The good news is that there will be a Galactic Civilizations III. The bad news is that it won't be out this decade.
Galactic Civilizations II v2.0 is currently in development but it's free for all players of the expansion packs. But that will serve as the code basis for any further GalCiv II updates.
Right now, the team is working on the "unnamed fantasy strategy game" sometimes called "not-MOM" (not Master of Magic). It's a totally new graphics engine that makes use of multi-core CPUs and GPUs but will still run fine on lower end hardware thanks to built-in detection that will determine "how much stuff" to display in real-time.
That game will go into public beta early next year and its release date will be largely based on player feedback. As many of you know, we are in the position of being able to keep working on our games until everyone's happy with them. Our non-game part of the company does so well that there's no pressure. We want to make it the best turn-based strategy game of all time.
THAT engine will be what serves as the basis of a future Galactic Civilizations III. That means GalCiv III will have features like tactical battles (as an option), multiplayer, more sophisticated planetary development, and much more.
Not officially. If you're interested in at least trying to get any issues with emulation ironed out though, the beta is the time to do that.
Ok.However, it is time to start thinking about platforms. Win32 is frozen, Win64 is where further development will happen. Linux continues like an unstoppable train and MacOS is more successfull than ever.
Game freaks will continue to use Windows as their main platform. Professional computer users, like me, increasingly use Linux and MacOS. I run Galciv2 on Windows, being a professional I don't to spend all the time (and do the pirate of all needed Win32 DLLs) getting it to run under Wine, however, that does nothing to the fact I have fully migrated from Windows, both at home and at work. I guess many people on these forums can say the same.
Keep in mind that you'll have to learn the new OS and perhaps convert some documents to a format that works better with the new OS.
My recommencation is that, for any OS you decide to switch to, you upgrade on a new or different machine from your primary machine. A simple replacement of the OS on the old machine might not be so simple - you may have to worry about driver compatibility and OS performance requirements. A new machine, especially one that comes with the OS already installed, won't have as many troubles as older machines.
It would be great if it suppots other OSes, although honestly Windows tends to be the OS of choice for gamers.
My personal experience is that emulators and virtualizers have very poor support for 3D graphics. I think Wine has some support and VMWare has some experimental support. Virtual PC emulates an ancient S3 card that has no 3D acceleration at all. Supporting emulators could be pretty difficult.
Wine has decent support for 3D graphics, and they have a new release every 2 weeks so it's improving quickly. It's hit or miss whether a game will work right now, but it doesn't seem dependent on how advanced the graphics are. Wine is actually not an emulator, though, it's an implementation of the Win32 libraries in Linux. This means that when a game does work, it usually runs as well as it would run on Windows.
If i'm a gamer, i just use windows.
If i'm a professional + gamer i install windows + Linux or MacOS.
Emulators or implementation of the Win32 libraries just to be able to play some games gives you more problems than just installing 2 OS on the same machine.
I just want to ask when can we expect to see 2.0 to come out. I thought it will be at the end of the summer. But then..summer is already almost over. Sooo will we be seeing it by the end of the year.
Another thread (Journals) predicts a release due date for October 1st.
I think there is a "next OS" problem around in general and for Stardock too.
XP is well entrenched for both professionals and gamers. The former are less than the later but pay for their games.
XP end of life will be declared sooner than later.
Vista is a flop besides preinstalled and MS will have to take care of it quickly.
In the meantime users like me have both XP and Linux on different machines and corporations are moving slices of users to Linux where possible.
Currently Stardock looks quite in good friendship with MS so I see 2 problems for a Linux GC:
1) technically an almost common solution should be found
2) politically could not be the best option and could affect other parts of SD business
Many years ago' Brad left OS/2 for Windows and managed it well. We'll see what will be next...
(forgive me the off-topic)
Good news, made my day. There is still a large fanbase of *cough* today, grieving about the fact that EA holds the rights and nobody was allowed to develop a successor of this great game. I'm looking forward to not-MOM.
Me too; me too!
I played MoM for a few weeks earlier this summer. It's as good as ever -- almost more fun than Civ4 even though Civ4 is so much better designed and balanced. It's just so much fun to summon a Fire Elemental to fight those halfling slingers. I really wish Hasbro had sold you the license (even though 80% of the stuff in MoM is cribbed from Magic and D&D).
*grin* I'm glad my name for it stuck. I can't wait until we get more details on non-MOM.
Can we get into Public beta by pre-ordering?
As long as it feels like MOM and has a similar feature set I'm sure it will be.
So the non-MOM features know so far are;
Tactical Battles (A huge plus in my book)
Multiplayer (Another huge plus for me)
Sammual
What sysreqs will be required to max the graphics at 60 and 75 FPS on 1280x1024 and 1920x1200? I'll be surprised if performance can get better then with a E8400, a 8800GTS (G92) and 4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM. I'm prepared to upgrade to the latest graphicscard (the generation after 4870 and GTX 280) but I haven't heard about a game that heavily taxes the cpu since SupCom.
Will a Q9450 be better for not-MoM then a E8400 with overclocking factored in the equation?
Good news, made my day. There is still a large fanbase of *cough* today, grieving about the fact that EA holds the rights and nobody was allowed to develop a successor of this great game.
EA holds the rights to MoM?? You sure about that?? Brad said it was Atari they were trying to buy them from. And if Atari wouldn't sell the MoM rights to Stardock for 100.000$ then I don't see why they would do it to EA. Plus, why on earth would EA be interested in the rights to a game in a nichegenre that consoleretards know nothing about?
This "flop" has a larger market share than all non-Microsoft OSes combined.
Sorry, I mixed it up with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (SMAC/SMAX). EA holds the rights to SMAC/X.
Source?
After a quick googling Vista lumbers at around 15%, though I couldn't find good up to date numbers on it.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10
I'm not sure if it's the best source, but it does appear that even 15% is bigger than any other OS. Mac OS is at almost 8% with the source I'm using. All of the other OSes drop off quickly after Mac OS and are barely worh mentioning.
Thanks for the link.
From the link:
So you're correct. But imho what he meant was, that Vista won't break XPs dominance on the markets for some years. So XP still will be first place when the new windows comes out, somehow fracturing the PC market even further with the addition of two "different" windows camps.
This forces devs to develop for two (similar) operating systems, making it cost more.
At least that's how I interpreted it, probably I'm wrong, but hey, I'm only almost perfect.
Hence why I was careful enough to say "non-Microsoft OSes." Sure, it's not taking over the market by storm, but it doesn't seem very many people are defecting to other OSes. They're just staying with XP and not upgrading.
If you note the trends, Vista is still a growing OS, and XP is still a shrinking OS. It does appear that replacement is happening, it's just not hapenning as fast as some people would like.
But yeah, it's happening rather slowly, and when the next OS from Microsoft launches we may have a 3 way battle between the Microsoft OSes.
Possibly. Depends on when they launch their next OS and how much it's delayed. I'm not terribly confident they can launch this next OS on time.
I think it is great news and I am glad that the company is expanding beyond Galactic Civilizations. What I mean by that is that Stardock can work on one genre (Fantasy TBG) and upgrade the technology behind what drives that game then revisit the other genre (Space Sim TBG (GalCiv XX)) and implement the newer technology for that game years later. I enjoy when a game that is released reflects greater leaps in technology and innovations. I have played too many games where a newer version of a game in a series are merely a year or a little more apart and the only real difference between the newer game and the last version are slightly enhanced graphics and tweaks to the AI and interface.
Im personally glad that there will be a multiplayer available, my friends and I have been waiting for something like this. As far as the AI being addressed by seth. Im only a novice game programmer (hobbyist) but my understanding with games utilizing multicores, the AI has plenty of room for improvement without effecting performance. I guess I dont understand how implementing multiplayer will effect the game at all. There are some videos at Intel's website about games and multicore. This seems to especially have positive impacts on game performance and so on. My understanding is that you can now use 1 core for the graphics, 1 core for AI, 1 core for ect. ect. This is great news and I can imaging this will allow for newer larger, epic games to be developed (I hope).
I also agree that the Metaverse has a certain appeal to it and would hate to see it go away and rather would like to see it improved. Such as the current scoring system and scoring for certain criteria. I think its a shame that if a player wants to play an epic game on immense that he / she are penalized for it because of the time frame it takes to clear a map size such as immense. I personally wish there were bigger maps but thats another topic.
I think its great that GC III is in the works and I cannot wait to see some screens of the early work (including the fantasy game). Stardock I think you guys are great and I have much respect for all of you. Keep up the good work and I will pre order the fantasy game as soon as it becomes available to support your efforts. What separates you from the rest is that it is apparent that you care about your customers and get invovled in the community and care about what we think. Rock on.
LaterAaron
I hope that the A.I gets it's own thread (maximum difficulty) no matter if you got a dual or quadcore. And I thought the graphicscard took care of the graphics, soundcard the sound, core1 A.I and core2 physics and leftovers.
I'm interested in how good you could make it look in motion. Got a feeling you could get a 4870x2 to choke if you wanted to
Would be great if you allowed better graphics to be displayed once in a while (every 5th update). Like in the beginning there's only "High" graphics as the max, but as the updates come it gets increased to "Higher", "fantastic" etc.
And a "max everything" would be useful so you don't have to max every slider and drop-bar there is.
Why not combine Galciv 3 with a Spore type editor.
Allow us to design our own races and buildings like that to use in our games. Give us emotional connections to our people. Make us care.
Obviously the spaceship editor is already in, but perhaps make a version thats less blocky and edgy. More round softness. Organic tech ships.
How about a feature that populates your skirmish games with other player's creations?
Looking forward to all improvements and beta and GCIII when ever it is released. Please, Please no multiplayer if it detracts in any way from the SP version. SP is the only way I play which is what makes this game the best of the best. So please no multiplayer.
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