Project Logs for Galactic Civilizations

 

1st Quarter 2000

bwardell@stardock.com

 

 

 

3.22.00

The first menu screen is now completely done!  Nothing too earth shattering but it’s our first “done” screen.

 

http://www.stardock.com/products/galciv/gc-mar00a.jpg

 

With GalCiv, we want to have a clean simplistic look with standardized GUI.  One thing we learned from Business Tycoon is the importance or doing standardized graphics first and not as you progress.  With GalCiv, a lot of the graphics are done which is the opposite of Business Tycoon and Entrepreneur where the graphics were done last.  This time, we’re going to have just 2 sizes of buttons – big and small.  A standard scrollbar, a standard slider, standard checkboxes, etc.  Business Tycoon had literally hundreds of different sprite graphics for the GUI that could have been chopped down without any loss in game quality by standardizing early.

 

We are still a bit aphrehensive on how the main map will be handled.  Do we have real time scrolling or do we have it like Galciv on OS/2 was where it is sector by sector?  If you have an idea, visit our discussion group and chime in.

 

The problem with scrolling is potential performance and memory.  Not very many games have done a sprite based game at 1024x768x65k.  I believe Diablo II is still 640x480x256 colors for example.

 

Let’s talk tech here:

Just to display a single frame of the screen will take 1.6 Megabytes of memory.  But we don’t want any flicker so we’ll need to use 3.2 megs of memory.  Our game engine, Pear, supports RLE compression in memory so we’ll save on some of that.  But when we talk about scrolling around the map that’s a lot of memory to be pushing around to have it be smooth scrolling.

 

Will it work out or not?  We’re not sure.  Since we won’t be finishing the game until Christmas 2001 we know that the average machine by then will be a P3-500 with 64MB of ram, that is going to probably be our target machine.  But realistically, I want it to be able to be playable on a p3-333 with 64MB of ram.  

 

I am in favor of smooth scrolling because I intend to play the game mostly multiplayer which means real time which means a lot of tactical play.  In single player mode, you don’t need a scrolling map or more to the point, in turn based mode you don’t.  But in real time (or continuous play mode) it will be an issue.

 

Next week we’ll be finishing the Player setup screen where you pick the aliens you want to play with, set up their intelligence, the size of the map, etc.  That’s going to be a lot of work.  The alien graphics aren’t even close to being done except for the Torians.  Each computer player will be able to be tweaked in terms of how evil or good they are as well as how smart they are including a per player randomizer.

 

Another interesting topic is whether we should support in multiplayer per player handicaps?  I.e. Let the guy who sets up the game be able to give different players different amounts of money to start with.  The potential for abuse might be big enough to make it not worth it.

 

Of course, all that dodges the scarey scarey problem of a strategy game that can take a long time to play – what is the guy hosting the game dies?  If he quits the game, the game is over because it’s a client/server game.  There’s just too much data to be thrown around to have it peer to peer.  I’d like to see eventually a stand alone GalCiv server.

 

Another potential solution would be to try to detect if someone has a broadband connection and if they do, they can inherit the server.  That will take some really tricking coding.  We’ll see how things go during the beta.

 

 

3.18.00

Grr, we switched to a new server and some of my log entries were on the other machine.  Oh well, nothing too huge lost, just my ramblings.  Lots of work has been done.  Moving towards beta but currently looking at a May beta at the earliest.  Maybe in time for E3.

 

2.15.00

Work continues on GalCiv though there is going to be a delay in the beta it looks like.  We’ve committed to Ubi Soft to create a German version of Business Tycoon which is going to sap off some of our developers to work on for the next few weeks.  But other parts continue forward.

 

Check out today’s new star ship: The Yor Battle Cruiser.

 

 

2.7.00

Looks like we have the player setup screen graphics about ready. Had more discussion on what kind of game Galactic Civilizations is going to be.

 

Here’s the issue I have with most games – tactics are given far too much importance in games. The boring word “Logistics” gets the short end of the stick. In modern warfare (let alone 23rd century warfare), it’s going to be the side who has the technological and manufacturing capacity to overwhelm their opponents that is going to win.

 

There is an old saying, tactics is for amateurs professionals study logistics. So few mainstream strategy games focus on the importance of building up a well rounded empire (so to speak).  I can’t wait to play Star Trek Armada but at the same time, I’m getting weary of games that glorify tactics. When I watched the latest season of Deep Space Nine, I was always a bit disappointed that they didn’t really cover the resources of the Federation versus the Dominion in much detail.

 

Am I the only one who would jump at buying a book entitled Star Trek: Balances of Power in the Alpha Quadrant in which it had a reasonably detailed description of each side:

 

Federation

Total Planets: 192

Members: 98

Protectorates: 31

Total Population: 3.2 trillion

Manufacturing Capacity…

Technological capacity..

 

And so forth for each of the major powers. Which then outlined the Dominion war with a historical perspective. Some clever plan to take out a key installation sounds great on TV but there are those of us out here that watch such things and think “Look, the fact is that the side that’s going to win is the one that can crank out the most units and use those units the most effectively.”

 

In many respects, that’s how I think of Galactic Civilizations. It’s the strategy game in which these background issues really matter.  As clever as Piquard and Sisko might be, what really matters is whether the Federation can build 25 sovereign class vessels with another 50 galaxy class star ships to protect sector 5x2x4 from a Dominion take over since that is where 10% of the dilithian production takes place.  And moreover, with the upcoming Avatar class star ship be built in time to match the superior production capacity of the Dominion Shipyards?  Will the home front morale stay high enough given any resent setbacks on the battle field? Can the Federation, as a free society afford to vastly increase its taxes? Will the pro-war faction of the Federation Congress stay in power in the next election or will a pro-negotiated settlement majority get elected?  And even if Piquard or Sisko manages to do something clever and take out the defenses of Illian 3, can the Federation maintain space superiority in that star system long enough to land the 1.5 million Federation troops? Or will a Dominion attack destroy the transport ships?

 

These are the sorts of things that interest me. And I don’t think I’m alone in this thinking. I think that many people would also like to see a game where this takes place.

 

I’ve been having a lot of debates with people who want to see a swarming bonus added to combat – i.e. you combine 10 star ships together into a single force you should be able to take out 4 enemy ships without losing any ships. True enough but that’s not the point of the game, we keep combat so that the defender has a big advantage in that there is no swarm advantage. We don’t want players to have to concentrate on the tactical position of their ships because it’s irrelevant in the final analysis. If you disagree, then we’d all be speaking German now because Nazi Germany outfought the Allies big time in World War II on a division by division basis.  But what mattered was the US and its allies mobilized far more resources than the Axis did and we overwhelmed them. That, my friends, is modern warfare and that is what we aim to provide.

 

Warfare is a major component of Galactic Civilizations. But winning it will be due to coming up with superior technology, superior manufacturing, superior morale, as well as superior tactics. 

 

There are no resources to mine, no peons to order. You control entire planets of people. An entire galaxy is your battle ground. And diplomacy doesn’t just consist of trading a technology, it involves everything from having to settle asteroid mining disputes to figuring out what to do with an sentient aquatic life-form that inhabits most of a mineral rich planet that doesn’t want you building a colony there.

 

Warfare doesn’t consist of selecting 50 identical units and sending them into the heart of the “enemy base” (which in this case means heart of an interstellar mpire).  It means first taking out the sensor buoys that they’ve probably set up to keep track of you so you might as well forget about a surprise attack.  It means escorting your transports that contain millions of troops that greatly detract from your own population. It means having stealth star ships to pick off ships in the picket line.  It means having sensor star ships to keep track of enemy stealth ships. It means building technology that enables your troops to fight better when they land.

 

Yet many of the suggestions we get for the game involve adding ship designing features or having a Masters of Orion style combat system in which you choose whether to fire your photon torpedoes or your phasors. Others want it to be like Starcraft in space where some units are ranged units and others are melee units. They are concerned there won’t be enough to do in the game. Hopefully the upcoming beta will dispel that concern. J

 

 

2.3.00

Game mechanics document in pretty good shape. Pick screen looking pretty decent. The “pick” screen is the user selection screen. On it you will be able to select human (in multiplayer) or alien players and decide how intelligent various alien players will be. You also will pick your galaxy size and chat with players.

 

Also tweaked up the main screen so that more space is available to the map and eliminated two buttons on there (instead of a tax and resource management slider there’s going to be a domestic policy screen instead in which you do both and the fleet/planets screens are going to be combined).

 

More debates on the news group with regards to how combat will work out.  Obviously if most of our beta testers don’t like our combat system, we’ll probably change it but too many people are thinking that this is going to be some star ship version of Starcraft or Master of Orion 3 which is not our target at all.

 

2.1.00

Working on the game mechanics document today. Worked on the Torians, Arceans, and Altarians over the weekend. Yesterday got a little tied up working on the German version of Business Tycoon. That project is just about complete so that we can devote our full time to GalCiv.

 

1.27.00

Got back from New York yesterday after meeting with several magazines with regards to all the stuff Stardock’s been working on.  Naturally it was just in time for that blizzard they had there.

 

Stuff that got done while I was gone included the Drengin colony ship being rendered and a fix to the research screen’s queue engine which had a rather nasty array out of bounds problem.  Good ole arrays.

 

1.21.00

More artwork is coming in. The Torians are looking pretty good. Also been working on the setup screen with Alex.  UI is tough to do in an age where everything has to look cool but be easy to use.

 

Stardock.net multiplayer stuff won’t work through a firewall, which is unfortunate but not unexpected. I hope to have the SDS chat client up shortly so people can at least talk live on Stardock.net if they choose to.

 

1.18.00

Last couple of days I wrote up the Drengins, Yor, and Terrans history. For game reasons, the history is a bit different than the story background.  In the actual story, the Terrans aren’t quite so naďve. They build the hyperdrive in secret due to seeing the increasingly aggressive stance of the Drengin and the Arceans who control Earth’s star gate.  The Drengin discover that the humans have invented a hyperdrive in secret and try to steal the prototype (this all happens in “The Defender” which I’ve largely written but it isn’t published).  The Drengin and Arceans have increasingly more violent border clashes. The Drengin also invent a device that jams a star gate and then takes control of it so that the victim can’t shut it down.  In short order, the Drengin Empire and the Arcean Empire are in a life and death full fledged war. The Drengin also eventually declares war on the humans for not turning over the hyperdrive.  Also key in the story but not in the game is that the humans have secretly invented something else (that the Drengin aren’t aware of – shields).  All other ships are huge armor plated things that rely on a lack of energy available to ships to get through them without some effort.  Human ships, equipped with the hyper drive have plenty of energy and thus have much more powerful weapons and shields.  The ships themselves have very little armor and thus get shredded once weapons penetrate shields.

 

Unfortunately, Earth is just one planet, while the Drengin have an entire empire of planets to draw resources from.  But none of that is particularly relevant to Galactic Civilizations since we’re kind of taking an alternative path here – the player decides whether the Drengin and Arceans and the rest are evil or good and thus things go from there.  And everyone has hyperdrive at the same time.

 

Researching shields will be important since all ships will have a defense value of 1 to 3 tops without them and no one will get shields for awhile.

 

Also, our guys had to finish up Business Tycoon.  Sent off a new gamma build today to Ubisoft for testing.  Ubisoft has been pretty good to work with other than them being located physically across the sea (in France) which makes email the primary means of communication.

 

1.14.00

Being getting a lot of graphics for the main screen as well as aliens and sketches from the graphics team. Looking pretty good so far. May need to add an artwork section. Fixed some bugs in the research engine (array out of bounds error). It’s amazing that the OS/2 version of GalCiv even worked, when I wrote it, I was just a college student coding out of my dorm.  I didn’t know what a #define was so whenever I created an array or did a for loop, I had to remember what the number was. It was a pretty different situation than now (I’ll talk more about that later).

 

I have been also looking at the save game functions. I am very very very afraid of this. People are going to demand that you be able to save a multiplayer game because a multiplayer game may last days or months in larger galaxies. So I can see where people are going to want to get together on weekends and play GalCiv together for a few hours at a time.  This is the sort of thing I want. But saving a multiplayer game is very scary.  What I’ll probably do is allow the HOST to save the game and then allow that host to load a saved “scenario” which would basically be a saved game which will assign values to each of the players. It’s going to be tricky but I know people are going to want to have this.

 

Gotta get the beta sign up going too next week. This means we’re going to have to start putting effort into explaining what the Drengin Network is. We have open betas but we require people to pre-order the game (i.e. pay up front). Some people will complain about this but it’s the only realistic way to get people in a beta program that we know are interested in this type of game. A free open beta program would draw all kinds of people that may not be into this type of game and start trying to force features into the game that aren’t related to what we’re trying to make (like make the game truly 3D or have a first person mode or whatever). I suspect most people will want the Drengin Network once they figure out what it is but the concept is still pretty hard to get across. It’s a subscription software network and whenever I hear to word “Subscription” and “software” together I think of a bunch of crappy games on a CD or worse. Pity that early companies made a bad name for subscriptions because I really think it’s going to be the next big thing. Otherwise we’re going to be stuck with only a few decent games per year because they are just getting too huge to do. I’d rather have games in which I get the engine and then get updates to the gameplay (example, get Baldur’s Gate engine and then get a new adventure every couple months to play instead of having to wait 2 years for the next installment).  Or instead of having to play some massively overwrought game, get relatively simple idea games that are of high quality. Can’t do that sort of thing today though. You’re either a $50 massive game or a $20 deer hunter type game. And the other kind of games are shareware and freeware games that have low production values typically. This needs to change.

 

1.12.00

Yesterday spent a lot of time on WindowBlinds, a user made a skin based off of Apple’s new Aqua interface for Macintosh and Apple quickly had some issues on it. We had to pull the skin. But that stuff took some time plus we released v1.1.  So today I’m back managing the project.

 

Wrote part of the game mechanics document. It’s going to take awhile to update it. I also need to explain the enhancements made to the game since the OS/2 version. There’s a number of pretty new items in the game that should excite players such as choosing a political party, creating a character, having your form of government really make changes in the way the game plays plus introducing the concept of “prestige” into the game so that propaganda now has some real teeth.

 

1.10.00

Had a bit of a debate on the star gates and why the Terrans aren’t familiar with the lay out of the galaxy.  Just for clarification…

 

In the 30,000 or so years of space travel while humans were still figuring out that whole fire and farming thing, the 5 major races (Drengin, Arceans, Yor, Altarians, Torians) had set up star gates between themselves.

 

They had also over the previous 50,000 years mapped out most of the galaxy. In other words, they learned where all the “good” planets were.  The Terrans do not know where the good planets are, they just know where the stars are.  They also don’t know precisely where the other planets are.

 

When you travel by star gate, actual location doesn’t make as much of a difference.  The Terrans will generally have some idea how far away from Earth a given race is but that’s about it.  The Terrans also don’t have their own hyperwave communications setup. 

 

1.9.00

Updated the encyclopedia with a bit of the history of the galactic civilizations universe and some of the philosophies behind the game. Most people don’t realize that GalCiv precedes “Masters of Orion” and yet people are going to be comparing it to that game simply because they both take place in space. Every time some company creates a space strategy game I get email saying “is this going to compete”? GalCiv is very different than these other games. It’s like comparing Caesar 3 to Age of Empires: Rise of Rome because they both take place during the Roman era. Some of these new games seem to require a PhD to get up and going. Their interfaces strike me as far too complicated.

 

I did decide though that we should put in way points on auto pilot. I’m probably going to borrow a lot of the conventions from Total Annihilation for that.  So the control mouse click will set a way point for a particular ship.

 

I saw a review of Galactic Civilizations 1.0 for OS/2 back from 1995. Boy, I forgot how awful GalCiv 1.0 was. The screenshots made me shiver. It’s that same feeling I get when I play with the C-64 emulator!

 

 

 

1.7.00

The core engine of the game is now complete.  We will be using Pear V2.5 for Galactic Civilizations.  This means we’ll be able to have Multiplayer right away including Stardock.net match making support even in the first beta.  My main concern is memory requirements, however.  We are going to go for a 1024x768x65k game for maximum playability.  The problem is RAM.  That kind of graphics will use a lot of in game memory unless we’re very careful and even then I suspect we’ll be using a good 40 megabytes of RAM to play the game.