http://www.systemcomic.com/2011/08/03/so-youre-mad-about-something-on-the-internet/

A great way to diffuse a raging Internet troll.

If you’ve been following my blogs on this topic for awhile, you know how I feel about the way DirectX 9 handles TrueType fonts. Terribly.

If we had to do it over again, we would have just hand made each character.  But we didn’t. And the battles to make fonts look good has made use choose font styles that we might not otherwise have used.

Luckily, we may have a solution – thanks to the ingenuity of the lead developer of WindowBlinds and Start8. He also wrote the overlay code and gave me a DLL this morning that may solve a lot of our problems.

The first thing to understand about the magic of Stardock’s non-games business is that they know how to get into other people’s processes and add features without source code.  That’s how WindowBlinds works – it takes over the drawing of every window on the OS to one that is better, faster, and cooler.

So seeing our font issues in Fallen Enchantress, he wrote a DLL that redirects the DirectX calls to one of his own making.

So here’s what a typical screen looks like in the current build. It helps to load this up and zoom in.  If you’re in the beta, you are familiar with the limitations of D3DXFont calls.

And below is the result after his fix:

Zoom in on the various parts.

This opens the door to us being able to eventually be able to do a lot more interesting things with fonts since they’ll not be blocky, artifacty messes.

It’s still being tweaked but it’ll be interesting to see how many people notice when Beta 5 hits (which is why I’m not posting this in the journals section, fewer viewers).

Now, before someone comments, please remember, the fonts we chose for the game were based on what fonts looked best on D3DXFont which tended to be Arial and that kind of thing.

I can’t promise that we’ll be changing the fonts this late in the game. But what I can say is that the existing fonts will look a lot better and it opens things up for future updates to have interesting fonts that look good.

While the unemployment rate nationally remains over 8%, the unemployment rate in the tech industry is basically zilch. Software developers and game studios can't hire people fast enough and fiercely compete for the talent out there.

This is why companies fiercely guard their company cultures. When every person at a given company knows that they can easily find another job if they so choose, the onus is on companies to make sure that the "work experience" is such that they have an incentive to stay.

I've read a lot of articles that imply that terrible working conditions in the game industry. But that's not the norm. Most game studios and developers in general live and die on their development talent and treat them with that knowledge. Horror stories are news because they're uncommon.

In software, a top percentile developer can produce over 20X more usable code than the average developer.  This is why so many companies are willing to do a lot in order to ensure that the culture that attracts and keeps high end talent.

In a small company like ours, our success boils down to attracting great talent but, and this is the key, keeping it.

A lot of the software we make simply can't be made elsewhere. Years after Fences was made, there's still no competitor to it. Same for WindowBlinds, WindowFX, and countless other products that we are, literally, the only provider of at any price.  

The game industry side of the fence is the same thing.  Simply put, a company as small as ours (50 or so) was able to do all the aforementioned non-game software while publishing Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod, develop Galactic Civilizations (And now Fallen Enchantress) as well as design, write and run Impulse along with its international server farm.  

And that doesn't even taken into account that we also run or host many different websites such as WinCustomize.com, Stardock's various sites, Neowin.net, and countless others.  And again, 50 or so people total are making this happen.

That sort of achievement is only possible because of employee retention and that means always providing the kind of company culture that makes people want to get up and come to work every day and do amazing things.

Because if we don't provide an environment that keeps people happy and wanting to do cool stuff, they know that they can go anywhere they want. It's that competitive.

And that, my friends, is why software companies take their company cultures very seriously.

(from a forum discussion)

It’s not that I don’t take the issue seriously. It’s just that I don’t take you seriously.

For the last few weeks, the poor IT team have been battling spam bots. Let’s give a shout out to all our hard working moderators who have been able to clean it up quickly and the IT team that’s been making it harder for them to do it.

First off, I want to thank all the people who have written their kind words of support these past few days.

I wish I could say this is the first time we’ve had to deal with a frivolous lawsuit and I wish I could say it was the last. It happens. It’s business. The only difference here is that one party doesn’t normally leak this sort of thing out to get press coverage.

It is amazing how many people will look at a bunch of unsubstantiated allegations and assume they’re true or assume that they are seeing even a tiny fraction of the full story.  I know I’m somewhat guilty of this since I have often taken the view “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”.

The emails I get often ask me how I “deal” with some of the vile and ignorant things that have been tweeted to me or said.  The answer is, you can’t take that sort of thing personally.  They’re reacting to drama they’re reading without really thinking any of it through.

I’ve been online for almost 30 years now – since Commodore 64 BBS days. It is extremely easy for someone to make things up and pass them off as fact.  I once got forwarded a claim by someone who said that we made female units in War of Magic weaker than males (they’re identical other than graphics).  But someone makes something up, it gets past on and it eventually becomes fact.

Heck, every time I go over to BluesNews.com, there’s some guy who insists I’m a Glenn Beck fan, a show I’ve never even watched. That’s why it is important to remember that the Internet isn’t real life.  That is why I’ve told my younger friends to be wary of taking their various virtual communities too seriously. It isn’t a replacement for personal relationships with people in real life.

When you are interacting with hateful people, don’t think of them as the norm. And while you can try to fathom where all that hate comes from, it’s ultimately irrelevant. People like that are always hating something. The phrase “haters are going to hate” is a truism. There are people out there who are miserable and there always will be.

There will always be people who will read unsubstantiated allegations, even ones that have direct contrary evidence, and still believe it because they have an inherent need to hate something or someone.  You can’t take those people personally. They’re facing an issue that you can never cure.

As someone who has had the opportunity to start their own business, literally from their dorm room, and build it up over many years, I’ve gotten to see this sort of thing ebb and flow.  My advice to those who have been tempted to lash back at these people who are filled with hate is to just ignore them. You might as well go out and yell at the rain.  You can’t change them. Only they can address whatever it is inside of them that makes them so ready to hate people they’ve never met (whether that be some Internet geek or a politician or celebrity).

The thing to remember is this: There is something fundamentally wrong with someone who is prepared to hate someone they've never even met. There's no point worrying about them.

Smarter developers than myself (Which would be most of them) have told me that there are “Tricks” to making DirectX 9 support multithreaded graphics.  Unfortunately, they’re beyond my capability.

DirectX 11, by contrast, natively supports a process spinning off a graphics related job into a thread (as opposed to it being in the same thread as the main message pump thread).

When I joined the Fallen Enchantress team as lead developer (the first time I’ve held that position in over a decade), my first task was to take our existing Elemental engine and make it multithreaded.  So everything – except graphics related tasks – gets spun off into a thread.

If you have the beta, you can load it up with the /cheat parameter. Have lots of players going, then bring up task manager and hit Ctrl-Z to watch the game play itself.  Every core on the machine will get used.

However, the graphics themselves, because it’s DirectX 9, remains in the main thread. 

So as some of you know, we’ve been working on trying to have more interesting things start to happen during what we call “Act III”.

Act I is where you’re exploring the world, founding cities, dealing with the monsters.

Act II is where you’re building up your cities, starting to trade with other factions, fighting skirmishes

Act III is where you start to deal with the end game. Going on quests, fighting wars, starting to unleash the more powerful spells.

What kind of place do you want to work at?

Stardock’s a pretty fun place to work.  We have almost no turn over and morale is pretty high.  It is, however, a nerdy place. That means there’s lots of references to Monty Python, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Robot Chicken that sometimes float around.  That is to say, it's not a place for everyone. When we interview people, we make some effort to make sure people know that Stardock is a silly place.  People bring their dogs to work. There are nerf-gun fights. We have a nutritionist come in to help show people (those who want to anyway) how to prepare healthier lunches. We have a personal trainer come in to give classes.  It is, in short, a pretty silly, fun, and unusual place.

And we like it that way.

Some people may find TV show references or jokes told around the office to be “vulgar” or “sexist” or what have you. How they personally understand these jokes is their right. And if a person has a specific problem with someone talking around them about it, then I think people should make a best case effort to not upset that individual. People have rights in the workplace and they should be respected.

Where I draw the line, however, is someone telling us (or me ) that we need to not talk about those things in general. That is, not just when they’re around but even when they’re not around. 

And my response to that is basically – this place may not be for you then – find another job.

The rights of the individual and the rights of the group

To use an example, we had someone who hated the word "fart". Don't ask me why. They just didn't like that word. So around that person, people didn't use that word.  However, they don't have the right to insist that the word "fart" not be used at work at all. 

I would like to think most reasonable people would understand that. But even if they don’t, I would think they would agree that it’s not acceptable wipe out company IP on the way out and file a frivolous “hostile work environment” lawsuit.  If a company's culture is incompatible with you, then the best thing to do is to find another job. Part ways amicably. Don't get angry or bitter. Don't let it take you to such a dark place where you feel justified suing your employer and destroying their property. 

Lawfare

Ever since [Redacted] publicly released selected (and one-sided) documents of her lawsuit against us, we've gotten a lot of negative and frankly, unfair publicity.  More than that, I've received numerous death threats (which included a call to the police), my personal information released online, google maps directions to my house posted, my children harassed, etc. 

None of the people calling for my head (both literally and figuratively) know anything about the situation.  Neither I, nor anyone on our staff, has behaved inappropriately to [Redacted].  Moreover, not only are people of all races, sexes and orientations treated equally here but our management team is extremely diverse -- not because we promote based on race/sex but precisely because we don't.

I would be willing to wager that Stardock has more women in leadership positions as a percent of positions than most technology companies.  We hire the best. [Redacted] was an outstanding employee. She was very talented at marketing and PR. A skill she was very well aware of as this ordeal began with a letter from her lawyer implying that if we didn't pay her off, she'd use her marketing skills to generate a lot of negative coverage of her -- a threat she has since made good on.

Two sides to the story

Unlike [Redacted], I am responsible not just for my own welfare but those of my coworkers. I don't have the luxury to lash out and do a document dump even though doing so would demonstrate just how ridiculous, spiteful and frivolous her case is. However, one day this case will be over. At which point I will be free to give more detail into her claims and the context they were made in.  I hope that the media, that as so quick to vilify me, will be just as eager to talk to me when we are exonerated.  

What I will say is that I hope when we are exonerated that those who reflexively sided with [Redacted] will, in the future, choose to withhold judgment until they have seen all the facts when they see sensationalist journalism. I will say I've been surprised and disappointed in seeing many people I thought had better judgment quickly assume the worst about me despite having run a successful company for almost two decades. We are a technology company in which fewer than 2 people, on average, voluntarily leave per year (this in a company of >50 people) is rare. [Redacted] was the first female employee, in almost 20 years, to voluntarily leave our company.  This in a company whose COO is female, its financial controller is female, its lead developer is female, its marketing manager is female, its lead artist is female, and on and on. Stardock is many things but it is not a boy's club.

Sometimes one party is totally wrong

People tend to want to see "both sides". Sometimes, however, one party is completely wrong and in this case, that party is [Redacted]  Like millions of people every day, she got angry with her boss for things that had nothing to do with whether she was a man or a woman. But unlike most people, she chose to make use of the legal system and a sympathetic media to try to get a pound of flesh. Her first act was to write us a letter demanding, in essence, that we pay her off lest she try to make us look bad in public. We have this letter.

When we didn't give into her demands, she ultimately sued us. First she stated it was because of "constructive discharge". Then she added hostile work environment. Then she added sexual harassment. And then she added, I kid you not, "battery" (because I touched her hair once at a social gathering months before she departed).

The problem for her and those who think what she did is ethical or acceptable behavior, is that our legal system doesn't exist for people to "teach someone a lesson" for making her mad. Instead of simply finding a place to work that she might find more enjoyable, she decided to abuse the legal system. And, for reasons I still find baffling, wiped out our marketing assets (on a side note, I remain amazed at how many supposedly computer literate people out there have suggested that our lawsuit against her was done as "retaliation" given the ease of proving what/when/how she did what she did - we have the logs, we have the forensics. It's trivial to prove).

In my opinion, [redacted] and people like her do great harm to our business climate. Her message seems to be: Conform to my narrow view on how the workplace should be or I will take advantage of being a "protected class" and make you pay for it - either through legal costs or through public release of hand-picked, one-sided court documents to damage you in the public.

What is your honor worth?

Most companies would have paid her off to make it go away. We have insurance, I had to explicitly waive that insurance in order to ensure that the case wasn't settled (because insurance companies just do a cost/benefit ratio). What is ironic, is if she had asked for some severance package before she left, I would have given it to her.  But because she chose to fabricate allegations against me I will fight tooth and nail against that. 

Some specifics

At this stage I am still somewhat limited in what I can say publicly.  What I can say is that not only was there zero behavior directed towards her that a reasonable person could consider "sexual harassment" but there was no behavior that a reasonable person would even consider inappropriate.  I never sent her a "purity test", I never asked her any "personal" questions (she makes numerous false allegations of this nature). Every witness, including her friends, have collaborated our version of events and rejected hers.  Her case is frivolous and this will end only one way: It will be be dismissed.

The only thing they have is my insulting email to her in response to her insubordinate email to me which was written without any consideration of her sex. And I make no apologies for my email. I am sure it causes some people fainting spells but where I come from, you do not email your boss's boss a patronizing "with these behavior modifications we can get along" email and not either get fired on the spot or reamed. 

Update: Redacted her name, edits.