Sinners,
Rebellion comes out tomorrow and I'm really happy with the result. The teamwork between Stardock, Ironclad and all the beta testers is fantastic. As my tasks wrapped up this past weekend I started looking at some comparison videos, old screenshots, old performance metrics and piles of bug reports. I can say that Rebellion improves the Sins experience across the board. It looks a lot better, performs better, is much more fun and is much more stable and desync free.
The last point is of particular interest to me because I was pretty deep into tracking down the desyncs. We've know there was one desync that existed since the release of the game in 2008. We were never able to track it down as the creation conditions were extremely rare. Anyways, last week the phenomenal testing team at Stardock was finally able to come with a method to consistently recreate that elusive desync and with that data the team at Ironclad was able to track it down after 12 consecutive hours of intense low level code and memory analysis. Anyways, the beast that has fed on our children for the last 4 years is finally dead. His head is stuffed and mounted above my workstation.
Aside from that the final build of Rebellion has some great stability improvements, balance changes and a number of important refinements and we'll continue to improve things post-release as we've always done.
I'll end this with some of my favorite things about Rebellion. I love when I get my Titan built and first bring him into battle. I love the way he dwarfs all the other ships and I can see them all flying around him casting shadows on him as if they want to emphasize just how much bigger he is. I love how each sub-faction can play completely differently. I love destroying planets. I love the new music. I love watching corvettes zip around the battle field. I love the tension and suspense of trying to win / stop someone else from winning a time based win-condition (occupation / research) or trying to save my flag ship.
Well, I love everything!
Enjoy the Sinning and Rebelling tomorrow!
Blair
Ironclad