Free Candy For Everyone

Firaxis released a bunch of Civ4 downloads today. First up is a new patch with a myriad of fixes, as all good patches should have. Since I haven’t really been playing the game (um. Ok, I haven’t been playing the game at all, no “really” needed, stupid WoW!), I’m not sure of the impact of these, but they’re probably cool.

The two other downloads are more curious. The first is the “SDK”. I put that in quotes because SDK stands for Software Development Kit. This isn’t really a toolkit that let’s you tweak stuff. This download is the source code to a chunk of the gameplay for Civ4. It seems absolutely insane to me! It’s a bunch of source files that require Visual Studio. With it, you can compile a DLL that you can then drop in to use your code instead of theirs. I can’t see what end users will know how to do this, except professional programmers! I write game AI for a living, I’m not gonna tweak theirs in my spare time. Whoa.

Who knows, maybe people who want to get into the industry can use this as a tool to experiment with and show off their skills. But it’s not all the game’s code, just a particular portion. From my cursory look, there doesn’t seem to be anything having to do with rendering or anything. So the burgeoning game developer can write a mod that does all sorts of crazy stuff and completely changes the way the gameplay works, but the game’s graphics engine remains the same. Which is fine, I guess.

The last download is the multiplayer pitboss. It’s a standalong application that you drop into your Civ4 directory. Note that you must patch the game up to the new patch, 1.6.1, or the pitboss won’t run (I learned that one the hard way). The idea is described on the official page here - basically it enables multiplayer games to continue in a turnbased mode even if not everyone is connected. So if Joe and Bob and Sue are playing a game, but Bob has to log off, Joe and Sue can finish their turns and log off. Then when Bob logs back and and finishes his turn, the pitboss will send out an email and tell everyone that they can take their next turn too. It sort of seems like an advanced way of doing a play-by-email game. I’m going to see if I can’t try this out with some friends and give my impressions. But given how long a game of Civilization takes, who knows if we’ll be able to get to it?

If anyone else manages to try it, let me know! I’m definitely interested in the idea of it.

What is going on today? There were three, count ‘em, THREE press releases involving Firaxis today. Firaxis is Sid Meier’s company, the developers of Civilization IV (and Alpha Centauri, don’t forget a classic fave of mine! Oh, and yeah, Civ III, Pirates, etc. Lots of great strategy games). Today I popped over to Blues News to get my summary of what’s coming out and going on in the gaming realm, and there were three press releases shown.

First, an announcement of an expansion pack for Civ 4. No big surprises there. Oh, and no actual information in the press release either, here’s the Blues News post and here’s the actual press release. It’s gonna be called Civilization IV:Warlords. And that’s all she wrote.

Next, Sid Meier’s Railroads! announced. I was a big fan of the original Railroad Tycoon. I haven’t really revisited the series for any of the sequels (despite the fact that they were created by Poptop, a company also responsible for gems like Tropico and Tropico 2, great games). But now the franchise returns to its creators hands. We’ll see what they do with it.

The last announcement reads like a joke about what a marketing department would come up with for a game. CivCity: Rome Announced! ??? It’s Civilization, a great beloved game, combined with SimCity, a great beloved game. It’s gotta rock! Well. That’s what the marketing people are hoping we’ll say. Me, I’m just laughing at the idea. This one is being developed by Firefly Studios, developers of the Stronghold series (a castle building strategy game - played the demo and thought it was nifty, but not cool enough to pick up the game). I’ll see what the game actually is, but it sort of sounds like Caesar (remember the Impressions City Builders, the fourth one of which is in the works at Tilted Mill). If that’s the case, it’ll be tough competition. The city builder market is not a growing one, and it CivCity is even set in Rome, the land of Caesar. I’m sure Firefly is a quality developer, so I guess I’m curious to see what they do, and how they actually tie it to the Civ franchise (if at all).

I was away for a short vacation, and I return to read all sorts of news in the game industry front. It seems Bioware and Pandemic are merging into a mega-international gaming entity. I find this dismaying. Possibly because I am a huge fan of Bioware’s products. They make wonderful roleplaying games, and I worry about anything that might mess with their mojo.

I’m sure Pandemic is quite a lovely place, but the titles they have put out are not of particular interest to me - Full Spectrum Warrior and Destroy All Humans may have good buzz, but they do not fall into a genre that I spend time on. It seems like an odd pairing, in that there is not any overlap in the titles they create. Currently, at least. And I think fans of both studios would prefer it remain that way.

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