CaretFarmer

Reply to SMP/Timer problems? in Bug Reports Stardock Forums

GalCiv2 uses QueryPerformanceCounter() already, which should work on nearly every chunk of hardware out there. It appears that everyone reporting this problem so far is running on an AMD dual core machine. Is there anyone here with an Intel dual core machine that is experiencing these issues? For those of you with AMD dual core machines, AMD has a driver update that may address this problem: AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor Driver for Win

Reply to And now for something completely different... in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

Okay, I wasn't trying to be mysterious, just trying to stay employed. Here's what Brad had to say about the Next Big Thing at Stardock: Link

And now for something completely different... in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

Well, all good things must come to an end: with the completion of the Planet Management feature of GalCiv2, I'm moving on to something else. Come Monday, I'll be starting on a new project here at Stardock, something new and exciting that looks like it could be a lot of fun both to make and to play. Using the GalCiv2 project as a starting point, it shouldn't be too

Reply to More Visual Improvements in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

For the time being, bonuses will be just that: bonuses. So, if you build a farm on a tile that's better suited for energy production, there's no penalty on the farm's production. The effect of the bonus will be a simple percentage increase in the corresponding production level, so it'll be something like another 10 MW of power, etc.

Reply to More Visual Improvements in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

In case you didn't know, BoogieBac = Scott.

Reply to More Visual Improvements in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

Regarding coloring the icons: I'll pass those suggestions on to Scott; he may have had a reason for making them black and white, but then again maybe he didn't. It's a simple matter to experiment with what looks best now that it's implemented so we'll probably try out different colors to see how they work. @Shai-Hulud: Centering them in the tile would make them more visible when the tile is empty, but once something is built there it's proba

More Visual Improvements in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

Happy National Kazoo Day! This week was kind of a mixed bag in terms of what I worked on. After last week's push for the media tour, this week was a time for going back and fixing things that weren't quite right under the hood but that were better left until after the deadline: fixing memory leaks, making things more efficient, etc. Also, it was a time for putting

Saving Grace in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

Things have been pretty hectic around here this week--Brad's getting ready for an important media tour next week, so we've been working hard to make the game as sweet as possible. You can see a summary of the whole team's recent progress in Brad's blog entry "GalCiv2 prepares to go on the road." Link . I close

Reply to Making Mountains out of Molehills in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

Yeah, green = good to go, yellow = needs some work, red = needs a lot of work (though there weren't any reds in that screen). And, yup, you broke the secret code: PQ = # of usable tiles. The # of yellow and red tiles is also based on PQ but not directly and exclusively. The exact formulas haven't been finalized yet, but the idea is that before you control a planet, you can get an idea of how good it is based on PQ but it'll be unclear how many yello

Making Mountains out of Molehills in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

The beauty of fractal terrain generation is that it can supply a large number of unique terrains from a compact representation. The ugliness of fractal terrain generation is that it looks, well, like fractal terrain. Okay, it's not that ugly, but it's nothing to write home about either. So, these days I'm spending my time trying to figure out ways of making the terrain look less fractal. The screen shot below displays some of the changes I've made of late. In particular, using a chea

Return of Loose Ends in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

Nothing earth-shattering to show you this week. As the title of this entry indicates, I spent this week tying up newly-found loose ends as well as some improvements. The bulk of this week was spent making it so that the planets in the main game screen look the same as the terrain surface in the planet management screen. Now, planets look the same whereever you see

Reply to Tying up Loose Ends in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

The plan is to have the planet in the upper left look like the map (at least roughly), but that will take a little more work (mainly because I didn't structure my map-creation code right to make it easy to get the planet's texture from it). The maintenance numbers and other figures may or may not end up in the final game. Originally we were going to have a simple model for those kinds of things, but even that may be too much micromanagement,

Tying up Loose Ends in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

Well, I've spent the last few days dealing with various things I've been putting off. None of them were particularly difficult or time-consuming; they just weren't particularly interesting. However, the end result is an improvement over what the planet management looked like at the start of the week. The shot below still has a lot of placeholder art, but it gives o

Reply to A Trek Through the Desert in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

All planets will have 120 tiles, but only a fraction of them will be usable. That's why it's important for the player to be able to visibly identify usable tile before they control the planet (since they won't have the overlays at that point). You assume correctly that red and yellow overlays indicate tiles that could be improved to the point of usability, with red indicating more improvement needed than yellow.

Reply to A Trek Through the Desert in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

Thanks for the great comments! My main objective was to make the desert tiles stand out from other (usable) tiles and, from the responses above, it sounds like that objective was met. I agree that it's unclear what some of the other tiles are and the mountains do look a little too cloud-like, so I'll need to address those issues, but I'm glad to hear that the deserts 'read'. mrodgers, cloud cover is something we've discussed as a way of

A Trek Through the Desert in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

Well, the planet surface is shaping up nicely. After taking a bit of a detour to deal with some underlying non-graphical stuff (yes, there's more to games than graphics), I've been working on ways of blending different terrain types so that they look reasonably 'natural' but are still easily identified for what they are. Water and snow-capped mountains were easy bec

Reply to Secret Santa - 2004 in Business JoeUser Forums

Dear Secret Santa, I'm always happy to get fun novelty things, so if you have some off-the-wall ideas, I'm cool with that. If you don't want to think that hard, you can always look at my Amazon wish list ([email protected]). There's plenty of stuff there in the $10-15 range--just be sure to look at the priority to make sure I want it (my wife uses my list some times and those items are marked as "Don't buy this for me"). And if that's too much wo

Reply to The View from Space in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

The max number of usable tiles is 36; the rest are just window dressing. There will be a color coding scheme so that it's obvious which tiles can be built upon (in fact, that's what I'm working on right now).

Reply to The View from Space in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

Well, we're planning on having different types of planets, so depending on the planet type, there will be different types of territories. For instance, a hostile, barren planet might have craggy mountains, deserts, oily bogs, etc. The actual number of types of territories hasn't been finalized yet, though, so I can't say how many there will be.

The View from Space in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

I briefly considered posting an update last Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), but rest and relaxation won out. Besides, the screenshots have improved greatly since then, so it's just as well. Today the team agreed on the basic visual presentation of the planet's surface and I think it's going to be pretty sweet. I'll post a screenshot tomorrow. Um, that's it.<B

Dispatch from the Planet's Surface in GalCiv Journals JoeUser Forums

Greets from the Caret Farm. First off, let me introduce myself: my name is Paul Kerchen, and I've been developing games professionally for the past ten years. A few weeks ago I took a game developer position at Stardock Link , so in this blog I'll be documenting my contributions to and observations about the next hit titles to b

Reply to Looked outside tonight? DO IT NOW!!!! in Current Events JoeUser Forums

Seems like every astronomical event that happens around my neck of the woods is blocked by overcast skies. This one is no exception.

Reply to More than just Republican or Democrats in Politics JoeUser Forums

ISTR that after the 2000 election, Scientific American (or was it Discovery?) ran an article about the problems with the electoral college and other forms of polling. The conclusion was that there really isn't a perfect way to vote--every method of polling has its own set of problems that can lead to seemingly unfair outcomes. Oh, and for a laugh, here's one of those whack-a-mole-style games with a political theme: www.whackthevote.com. The

Reply to Politics & The Hollywood and Music Industry Elitist Lefties in Politics JoeUser Forums

WHO said anything about being a "leftie"? Just because I didn't nod my head in agreement with you makes me a leftie? I think you need to step out of your ideological echo chamber once in a while. As for talking about censorship, how else would you make it so that singers "shut up and sing" without talking about anything that you find uninteresting or offensive? Obviously market pressure isn't doing the trick, so what else is there but gover