Signs of Life!

[Scott Tortorice]

Just found this interesting post from Wardell concerning the future of Sins:

Stardock and Ironclad have been looking at what's next for Sins of a Solar Empire. One of the big things on our list is to implement a new memory model for the game. The reason this matters is that right now, it's hard to add more ships or structures into the game because of the infamous 2GB memory limit on 32-bit systems.


So in the coming couple of months, we're going to be working on a new update to Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity that implements this. After that, we can evaluate new opportunities in the Sins of a Solar Empire universe.

Awesome! First Frogboys promises some new GalCiv updates and now something for Sins players! This is why people love SD. They don't just dump a game and move on to something else.

I wonder if this also means that some of the people that were dedicated to Elemental have been released back to other projects?

[Dr Zaius]

They should start working on Sins 2 and design it as 64-bit right from the beginning. Then we can have larger battles with much better graphics and special effects.

[Scott Tortorice]

I have a hunch that you won't see an exclusive 64-bit gaming title until the consoles make the 64-bit leap (coincidentally this). Of course, SD, being a PC only company, doesn't really care about the cross-platform stuff. In this case, it's the fact that a majority of gaming PCs remain 32-bit (in other words, older PCs still in use). That is why they went with a 32-bit Elemental with the plan of (perhaps) later releasing a 64-bit version. Kerberos is taking the same strategy with SotS II. We're not quite there yet.

As for a Sins 2 - while I would love the news, I am a bit hard pressed to really come up with some feature that is missing. There certainly is some tweaking that could be done - such as enlarging the scale of the planetary wells, which would allow for larger caps - but nothing truly major...at least not without having Sins 2 wind up being a completely different beast. Ironclad succeeded in creating the most mythical of all creatures: a game that actually accomplished everything it set out to do!

[Scott Tortorice]

Update:
Sins News

They also have this to say about their flagship franchise: "Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity (aka Diplomacy) was a major success for Stardock and its development partner, Ironclad Games. A significant new update for Trinity is expected out in early 2011. We will also be making some important announcements regarding Sins of a Solar Empire in 2011."

Also, last weeks, Ironclad released a beta patch for Sins to address various bugs/issues.