other form of chat) client could be built into the game interface itself. Would be a nice option to be able to chat about your game while playing, ask for advice, etc, without the disjoint experience of having to play in a window or constantly alt-tab. Depending on how things are set up, I could see this either being pretty easy or incredibly hard, though - (Although if it could be set up as the backend to

[quote who="Strand" reply="32" id="2372816"] Quoting Dopplex, reply 31The Beta is actually going to run on MS Excel instead of the final game engine...Funny you should say that... http://www.excelgames.org/[/quote] Actually, I work at a company that does "Serious Games" using Excel, so I know well the kinds of hoops you can get Excel to jump through if you really try :-) Our uses are a slightly more traditional use of a spreadsheet though (well, at least compared to Ex

I think the difficulty distinguishing tab whitespace and space whitespace was the single largest issue I had at first. (Thankfully, a good IDE can help with the issue immensely) That said, I do appreciate its flexibility as a language - it didn't take that long to get decently proficient with it and get some pretty neat things done (even though I know I was often doing things the wrong way by Python standards). Even so, I'm still much less comfortable working in it than in

Rhizzy, you should probably contact them at [email protected] They should be able to switch the email on the account to your current one and also verify the preorder. (I had the exact same situation, and emailing them took care of it - you'll need to provide account information to prove the old impulse account is yours)

It's been mentioned several times, but it really can't be mentioned too much: If at all possible, find a way to consistently reproduce the bug, and then write the steps to do so down in such explicit terms that nobody could possible misunderstand. It is easier by several orders of magnitude to fix a bug when you can consistently get it to occur, so if all of us testers do a good job of including the steps to reproduce it, it means that everything gets fixed fast

The Beta is actually going to run on MS Excel instead of the final game engine...

I know the modtool is free. I don't have anything against XSI or the modtool - although I would prefer that an open format be used for modding assets. I was talking about the pricing as a comment on Autodesk - about how XSI used to have commercial versions (XSI Foundation) with decently affordable price tags for that kind of software - and then coincidentally when they're acquired by Autodesk the cost of entry for a tool with which you can produce commercial content (say, meshes

If it isn't hook up-able through Python, will it be exposed via SDK so we can write our own mapgens in C++? (I'd be happier. I hate whitespace aware languages... >_ In general, is the plan to only do modding via Python, or is there any chance of actually getting a SDK? (I don't know your architecture, but depending on how engine functionality is exposed for internal development, it could just be possible to expose a subset for external development) - or just some

Preordered since April... But only managed to confirm that it was in the system yesterday. Waiting eagerly...

"Now owned by Autodesk" is, I believe, the biggest argument against it. From everything I've heard though, XSI was a great program (and they used to actually have an affordable* version of it!)... Whether it will remain so under Autodesk's reign is yet to be determined. *(Around $600. Affordable by the standards of such programs, at any rate. Mysteriously, now that Autodesk owns them, the cheapest commercial version is several thousand d

I propose we all chip in and sent a case or two of Red Bull (or the caffeine-based infusion mechanism of their choice) to the Stardock offices. Just as a hint. ;-) (Maybe Red Bull laced with Nyquil for certain developers...)

I too think Alpha Centauri is one of the best 4X games ever made. The gameplay was excellent, but what really set it apart (to me) was the really clear sense of identity that each of the factions had. The quotes and flavor text did an incredible job of helping you to see the opposing factions as having really unique identities - in a way that something like Civ IV, for all of its wonderful gameplay, doesn't quite do. Civ IV doesn't do an awful job, but I fee

For the originality debate: Yes, we want something original, but original does NOT mean "design the game as if the entire history of video game design never happened". A great novel can be original and groundbreaking while at the same time beind informed by the work of all of the other great authors that came beforehand. Art forms progress over time not because they're made in isolation, but because artists are constantly inspired by, or repulsed by, or are reacting in som

What would be really great would be to have a centrally run mod repository that was integrated into the multiplayer matchmaking. You want to play a mod and the other person doesn't have it? No problem! They may have a significantly longer loading time after they click to confirm, but the entire mod downloading and activation process would be handled automatically behind the scenes. Something like that would no doubt involve a major amount of technical work, but I thi

Spore had great *visual* unit customization. What annoyed me to no end was that the vast majority of unit/building/ship design decisions had no impact whatsoever on gameplay, aside from a few extremely limited variables. I couldn't put a weapon at the end of a very long creature limb for added range, or position vital parts in more defensible parts of the body. A creature I made with 8 legs would move around in exactly the same way (in terms of mobility) as a creature with o

The best solution here would really be to support a good open interchange format like Collada for modding. Blender's Collada support has been spotty in the past(it was just a random script), but I think that I heard that it's going to be officially supported soon. At the very least, it would be great if Stardock would publish the specifications of whatever file format they do use (which may well be an internal binary format), and enable us to write our own conversion tools.