We were able to get the updated network update out yesterday and we turned the Pantheon and Skirmish to try to do 3 on 3 matches. 
Since so many people seem anti-bot, we are looking for ways to make that happen but the problem is, if people insist on human only then we need to provide more feedback to the user. We already get complaints from people saying it takes “too long” to get into a skirmish game (a whopping 2 minutes). So for people who insist on human only, we need ways to make them aware that the system is working but it might take several minutes.
Skirmish and Pantheon games aren’t just about finding some random group to have you play against. It uses your ELO (experience) rating to help match along with your location to try to put together the best match possible.
One of our frustrations (and this is one of the reasons I’m not a fan of MP games in the first place) is how inconsiderate some people are. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out why people were getting “disconnected” right when a game starts. Well, it turns out, from looking at the logs, is that some people, having only 2 on 2 or 3 vs. 3 where an AI player had to be substituted to fill in the gap that some people just quit right at the start. I understand the rationale but it’s still objectifying other people’s time. I won’t debate people on the issue as I think it’s a matter of agreeing to disagree.
But bottom line is that if people want to have an idealized match, it’s likely going to take more than 2 minutes and the only way to make it take more than 2 minutes is to provide more feedback so that’s what the team is working on today.
Proxy tomorrow
So besides having more feedback telling you how many people are looking for games which lets us increase the time to find an ideal match, we also plan to have tomorrow’s update have the proxy server. This should eliminate the last problems for connectivity except for the case where people have multiple IP addresses which is still being worked on.
More info please
Some people have said “I used to be able to connect fine, now I can’t.” We really need data from those people in the form of their impulsereactor.log files (located in my documents\my games\gpg\demigod) which you can send to [email protected] with (ideally) a description of what happened and whether you used to be able to connect so we can see. At this point, people shouldn’t be having any problems connecting other than those with router issues.
The Documentary
Once we concluded that we were going to have to write our own multiplayer system for Demigod and that it would have to be done not in a matter of months but a matter of days or a week or two we knew that crazy hours were going to be involved. So we video’d it. We hope to release in the next week or so a documentary video so you can see the innards of Stardock and what was involved.
Here are some images from it:
Marketing meeting
Management meeting in late April when it was decided to assign the Impulse team to develop a new system.
My daughter Ashley visits me at work
Our chief architect, Jeff Bargmann and his Impulse team merges with the Elemental development leads to create a new network system. The application team had already gotten somewhat involved by creating the “Impulse Overlay” that allowed us to inject new screens into Demigod.
Elemental team can’t resist but show off what they’re doing.
Found a baby turtle while taking a walk outside
