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Monday, May 03, 2004 - Stardock Game Relesae Schedule
This week Stardock will be releasing Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy Release Candidate 2. The main new feature here will be a tweak in the campaign code so that difficulty levels don't affect your teammates.
Later this month, we expect to release Galactic Civilizations 1.21 to add some fixes and tweaks we made during the course of GalCiv: AP's development.
At the end of May, Stardock is planning to go gold on The Political Machine, it's political strategy game that is both single player and multiplayer. Like Galactic Civilizations, Stardock will also have a "BonusPak" available for buyers to download when the game comes out that will contain "Bonus features" as a way of thanking people for purchasing our software.
Come July, we expect to begin preliminary work on two new games. One is an unannounced title which we'll announce this Summer and the other is Galactic Civilizations II which won't be ready until mid to late 2005.
From a technology point of view, if you have Political Machine, you can see where Stardock's gaming technology is heading -- 3D engines (not 3D UI though for ease of use). The graphics quality will not just get better but the ease of making great looking stuff will improve.
Stardock is using DesktopX 2 (www.desktopx.net) to create its game UIs from here on out since it fully supports alpha blending, true color. It's all very object-oriented. Users will be able to "skin" Stardock's games by modifying the DesktopX objects. We're not talking just new graphics, users will be able to completely mold the UIs on our games based on their level of play. It'll be really ground breaking (anyone who's used DesktopX will know what we mean).
Net result is that the graphics in our games will become much much better while the performance should become faster. GalCiv 1 is NOT hardware accelerated at all. GalCiv 2 will have full hardware acceleration so it's possible it'll actually run on lower end hardware than GalCiv 1 while looking 10X better and having more features.
Meanwhile, our goal with Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy is to enable GalCiv players to have a game that is very replayable in new ways where the community can support itself with new content and such.
Stay tuned for more news. We have some exciting announcements coming up.
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