So the beta has gone out and we're starting to get some coverage.  It's hard to believe we have almost a full year left of work on this.  The main engine is done so we have plenty of time to fill in all kinds of content and detail in here.

The stability what somewhat better than I had feared/anticipated. But there's plenty of issues to resolve between now and Beta 1B which is due out at the end of next week.  That will be the last public build of Beta 1.

Beta 2 is scheduled for the the week of E3. That's where we'll be making a bunch of announcements on some pretty exciting things.  Suffice to say, it'll be a lot easier to find Galactic Civilizations II at your local retailer than it was to find the first one. 

We are also interested to see if in the two-years since the first game's release that there will be more people who want to purchase and download the game.  The technology has certainly come a long way.  That is, Stardock Central is much more advanced now and this beta is allowing us to work out kinks in the system to make the final process as smooth as possible. 

This week we released a new build of Stardock Central in which just entering your logon ID here SHOULD (assuming you used mostly the same info when you purchased the game) automatically find your purchase info and register ALL the program's you've purchased from us.  So no more having to type in bunches of serial #'s.

The changes in Galactic Civilizations II's technology is helping us make things more electronic-friendly.  Beta 1's base game is only 28 megabytes to download.  The use of the new .dxpack technology allows us to take a screen that would have been 5 megabytes in GalCiv 1 and make it 100K in GalCiv 2.  In short, we should be able to have a game that has vastly more content that is smaller in size.  Of course, cut-scenes and multimedia won't be smaller (if anything, they'll be bigger) but they're a seperate component.

There was also a lot of discussion this week about the MMORTS our second game development team is working on.  We'll be announcing more on that around E3. But don't get too excited, it won't be available in its final form until 2007.   I was quoted as describing it as The Sims meets Total Annihilation.  It would probably be more accurate to say it plays a lot like somone might imagine a Massively Multiplayer Civilization game might play except it's RTS and you deal with individual buildings and can see your citizens going about their lives (hence the Sims thing).  But you don't control your citizens directly (NO PEONS). Only military units.

So in Beta 2 we hope to have a lot more screens in, there's going to be a lot of UI re-design work based on feedback and the AI should be more intelligent by then. Stay tuned.