JoeUser Forums
The GalCiv II team keeps working on new updates. But more and more of that coding is occurring during the spare time of the developers. For example, I'm only budgeted to work on the game a few hours per week at this point. In effect, most of my time working on the game is during my nights and weekends.
On every Stardock game for the past several years, my job has been to manage the overall project and then come in near the end to go hard core on the parts of the game that need the most work or that I'm specialized on. Computer AI has been my programming specialty for the last decade or so. As a result, I typically only do serious coding on a given project during the last few months.
Once the game is starting to come together into something that can be played as opposed to being a technology, I move from managing the project to actively programming on it. I would also fill in the gaps that our project design document didn't assign out. On GalCiv II, for instance, I came in and wrote up most of the technology descriptions, a good chunk of the alien conversations, the ship components, planetary improvements, and much of the "data" parts. I also wrote most of the AI for GalCiv II (except for the diplomacy screen logic which was cobbled together by eveyone and the planetary surface/improvement backend for picking out what gets built on planets). The economics and tons of gameplay tweaks I also code on.
After the game ships, I get involved in pieces here and there. I'm like an older, uglier (but better spelling/grammar <ducks>) version of Boogiebac where I look at what I think needs to be tweaked in text or in code and does what needs to be done with a heavy bias towards AI and economics.
But at this point, it's on weekends. There's a LOT of stuff that I have to do during the day. Running a company is a full-time job unto itself as you might imagine. And the 3/4ths of our business that isn't games (like Object Desktop) is getting ready for next year's release of Windows Vista.
Like many gamers and modders out there, I enjoy doing this stuff. I like reading the forums (most of the time) and playing the game. I get ideas or spot stupid AI things and then go in and try to figure out why it did something stupid or how I can make it better.
For instance, tonight I changed the starting position code a bit so that there tends to be a bit more space between players. I also tried to improve the planetary improvemenet handling. The original coding for planet surface stuff is expertly written but it's not my code and I have a hard time following some of it. It's also different from how I would have written it so I do my best to update it to try to be "Smarter" based on playing the game and reading posts. I think I've gotten it so that it won't build a gagillion embassies or entertainment centers. The cause seems to be that those two types of buildings were not defined and as a result there was no limit on how many of that "kind" of building could be made. It was pretty deep in there so it took some doing.
I also put in more code to make different players play more differently in terms of what they research, how aggressive they are, and numerous other things. Another thing I did was change the way the AI handles bribes/gifts so that players won't necessarily (easily) just give it a bunch of goodies, crank relations up to close and ally.
One area I think was significant improved but we'll have to wait until more players get their hands on it is in terms of strategic gameplay. The AI tends to focus on sectors to conquer (much like a human would) but it woudl tend to focus on too many sectors still and its forces would never be focused enough to overwhelm an expert human player who was focusing their resources.
A challenge that will take more time to deal with is that the computer players have reached the level where they are plenty tough for me. That is, unless I'm playing on a very specific setting or playing with a very specific style, the AI at higher than tough difficulties will cream me. My view is that anyone being 1.2 at anything higher than tough consistently is probably doing some sort of exploit at which point you just gotta decide whether you want to play a game or game the program? The AI doesn't "care" whether it loses. So if you figure out that you can some starbase/resource/ship combo or find some diplomacy trick to "Win" then knock yourself out. But I won't be spending my summer weekends trying to "fix" something like that.
After 1.2, the update path starts to slow a little as we move towards expansion packs. There will be a 1.3 still but the development team (even now) is working on this stuff in their spare time too. When you see a post from one of us on the weekend, don't think we're getting paid to do that. 
We do it because we love the game and love you guys. We love the community. At the same time, I hope people realize that it is the good will and encouragement from that community that keeps these incredible updates going.
Sometimes I see things on the forums or in email (particularly Cari's email) that are incredibly rude and come across with such an attitude of entitlement that it can really take the wind out of ones sails. When someone makes a post like "X MUST be fixed" (where X is some trivial issue that few people care about) or a post that makes outright demands (as opposed to requests) on what "MUST" be in 1.2 or 1.3 that sort of thing is pretty grating. I know seeing some guy on the forum saying how the "AI sucks" doesn't make me inclined to spend a sunny weekend working on it. I mean, heck, I've been making games for 15 or so years now. And I've been playing them longer than that. I have a decent idea of what is "good" and what is "bad". No game is perfect. But we left "good enough" a long time ago. Someone listing out a spelling error or some UI thing they don't like or some goof one of the AI players makes on occasion is not something that "must" be fixed out of some sense of quality control. This isn't WoW where people are paying $15 a month and hence one expects continous updates. We keep updating it because - like I said - we love the game and we love the community. It's a labor of enjoyment/love. We're not looking for adoration, just respect and decency.
The betas of 1.2 should still show up sometime this month. The main features of 1.2 can be listed as:
- UI to choose mods (such as total conversion mods)
- Sample mod
- Significant UI improvements
- Some AI fixes/enhancements
- Memory optimization
- New Combat system (ships fire at the same time)
I am thinking of putting in a request so that the attacker gets a 25% attack advantage for that first round so that there is still an advantage in being the attacker.
For 1.3, it'll be fairly modest tweaks and improvements. After that, the team will be working on the expansion pack. The art team is currently split between making cut-scenes for the expansion pack and making ship-content for an $8.95 ship component pack. The idea is to be able to lower the cost of the expansion pack a bit. People (like me) who love having cool looking hulls and ship parts can get those (And I've seen some early stuff, it's far better than what's in the game, the art team has really mastered how to do this stuff). And the people who don't care about the ship design stuff can skip that if they want.
GalCiv2 Forums
