Currently available on Impulse is Beta1 of GCII version 2.0 (we're shooting for only one major Beta, but there may be more).   I'll keep exposition to a minimum, so here's that list of remaining features you'll be receiving...     New Negotiation Options Tech Brokering is a game setup option that restricts the trading of technologies to only those you've personally researched. This keeps tech-trade-spam to a minimum and gives some extra muscle to races more...

Continuing our in-depth look at 2.0 brings us to the new Galaxy Setup options, as well as the Espionage changes people have been looking for. Again, as with all new things in 2.0, we aren't looking to revolutionize, just to bring these features to a natural completion before work on GCIII begins (which is still a way off, but still looming).     New Galaxy Options   As Brad (Frogboy/Draginol) pointed out in his official Preview of 2.0 , we've gone in and added some...

Galactic Civilization 2 Version 2.0 is being designed to blow our other updates away.   A few months back we traversed all the suggestions/requests/demands we've received since GC2:Dreadlords 1.0 and compiled a definitive list of new features to cram into our penultimate update.   I think these next two are going to make alot of people happy...     External Ship Designer   Yes, we've finally done it!  From the title screen, you now have the option...

For the last few months the team has been toiling away on THREE seperate projects...Political Machine 2008, the unannounced fantasy strategy title, and GalCiv 2.0. And for those months we've kept players in the dark about 2.0...mostly because of the frantic, nose-to-the-grindstone pace we've maintained. But now it's time....time to finally start talking about what will hopefully be the ultimate update to our little GC2 series For those that don't know, GalCivII 2.0 is the final major upd...

For your weekend amusement, we've cobbled together a fresh build of GC2:Twilight with some significant fixes. http://sd.stardock.com/GalCiv2/GC2_Twilight_1_92_Alpha.zip You'll be seeing the official build make its way onto Impulse and SDCentral next week, but in the meantime, just copy the contents of this ZIP into your 'Program FilesStardock/TotalGaming/GalCiv2/Twilight' folder and you should be good to go! Here's the change log: + NEW: Improved Starport improvement graphics ...

I wish I had time to do a proper journal entry about Politicla Machine, but there's just too much work to be done   Next Friday I'll write up about some of the new features, but I have to say, the Bobblehead maker is pretty darn cool.

Final testing is going well...we're all pretty happy with how things are shaping up. A few more days then it's onto Political Machine's cruch     It'll all be worth it when the team puts out 2 great strategy games in the same year!    Cya Wedensday!

It's not much, but I guess we can leak a few images from the new Invasion Window. I'll let you guys come up with your own conclusions., but let's just say we weren't making the Improvements extra-detailed for the sake of the icons EDIT: 'if' changed to 'of'...as was my original intent.

So I lost a battle of wits to Brad this week. During a discussion about the blurriness of icons when playing on Higher Resolutions (which most of us do), Brad pointed out that 128x128 versions should be a nice improvement, hinting at more work from yours truly (not much extra work, but some). 'The problem with that...' said I, 'Is that, when shrunk down on lower-res games, the interpolation of DirectX's texture manager would start removing pixels and the icons would look REALLY bad.'...

Nothing too juicy this week...just a pict of an early lab when playing an evil race (yet to be implemented). Feedback has been very positive on the improvements from Beta 1, so I'm hoping we can continue to replace old graphics up through the final RC. I played a few sessions, and it's kinda sad to have early improvements look cooler than late-game wonders   Ah well, whatever time allows. Hope everyone is enjoying Beta 1a!  See everyone next Thursday for Beta number 2!!!

Another fun week of Improvement creation! While I'm enjoying myself, making these race specific improvements is really starting to take it's creative toll on me. For GalCiv3 I'm going to fight for Improvements that are real-time 3D models and an 'Improvement Editor' where it's easy to crank them out (plus it'd open the door for more custom-created improvements). But enough looking forward....let's dig through the past two weeks and see some new Twilight stuff!!! (Starting at the upper...

It's been a while since I've had something (I was allowed) to talk about, and with production in full swing for 'Twilight' I thought I'd pop in and show off some of the new Improvements we've been working on. With the race specific tech-trees come TONS of new Planet Imps that need made, so that's what I'll be doing for the next few weeks. Above we have the following... Arena of Agony : Boosting the morale of any evil race that may build it, the Arena takes the place of 'Entertainme...

With August half way past and summer slowly drawing to a close, our deadlines for Dark Avatar are beginning to loom. Luckilly, we've kept at a steady pace the last few months, meaning much of our hard work is starting to really come together nicely. Here are some of the major features we're working on right now.... Race Logos on Ships That's right, this is MY ship. Jesse, the man behind the "rotating jewelry" solution (for those that don't know, 1.0 didn't allow you to...

With the Epic Generator coming in at #3 on the poll, I figure it's time to give the faithful an update on the progress. When I first tackled this project, I was under the false impression that the difficulties would lay in the writing. Turns out I was wrong... very wrong. In my last dev journal on the subject, I went though and determined what story events I thought were needed to develop an interesting and accurate story. You guys posted some comments on other events that should be lo...

Ah, the UI of a turn based strategy game…so much info to convey, so little time to get it all 100% perfect. As players have invested hours and hours on our little space game, they’re finding many little UI issues that hamper the gamplay experience and can quickly turn a joyful galaxy-wide extermination into a click-fest nightmare. Well…perhaps not a nightmare, but certainly not as enjoyable. After the memory issues of 1.1 that went hand-in-hand with playing on a Gigantic galaxy, the wh...