any new information about 1.03?

Yarlen has already said it was pushed to early March. Suspect details will be forthcoming next week at some point.

Just my opinion, but I think v1.03 got a little more complicated after reports of bugs and exploits really started coming in.

Hope the wait isn't too much longer though.

I do hope they fix all those crashes to desktop we get, with those minidumps.. just ruined a long ffa game, after 2h of preparation we were to clash 2 huge fleets in a final battle, and the game crashes. Also it would be nice to be able to re-enter a game once you crashed for some reason, that is if not everyone crashed, without using a saved game.

Using save games works only when playing with friends/clan members in more organized matches. Not on random public games.

As far as i am concerned, Stardock can take as long as they want (within limits). It just seems to me like they have worked their asses off since the game was released and kept everyone happy, so (unlike with some other companies), i am confident that the patch will come at a good time when it is well done and ready and thats that. btw, Stardock, if you read this, congrats on the 100,000 copies figure. Hell of a feat to outsell COD4 and Valve's box of orange, lol.

I hope they are taking extra time to add an MP3 player. Sigh. A little sick of the music and ALT + TAB = Death for my POS.

Yeah, were hoping 1.03 will fix many MP problems, and improving the AI.

We got a possible private lan coming up towards the end of March.

OrangeJumpSuits: couldn't you just add all your songs to the playlist ? Or use the built in Window mode in the video option (I think it was?), so you don't have to Alt+Tab

Don't you mean Ironclad or is Brad working on the AI/patch?

Selling so many copies means they should have more funding to IMPROVE the game even more...

Look at WC3... HELL of a game.. and its still going strong (Mostly from DOTA... A Community Mod).

I hope they continue to patch/update this game often for the next few months to bring it up to speed (and make it nearly perfect)... And then allow the modding community to create exactly what the devs failed to provide in content!

First off, who is Brad? and is it Stardock working on the patch or Ironclad? I have no idea, lol, i just assumed that it was Stardock.



good point.

Brad Wardell is the President and CEO of Stardock. Although I assume Stardock, as publisher of the game, has some input on the patch (and undoubtedly does testing), It's highly likely most of the patch work is being done by the developer, Ironclad.

-HM

Hollow Man is correct, Brad/Frogboy isn't doing Sins AI, that's up to Ironclad. Stardock and Ironclad have always been pretty closely involved in the development (closer than most publisher/developer partnerships), but all the coding is still up to IC.

The partnership is something akin to what id Software does with the people who license their game engines. For example, id worked very closely with Splash Damage on Quake Wars. Because of this, there's a number of people who believe id actually developed Quake Wars (but they didn't). Throw into the mix that Activision (ActiBlizzard!) is the publisher, and it can be mighty confusing for people.

Anyway, the upshot is that you should be knocking on Ironclad producer/top dog designer Blair Fraser's door if you want to know where the patch is. He pops on the forums every so often (hi Blair!).

-HM

Amen to that. Well thanks Hollow Man for the insight into the confusion that often develops around the gaming industry with all of these companies. I have been an avid gamer since i was old enough to hold a controller (super nintendo) and still have trouble figuring out what is going on. Hell, back in the day all there was was playstation and nintendo 64 to me. Now there is.....so much more....lol. thanks.

Sadly, I'm much older than that. I owned an Intellivision, and we had a PC in the house back in 1983. Yee gods.

Back in those days the developers were completely hidden from the public and didn't get proper credit. Which is why companies like Activision (Pitfall!) and Imagic (Demon Attack!) popped up: they were started by developers who were tired of working for Atari and getting no glory.

These days people care more about the real people behind the games, but it can still be confusing. I mean jeez, for some games there are so many company names that pop-up before the game starts. Who are all these companies?!?!?

It'll be interesting to see if Stardock continues in this publisher role. I was surprised they did it, because it's a ton of work. id Software got out that business a long time ago (Quake 1 was the last title that they self-published, and even that got given over to Activision fairly quickly). But Sins really seems to be doing well, and they continue to self-publish the GalCiv stuff, so the extra work for Stardock may be worth it in the end. I think they were quite unhappy with the original GalCiv publishing deal with Strategy First. They filed for bankruptcy before paying out a good portion of the royalties to Stardock.

-HM

That seems to be the trend these days. People aren't being ignored as much; everyone from Publishers to Writers to Coders and designers are getting in the spotlight. I think it is due in part to this information age we are in, with the internet and all. Even simple Modders for games like Crysis and the Elder Scrolls series are getting huge hype simply because people are seeing what they are doing and are recognizing them as more than just a team of dudes sitting at a computer making cool stuff. Look at Black Mesa Source (blackmesasource.com). This is a freaking mod and it has gotten more hype than some full-fledged boxed games. So everyone these days gets credit that they deserve and that is good to know, as compared to the old days that you described.

As for stardock, it will be intresting to see how they continue. I don't think it takes a genious to see that whatever game they decide to publish next is going to be huge, due in part to the success of Sins of a Solar Empire. If their name was not household to gamers, it most cirtainly is now.

If one wants to get into game design, doing mods is a good way to go. Many game companies hire mod talent.

I think Sins is a still a bit under the radar for gamers because strategy games are still a bit of niche thing, at least compared to shooters. What will work in Sins favor is that it has RTS elements to it. So it's quite possible that they'll attract the Warcraft/Starcraft/Command and Conquer fans (and there are a lot of them!). Many people who enjoyed Homeworld are already into it (those who are willing to accept that it ISN'T Homeworld).

So if they get that fanbase, plus the people who buy Civilization (there's a lot of them out there too), perhaps they'll start seeing some big sales numbers. Fortunately, PC gaming is one of those things that can be a slow burn saleswise (console games tend to go down the tubes after a few months). Reviews for Sins are beyond excellent across the board. I don't think I've seen a review any worse than, "It's darn good!", which is going to help big-time.

-HM

I think one of the games that Stardock (who actually makes or did make, if I am correct, most of their profit on skinning/modding utilties for Windows XP/Vista) is called "Society". It is or was an online game, but like an empire builder, and it was going to be a persistent online game. Thats the game I want to see! Plus, just FYI they are making a game called Political Machine 2008 (presidental race, with all your favorite charactures).

Stardock is developing Society, but it is currently on the backburner. I believe they're concentrating on their new fantasy based turn based strategy game, the second expansion pack to GalCiv2 (Twilight/Armor), Political Machine 2008, and hopefully GalCiv3!

-HM

We started self-publishing with GalCiv2 because in pretty much every instance in the past where we had another company publish, we've gotten screwed. Usually by them never paying a significant portion of the royalties. Now with Sins we hope to start publishing for other small developers as well. It's an "easier" way to grow since we don't have to hire additional dev teams, etc, and we get to help other companies like ours to grow as well.

It's great for us as long as you can somehow continue to handle all the extra work. And it sounds like you'll have to make good and pay out royalties to Ironclad!

id had issues with publishers too. When they decided to make a boxed Linux copy of Quake III, they never saw any royalties from Loki before they went under. id just sucked it up, but sadly, we'll probably never see another boxed Linux port from them again.

Sorry about all the id fanboyism; I like them, heh. They started out small, like Stardock, so you never know what may happen!

-HM

I think we're going to continue publishing, but you'll never see us churn out huge numbers of games like the big boys.  As we did with Ironclad, for any project that we work on we'll want it to be more of a partnership which means sharing the same overall goals/philosophies. Plus, we couldn't guarantee any sort of quality if we put stuff through the mill.

1.03 is still on tap for early March. After that we'll be working on a single-player Sins demo, then it'll be on to the v1.04 update (which will be a content patch), etc.

Only the next few months?

Yarlen,

It occured to me that you might not have included a campaign in the initial release for SoaSE because you planned to release in the future. Maybe it was never set into stone as a formal plan, but perhaps it was kicked around the conference/brain storming session as doable in the future. Perhaps, maybe when you release the new expansion... the one where you introduce the race/power that is after the vasari?

Just a guess...

- SofEnder

Ironclad is working on the update. There's a lot of new stuff in it.

So that everyone is on the same page:

Ironclad does the actual programming.  Stardock is the publisher.  Stardock and Ironclad work very closely on the game development process (much more closely than is typical in the game industry). I have sent over code snippets and suggestions on the AI but I am not doing the computer AI in Sins.

Here is a sample of some of the things that we plan on being in 1.03:

-New Game Options Screen:
 -Locked/Unlocked Teams
 -Fleet Size
 -Pirates or No Pirates (arrrr!)
 -Income Rate Speed
 -Build Speed
 -Ship Speed
 -Research Speed
 -Culture Speed

***REMINDER***
-In singleplayer you can accelerate / deccelerate time by pressing the +/- buttons. I'm mentionning it again because this request is coming up a lot even though it was implemented in the v1.02 patch.

-New Market System:
 Highlights:
 -Random fluctuations in addition to user influence on price.
 -Can cause crash or boom by selling/buying too much.
 -known exploits fixed.
 -Cn now buy and sell resources on the market in large increments again.

-Improved Group Phase Jumping for large groups of ships. If the number of ships exceeds a threshold, the group will only wait for 90% of the value of the ships to be ready. The stragglers will follow shortly after. Typically, its only a couple ships that cause the whole operation to stall so this should eliminate the majority of problems.

-Overseer's Nanite Reactive Armor ability can now properly stack heals (but not the armor and max HP bonus).
-Kostura Cannon now only disables enemy units and structures at the target planet as originally intended.
-Autocast for many disabling abilities improved.
-Disciple's Transfer Antimatter no longer targets other Disciples when autocasting.
-Transfer Antimatter can no longer target entities with full antimatter.
-Can't attack unbuilt structures anymore.
-You can now change game options when loading save games.
-Defeated players can no longer give or be given resources in unlocked teams games.
-Defeated players can no longer place bounties in unlocked teams games.

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Graphics:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Fixed sometimes drastic frame rate drop when chat messages are displayed.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sound / Music:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Sins handles no soundcard now.
-Added sound option for varying music vol in battle.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AI:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-AI now knows how to surrender (based on time elapsed, relative economy, relative fleet value, resource reserves, and allied strength). Also, an AI player will not surrender if he has a human ally.
-AI is now smarter about retreating and is willing to commit local suicide or accept local Phyrric victories if the global gain is higher and will also factor in local allied forces.
-Fixed various AI researching and building stall outs for the various trees (military in particular).
-Rewrote AI siege building and attack logic.
-Improved AI use of Black Market.
-Autocast for many disabling abilities improved.
-Wide variety of AI upgrades.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Networking / Multiplayer:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-AI will now take over for dropped players.
-You no longer have to kill all a dropped player's planets to win even when the AI takes over for him.

-Unified the in-game and ico chat system. They now share the same irc/wow like commands. Full autocomplete with tab/shift-tab. Autocomplete will attempt to either complete the name field or cycle through the available names.

Stay tuned

Thanks, Brad. Looks like a great update.



Your English teacher probably wouldn't like that one though