Mellified

Join Date 07/2002

+21

The new Stardock Games platform

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For those of you who don’t recognize my name here's some background. You’ll be seeing me in these forums more often. My list of excuses why it’s taken until now is long: moving my family to a new city, setting up Stardock’s third office (located outside Austin, Texas), helping Stardock build its IT teams, working on Project Tachyon, and trying to live up to the proud legacy left behind by one of the earliest Stardockians.

When I started at Stardock last year I joined a talented team of developers and engineers. Many were Stardock veterans and we've hired several smart folks as well. Hard as it is to believe, the team has been hard at work for almost a year now. The first small example of our efforts is ready for you to enjoy. It seems an appropriate time to talk more about what you’ll see from Stardock in the future.

“Project Tachyon” is the internal code name for a collection of “metagame” features Brad envisioned for Stardock’s games. Since we’ve added many awesome game studios to our family it doesn’t make sense for each developer to re-invent the wheel. So the team here is building these metagame services as a single platform for all Stardock's upcoming titles. We’ve named this the “Stardock Games” platform.

Not every game will use every feature of course. A single player only game such as Sorcerer King needs no online. But competing to be the best Guardian Sovereign player in the world sure is fun! Seeing who’s playing on Insane difficulty is great too. Best of all, you can show off your ladder rank to your friends and rivals via a beautiful custom web site. A sample set of these leaderboards is now live for Galactic Civilizations III Beta 6!

One of the goals of Stardock Games is to keep you gaming. For example, Steam provides authentication already. We’re using that information to simply log you in automatically after a one-time email registration (coming soon). That email enables us to link you to your multiplayer stats and provide Stardock technical support. Most importantly if Stardock Games is unavailable due to connectivity or maintenance your single player game won’t be impacted.

Multiplayer will require a connection of course. Brad’s AI skills aren’t quite up to simulating human consciousness... yet. We do have fantastic matchmaking systems available for our developers. Servo, now available to Founders, is the first game using Stardock Games matchmaking. It’s been great working with the BonusXP team for Multiplayer and there’s so much more to come!

Which brings up an important point… we’re crafting tools for the developers at Stardock and our partners to use as they see fit. We talk regularly about features and design ideas. We work together to ensure the game developers’ vision shines.

Admittedly this effort requires some sacrifice... of sleep. We have a great operations team dedicated to keeping Stardock Games running smoothly. When an alert goes off at 3 A.M. one of us (yes, I’m on call too) wakes up to resolve the problem. And the Stardock Games platform is built in the cloud. This enables us to scale quickly to meet demand when a new game or update launches.

We have several more great features planned for the future. Those of you who participate in our Founders and Early Access programs will see these added as new builds arrive. And we’ll be posting updates here as cool new things are ready for you.

It’s a great time to play Stardock games!

-Adrian

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ElanaAhova

Join Date 09/2008

+105

Are you the adrian who made the civ4 mod 'a new dawn?'

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Mellified

Join Date 07/2002

+21

No.

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hedetet

Join Date 02/2012

+13

You broke your flawless lurking record just to say that???

j/k and welcome!

How many of you are there in Austin?

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cardinaldirection

Join Date 08/2012

+18

Nice to meet you Adrian; thanks for all your hard work!

Spent most of my life in Austin, say hi to Barton Springs and the bats for me.

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Mellified

Join Date 07/2002

+21

Just a handful of us in Austin so far. We're setup for growth though. We'll continue to add more folks as Stardock ships more games.

And we're actually north Austin so we don't get down to Barton Springs much unfortunately.

Finally, thanks to you guys for supporting Stardock! It's great to work here and doubly so to build something I'm passionate about. We're making the Stardock Games platform with y'all in mind. I think it's a great example of how Stardock values its customers.

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Jafo

Join Date 03/2001

+1851

Admittedly this effort requires some sacrifice... of sleep.

Sleep?

What's that?

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cardinaldirection

Join Date 08/2012

+18

Quoting Mellified_Man,

reply 5

y'all

the real gotham

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Quoting Jafo,

reply 6

Admittedly this effort requires some sacrifice... of sleep.

Sleep?

What's that?

or just pile it on for jafo and go international. someone will always be awake somewhere

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NetNomad

Join Date 04/2003

What?! There are Stardockians's in Austin?! I'm going to drive to their office personally and buy them lunch as a thanks... unless they are Aggies.

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Stardock seems like it's gonna become one of the big ones just like Blizzard.

So, you envision Tachyon to reach the quality of Battle.Net sometime soon? Tachyon made me think of the Battle.Net program.

In any case, great to hear!

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Mellified

Join Date 07/2002

+21

Quoting Campaigner,

reply 10

Tachyon made me think of the Battle.Net program.

Stardock certainly didn't invent the concept of a multii-game platform. However, we're doing things a bit differently. You don't need yet another username and password. Stardock Games won't provide digital download services. We won't require you to maintain another friends list. All of those services are handled by Steam.

We're focused on extending Steam's offerings in new ways, such as the Galactic Civilization III leaderboards and Servo matchmaking.

As more games are released with Stardock Games these and new features will extend the games in new ways. We are definitely focused on quality for these features. Fortunately we'll have lots of help testing thanks to our Founders and Early Access customers.

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