Wrapping up the 'Development Log'

It’s now time for us to wrap up our “Development Log”, at least for the current incarnation of Supreme Ruler 2010. At the end of May, SR2010 finally started to hit the store shelves, albeit slowly. Most retailers choose not to stock our title on release, feeling that “serious strategy” was a niche market that held little interest for them. Even though industry “experts” whine constantly about how there is so little innovation and fresh thinking in computer games, anything that isn’t a sequel or a knock-off is brushed aside and given little attention. One has to wonder if legendary titles like Panzer General or the original Civilization would ever have made it to market if the industry back then was the same way.

We have had our bright spots, though – EB Games Online ( www.ebgames.com ) launched us May 13, 2005, and for the following three weeks we were consistently in their top selling PC Games; some days we were their top selling game of any format. We are now carried by a wider selection of resellers, though many “brick and mortar” stores still have the “strategy blindness”. Even strategy titles with a solid history such as Galactic Civilizations Deluxe or Hearts of Iron II are hard to find in many stores, who seem to need more shelf space for classics such as “Bass Fishing” or “Big Game Hunter 2005”.

Reviews have started coming in, and have been generally very favorable. Ratings average 75%-80%, with concerns about Diplomacy and AI that we are working to address with our regular game Updates. Unfortunately a print reviewer in PC Gamer (US) seemed to forgo actually playing the game and instead just wrote about how much he didn’t like it, without listing any facts or features; even the captions on their screen shots were incorrect. And in the same issue, the “Wargamer” column laments about how few new “innovative” and original strategy games are developed; sigh….

As I write this in July 2005, we’re working on our next few “Updates”, adding new missions, new features, and improvements based on feedback from players and our forum. (All available for free download, of course.)

We are also working with European developers on “localizing” (translating) SR2010 to be sold across Europe – hopefully we’ll be showing up in stores throughout Europe very soon. Beyond that, hard to tell what the future will hold, though we certainly plan to continue developing, refining and building on the Supreme Ruler game engine.

Once again a big thank-you to our supporters, beta testers, fans, and strategy-game enthusiasts the world over. We think that Supreme Ruler 2010 is a great game that has brought new ideas and concepts to the modern strategy game, ideas that you’ll see further developed not just in our own future games, but in games from others as well.

Note: our new Blog can be found at http://www.supremeruler.com/blogs/ - with the first Blog posted August 30th, 2006 by David Thompson.

Europe Map Post Mortem

One of the maps I am certainly most excited about is our Europe map. This map was one of the last to be completed for the game partially because its size made it complicated but also because the research would be easy. The map is 260 hexes wide by 180 hexes high. It includes all of Europe with the exception of Turkey. This size gave us a scale of 18km per hex. The research for this map was actually spread over two years in a sense since every region on this map with the exception of Switzerland exists in a submap. When it came time to create the Europe map, it was needed as the second map in the campaign for when the player has completed the submap. The fact the game engine supports grouping regions together meant that we could build the map using our maximum of 31 players and then group the countries after. We actually went with 30 players as that covered most of the regions nicely. They are as follows;

Ireland
United Kingdom
Portugal
Spain
France
Italy
Germany
Poland (includes Kaliningrad)
Benelux
Ukraine
Belarus
Denmark
Norway
Sweden
Finland
Greece
Bulgaria
Romania (includes Moldova)
Austria
Hungary
Czech Rep
Slovakia
Lithuania (includes Latvia)
Estonia
Switzerland
Slovenia
Croatia
Bosnia
Serbia (includes Montenegro)
Macedonia
Albania

Since these existed in submaps, we where able to take the data form those and reuse it to create each of the countries in the Europe map. Each of the countries was given it’s starting units and balanced the same as the region in the submap.

The strongest players are certainly France, Germany and the United Kingdom, but Italy, Poland, the Ukraine, Switzerland and Sweden are reasonably strong as well. The number of players also allows for a large amount of diplomacy to affect the outcome. I expect this to become a common multiplayer map since human players can play the first 16 regions in the list and this also leaves lots of AIs to interact with. It’s also interesting to try some of this map’s smaller regions. Playing from Denmark is certainly a challenge but you begin in contact with only two other regions so the threats are at least minimized. Even countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic have an impact by the raw materials they can sell, or not sell, to the other regions. Geography also plays a part in the naval strategies since the French and English share control of the English Channel, the Spanish own the Straight of Gibraltar and access to the Black Sea requires passing through Greek waters. Some countries certainly cannot survive alone in a military campaign, but the right set of allies can make even regions like Estonia or Albania military or technological significant. Its just takes some work.

-- Chris

It's just the beginning!

Well folks, the day (and hour) have finally come - the "Gold Master" for Supreme Ruler 2010 is being sent off to our publisher as I type this. And the last few weeks have seemed longer than all the combined time since the project was first started (on February 15th, 2000!)

Through an incredible effort by our core team (Chris, Dax, David and myself) we have pulled off finishing up our first release version of SR2010. And now starts the debates among our long-time supporters and testers about what made it in, what didn't, and what's still to come. (Actually, the debate has already started, but I'm sure it will get even more intense!) While not everything came out of the oven according to the original recipe, I'm very proud of the result, and I think it is certainly time for the public to get their hands on what I believe is a landmark strategy title.

But there's more work to be done - not counting the demo version, which should be coming out shortly, we are also planning additional content to come soon as a free upgrade (more missions, future equipment types, feature upgrades). We have a lot of excitement about the future potential for the Supreme Ruler 2010 "engine", there are a lot of capabilities that we've only just started to scratch the surface of in the initial release.

And the biggest challenge may be getting the word out on this product - a lot of resellers and distributors consider serious strategy as a very small "niche" and are not willing to invest their shelf space in titles of this type. So if you don't see it on the shelf at your favorite software-o-matic store, make sure to bug them to get it in!

Keep a lookout - street date mid-May in North America!

So close that we can smell it...

Or is that maybe due to the fact that we’ve been neglecting personal hygiene? Hard to tell... In any case, we’re getting very close. Still working on some issues regarding running the largest maps (ie the world) on systems that are close to our “minimum spec” – the huge number of units, facilities, types of units, and such at this level are certainly a challenge. As mentioned before, our World Scenario is BIG. Not recommended as the first thing you try! In fact, some people simply will not like the World scenario for a few reasons, including its huge scope, massive number of units, and ‘overwhelmingness’. The continents also create a situation where you have to use invasion landings and airdrops much more. Of course, for these exact same reasons some people will love the World scenario.

We’re also being delayed a bit by not yet receiving some items required for our GameSpy matchmaking services. Hopefully that will be resolved soon, we’re know that everyone is waiting to hear the magic words “Supreme Ruler 2010 has gone Gold” ... Soon, real soon!

(PS – The World Scenario contains a total (for all players) of 13,600 units and facilities. Compare that to the “unit limit” imposed by many other games, and you’ll understand the technical challenges we had to overcome – and it all has to run in real time!)

Stress? Pressure? Nah....

But I wouldn't recommend coming near BattleGoat's offices unless you want to be caught up in a caffine-induce whirlwind of work, debates, and last-minute to-do lists. Well, except for Chris, he doesn't drink coffee. (He does occasionally drink Mountain Dew, but that's a different story...)

As discussed on our forum and in recent blog entries, not every feature is falling into place exactly as hoped for, either for technical or time reasons. All the "big" features are in. But we all have our favourites on the backlist... David wants future-scheduling in, Chris wants biological covert attacks, Dax doesn't like the fact that as the campaign progresses you could get caught being attacked with your units in reserve (they get reserved between campaign scenarios), and I don't like the fact that our big-map performance is below expectations on low-end systems. So we debate a lot...

But even given all that, things are moving along briskly. Good thing, though, that our "countdown to gold" whiteboard supports negative numbers :-) But soon, soon........

40,000 tasks done, 100 left to do

I wrote a blog here yesterday, but the blog system ate it – I guess it just wasn’t meant to be. So I’ll try again, but time is short so I gotta be quick – lots of work to do…

As you can probably tell from our recent blog entries, a lot of discussion and debate is spent around here on the topic of just what really needs to be in Supreme Ruler 2010 in order for us to be ready to “go gold”. Not really sure if 40,000 is the accurate number for the features “in”, but we are certainly down to less than 100 tasks that “must” be done to finish up (some more difficult than others). We’ll probably be debating the final feature list right up to the point at which we press record on the CD Burner.

By however you measure it, SR2010 is an epic-sized project with a huge amount of effort put in to making things accurate, and then just as huge an effort into making it all playable and fun.

One disappointment for our upcoming release is that it will be English-only at first launch. The huge amount of data that requires translation (“localization” it’s called in the business) is enough to scare off all the foreign distributors for now. To those in other regions, our apologies that you won’t be able to get SR2010 in your language at day 1, but hopefully we can get the localizations rolling soon after the initial release.

One last thing for today, in case you didn’t catch our press release, we were very pleased to announce this past week that bestselling author Larry Bond has worked with us to provide a foreword for our manual. It was terrific to have Larry on board for this, and he seemed quite enthusiastic about SR2010 as well… to quote,

“This simulation is the most detailed and realistic model of a country that has ever been commercially produced . . .. Supreme Ruler 2010 is a great game”

Time flies (like a missile?)

I was just reminded today that the clocks get set forward this weekend in this time zone - a real pity, since I'm going to miss that extra hour of programming time...

The release date is now "official" at May 10th, 2005. (Give or take a few days, of course.) Which means that our 'Gold Master' date for wrapping up development is very close. The manual goes to press early next week (over 150 pages!). The box art is done. The ads are being assembled. And nobody's made coffee yet this morning...

I've posted a few comments recently on our forum about the 'features versus finish' issues - ie what (may) get sacrificed to actually get things out on the shelves. As we've said all along, we will not release a buggy product. We think we have that element wrapped up - no crash issues, no stability issues, no serious operational bugs that we know of.

But what about features? There's always more we can do, but things have shaped up pretty good with all the important features getting in. Some lesser features are on the borderline and may not get in for our '1.0' version - for example, assassinating cabinet ministers is the one I just looked at a few minutes ago. However, we have also made a commitment to continue working on SR2010 after the initial release - we think of this as an epic title that people will continue to play, not a "throwaway" that gathers dust after the game is "solved". We'll continue to listen to players on the forum and look at ways we can improve what we've done.

And in case you missed it, a great preview was just posted on WorthPlaying.com:
http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=24371&mode=thread&order=0

"...here I was with an incomplete preview build of a game from a company I've never heard of that gripped me with the steely claw of game addiction not felt since the last installment in the Civ series."

The incredible 'Task-o-Matic'

Here at BattleGoat we use our own custom task/bug tracking system, which we so affectionately like to call the 'Task-o-Matic'. As we approach 'Gold' date we have the fun of going through and finding out which bugs/tasks must get done, and which are ideas that we can put aside for the future. One thing about these last few weeks going towards our release date is that we see just how big the Supreme Ruler 2010 project really is.

I think it is a compliment to our User Interface (which was redesigned 4 times) that most people will not really see how detailed and comprehensive SR2010 can be; unless you really 'drill down' in the UI, you'll only be seeing the surface of the game, and everything else will either be just rolling along under the hood, or will be taken care of by your Ministers. However, when we have bugs to fix and features to test, we have to look at everything - and there sure is a lot!

Oh well, I better get back to tonight's task list - including work on Missile Silos, Minefields, Campaign defaults, Map resizing, testing Victory Conditions, Map/Region Grouping, and maybe another cup of coffee...

-- George.

Déjà Vu

Having worked on our maps for more than four years now, I’m certainly very familiar with some of them. Development of a game with such depth has caused us to make major changes a number of times over the years, changes that caused the balance of all existing maps to be thrown out the window. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gone back to Australia, the first map I ever did, and started over the balancing of the eleven production commodities. Since the maps and the game engine where works in progress we had to leave some things for later on. Preset diplomacy between regions is an example of an element that is only now nearing a functioning stage. However, this means once again returning to maps that had previously been set aside to flag any pre-existing treaties or state of war. Can’t have North and South Korea making nice on the first day, just would not be realistic.

Since we are nearing completion of the project, there was a need to go back to most of the maps for finishing touches anyway. Most needed some boat that was previously unavailable in the equipment list or to mark a technology we recently discovered they should have pre-researched. It is nice that our map work in some cases is getting to the quality control stage and getting away from the hours of mind numbing drudge work. It’s just not much fun looking up the crime rates for the Ivory Coast or the life expectancy for residents of Nepal.
But at least we still get to spend some time playing the game testing new features and looking for bugs. Our test game this week got off to a slow start thanks to a misplaced “S” in a line of George’s code which was messing up multiplayer. We made sure he heard about that one for a while :)

-- Chris

Round and Round and Round she goes...

Of the 40+ Scenario maps that we include with Supreme Ruler 2010, there is one that is unique compared to the rest. In the program code I refer to it as the top level map, but in discussion it is simply called "The World".

The World Map has a few unique features to it. First, and most obviously, it is our largest map, at 900 hexes wide. Not the type of map you'll be able to play an conquer in a single night. The world is a big place.

Secondly, it is our only map where there is no 'external' World Market organization. In each sub map there is an off-map force - the new "UN" - that controls external trade and also gets involved with subsidies, military interventions, sale of arms, and so on. (Much like the United States does today.) In the World Level, what you see is what you get - the borders of the sandbox are defined, and nobody can come to help if you start getting beat up by the bullies.

However, the biggest internal engine difference is the fact that, unfortunately, the world is not flat. Ignoring for now the protestations of the Flat Earth Society (http://www.flat-earth.org/), the world has this roundness to it that is a challenge to represent in a strategy game. Some games have pulled it off, but nothing with the complexity of detail that SR2010 stores about the world. Even just moving around - internally units use a very sophisticated "A* Path Search Algorithm" that can scan thousands of possible paths to determine the best way to get from point A to B. We don't just take into account terrain, but add in unit movement types, bridges and bridging units, supply zones, transit treaties, and a few other elements, and you have a pretty complex process. Now you also need to toss in the fact that you can go off one end of the map and appear on the other - or more precisely, you just keep going round and round.

This 'wraparound' implementation is something that has just been, well, "wrapped up", and is being incorporated into the game engine. It works pretty well, though there are a number of oddities to address (such as the mini-map display). Of course, this isn't really a "round" world, since we only allow East-West scrolling. North/South scrolling would just be too confusing to the player, and so it really isn't worth attempting. (For example, if you scroll up from North America without changing viewpoint you would end up seeing Europe upside down, etc). Maybe someday we'll do a truly round tactical world, and really give the A* pathing a workout...

So, welcome to the Cylindrical World of Supreme Ruler 2010...

-- George.

As the days count down...

As we get closer and closer to the infamous "Gold Date" things can certainly get "interesting". There's a flurry of final bugs, unfinished features, incomplete scenarios, and a mix of "I wish we could change this..." and "There must be a better way to do that..."

Supreme Ruler 2010 is like no other game the PC has ever seen, in both its depth and vast array of gameplay styles and features. A lot of our design debates center around elements that other games have never even tried to pull off to this level of detail.

We're at the 'feature freeze' state, but now that we are approaching completion it's pretty impressive to see how all our existing ideas have come together. Just a few hundred more 'to-do' items to complete and we'll be ready to go...

Time for the last "Performance Tests"

In a game engine like Supreme Ruler 2010 where we have so many "no limits" elements, performance bottlenecks can become a major issue. A lot of other games solve this problem with the simple "you can't do that" solution, such as a unit maximum, a map size maximum, a buildings limit, and so on. We like to think more like that credit card commercial, "No pre-set spending limit"...

So now that most features of our engine are complete, it is time to take one more look at performance testing to see where we can make things go even faster. As an example of how important even small performance elements can be, consider the fact that SR2010 gives each unit the opportunity to react to orders once a minute - 1440 times per "day". If you have a huge number of units, say 10,000, then there are over 14 million "unit slices" in a game day. In those slices units will need to use their spotting, their supply capabilities, scan for targets, scan for opportunities, avoid threats, and respond to their commands and rules of engagement. And leave enough time for the other 14 million such scans that have to happen on that particular day.

It has required some very innovative design ideas to pull this off, and I'm pleased to say that we do a pretty good job of it. Even with our final optimizations, large maps with large unit counts will probably still end up moving a bit slow on older hardware, but I think we've taken the standard a huge step beyond anything else out there.

-- George.

Where in the world is the Supreme Ruler?

Until now we have been marketing the fact that Supreme Ruler 2010 has over 200 starting regions to play from. Scenarios will be used for multiplayer or single player games when you want to play a particular map or region of the world in non-campaign mode. Introduce our new feature of "grouping playable regions" and things get interesting.

Take the Canada map for example... which is divided into 5 regions. Ontario, Quebec, The Prairies, The Maritimes and The West Coast(which includes Alaska). When you play the campaign, starting as Canada, you will play as one of these five regions. But when you play Canada as a scenario (in either single or multiplayer) you'll be able to group these regions together, if you wish. You could play the east versus the west with the dividing line between Ontario and Quebec or you could play in another other combination you can think of.

Another way to look at groupings is how it will provide its own levels of difficulty and challenge. If you find yourself overwhelmed with running a country when you are starting out you could take a scenario and give yourself all of the other regions except for one. As you get a handle on things you can hand off regions to AI control and eventually play as one region in a 16 region map.

So, just think of the possibilities... How will you divide the world?

-- Daxon.

The World is MORE than Enough!

All the cities in the final scenario (The World) have now been placed. But now is the challenge of adding all the population to each region that is not in the big cities but in the surrounding areas. This would be easy if we didn't have to keep the population distribution accurate... Don't worry though, we are keeping the world map as accurate as all the sub-maps! So if you needed to know how I'll be spending my week --- that's it!

- David

Challenge of the Big Maps

I think one of our challenges with Supreme Ruler 2010 will be making sure people know that not every map we include will appeal to everybody, and they shouldn't judge the game on a map that they think is too big/small/cluttered/sparse etc. This is made even worse by the different gameplay options - for example, a large map like Europe may be very interesting and challenging in single-player turnbased mode, where it may very well take a few weeks to wrap up, but it will be utterly overwhelming to most players in real-time multiplayer mode. The world will be even worse in this regard. However, a map such as Michigan, Mexico, UK, and even larger areas such as France, US SouthEast and Australia, can make very good Multiplayer games.

I know that large maps such as North America, Europe, and the World will be attractive targets for people to try in Multiplayer mode, so we have to try to cool expectations that these are NOT good beginner/multiplayer maps to try. One of our technical innovations is that we've allowed creation of tactical maps larger and more detailed than any other strategy game, players will need to know that "bigger" does not always mean better gameplay if a large "epic" game is not what you wanted that particular evening...