http://screencast.com/t/iPQrOJwt6V

In Windows 8, you can create a column of tiles in it and label the tile. This is Microsoft’s idea of a “group”.

Here’s a couple of videos showing off the pain:

Windows 7: The Start Menu

and…

Windows 8: The Start “page”:

And a follow-up to show you about column headers (what Microsoft is calling groups):

Now, I’ve gotten a lot of email from people saying that I’m “obviously” a Microsoft hater or an “Apple zealot”. This is obviously a change from the traditional charge that I’m an Apple basher and a Microsoft apologist. 

So let me be clear: My livelihood depends on the success of Microsoft Windows. It is the only platform I write for. I have a vested (i.e. not emotional) interest in the success of Windows.  I’ve been a Microsoft MVP for years, have worked with Microsoft on many different projects over the years. And Windows 8 is very good, technologically, under the hood.  The problem is strictly with the insanity that is the Windows 8 user experience and that if unaddressed will result in a lot of people migrating.

I don’t think that many people in 2012 realize how close we are to the next phase computing. It’s not tablets vs. desktops.  It’s decoupled computing. It’s AirPlay vs. WiDi. That’s the next battle and it’s one that Microsoft could very lose if they splinter their developer and user base. 

Got to play around with the February beta of Windows 8. It is terrible. It is beyond terrible. It is so bad that I’m a little panicked about the future of Windows. People won’t use this.

I could have teams of people working full time to develop products to fix it but we’re not in the business of making a terrible experience good. We’re in the business of making a good experience better.

No sane person, will consider the user experience of this beta acceptable. Even a die hard Windows advocate cannot be pleased. It’s that bad.

I’m all over adapting to new UI conventions if they’re as good or better. But that’s not the case here. This is just terrible.

I have confidence in Microsoft in delivering innovative technology (Windows Phone is excellent). But something went terribly wrong here.

Start button: Gone.

Everything is in a corner. Type in top right, move to far left.

This is the new “Start” menu.  Note: Fresh install. Luckily, no one installs anything right?

Click…

and…be taken here:

But someday, everything will be metro right?

That’ll be the world of:

The 2560x1440 weather widget. Microsoft Window 9 (we can dispense with “Windows”).

Everything requires lots of clickity click click and lots of mouse drag. Less of an issue on a mobile device but on a desktop? If they didn’t force you to live in-between worlds (you’re not allowed to live in just the desktop remember, you have to come back to the Metro-tablet like experience).

What’s really a bummer is that Windows 8’s desktop is really good. Better than Windows 7. But you’re not allowed to live here. They treat the desktop as a kind of DOS box equivalent even though, for desktop users, it’s a vastly more productive experience.

Update 1:

It's not just that they got rid of the Start button -- on the classic desktop. Navigating around is just a pain. Getting to your stuff is a pain. It's lots of clicks and drags to do anything, even basic stuff. 

Remember how annoying the UAC prompt can be when it darkens the screen interrupting your flow? Well going back and forth between Metro and classic is far worse and far more frequent.

Let me put it this way, this is bad enough that there will almost certainly be YouTube videos demonstrating some of the absurdities of use. We're not talking nit-picking type issues here, we're talking fundamental, baffling user experience choices. And that's without touching on performance (10 seconds to load up the mail program?).

Update 2:

You be the judge:

Bear in mind, this is on a clean system. Imagine how this system falls apart when you have dozens of programs installed -- some metro and some Win32.  I can't even imagine trying to explain how this works to a typical enterprise customer or worse..my mom.

Update 3:

Here’s a quick stop gap solution for the Start menu issue:

https://www.stardock.com/products/start8

I was reading on the forums today people complaining that even in a post-civilization world (one where people are basically getting together from the ruins) that they would “know” how to do all kinds of things like make bows, swords, etc.

I have a lot of friends who are active in the Renaissance and Medieval communities out there who always laugh at this kind of thing. The conversation goes something like this:

“Really, you think you can make a spear? Ok. Let’s see you do it. Let’s see you actually make a weapons-grade spear. In fact, tell me how you would do it. Do you really think you can just get a stick and sharpen it?”

Some is true about agriculture. It’s amazing that people who can’t manage to keep their house plants alive think that farming is technologically trivial. Gardening isn’t that hard but unless you’ve actually farmed some real acreage, involving a plow and doing a real harvest, it’s not something one just inherently knows how to do.

Or how about making bows and arrows. Not the kind for shooting a bird or something but a weapons-grade bow, one that could kill a soldier.  It requires a level of knowledge that the average lay person, even a medieval peasant, would have no idea how to do. 

As someone into this stuff, I can tell you the mechanics of how to make a bow (lots of ash trees around here). But could I make one that would be actually useful in a battle – i.e. where I’d use it over a good club?  I don’t know.

And that’s before we even talk about metallurgy…

As some of you know, the latest iPhone update caves into AT&T’s request to have their HSPA+ connections labeled at 4G.

AT&T: I’ve used 4G. I’ve spent lots of time with it. You sir, are not 4G. 

When I use my iPhone for data and I’m using AT&T’s “4G” network, it is note terrible. It’s definitely a fast 3G. I get typically 3 to 5 Mb/sec.

However, when I use my LTE hotspot with it, I get 15 to 20 MB/sec. THAT, to me, is 4G. It is a huge experience difference too.

You’ll hear a lot of my posts start with “I’m not a …” 

I don’t have a real specialty at anything.

I’m not a DirectX programmer but I know that the jaggies in Fallen Enchantress were driving me mad.

So I made some tweaks to get objects to multi-sample on the map without it doing everything. So you don’t get the perf hit of trying to multisample everything but you get the smooth graphics on the things you want.

Example:

Before:

After

You’ll need to click on the thumbnails since thumbnails multi-sample the original.

The Beta 2 series of Fallen Enchantress is where we begin to introduce the bread and butter differences between the different factions.  Beta 2-B, which, I’m sad to say, won’t be out until at least the 22nd, will reintroduce players to Magnar and Gilden.   We’ll be talking a lot about the differences in an upcoming journal.

Broadly speaking, each faction will receive unique equipment, weapons, armor, items, improvements and abilities.  While most of our focus will be on making each faction distinct in how you play, we will be working to make them visually different as well. A Wraith city will look different from a Trog city which will look different from a Krax city and so on.

In the meantime, let us know which faction you tend to play as the most and how you would like to see them differentiated from the others. What would make them feel special to you?

Vote here:

https://www.elementalgame.com/journals

Just discovered that the shard objects in the game are a different type of object than say metal or crystal. As a result, the AI pioneers couldn’t “see” them when it was looking for places to build outposts.

So in your games, you may notice that the AI won’t send pioneers out to capture shards. It doesn’t seem them.

Video:

http://screencast.com/t/kIaXyrkUd

Discussion:

This weekend I’m working on optimizing memory usage in the game. This requires a lot of testing that involves having the AI play against the AI on the largest possible map with lots of players.  Now, late game, there’s only a handful of players left (in the video above you can probably figure out how many) but the times can take a lonnng time.

Let me first ask those of you reading this, how many of you have played the beta on a large map with lots of players with >500 turns into it? It gets slow. There are thousands of units and dozens of cities and lots of things going on. Each unit has its own armor, weapons, enchantments, equipment, rings, etc.  And each turn, the game has to go and evaluate all these to see if the various cached values need to be updated – and late game, they often do.

So in a bit of frustration, I bit the bullet and created a worker thread for each AI.  In FE 0.86, the player and “the AI” move simultaneously.  In my build, the player and each AI player moves simultaneously.

This could only be done because of the work in the past few months of making the game much more thread safe.  So it’s a good robustness test to be able to not just have a few “dedicated” threads where each thread has a specific job. Now, we can toss threads around as needed and let your multi-core machines take care of the rest.

Or put another way, the idea of putting all these into their own threads is pretty obvious. The ability to actually do this safely is the key element here.

…

Oh, in case you’re wondering, in my example the end turn wait went from 8 seconds to 2 seconds in my massive, mega game.

Fun with mip levels:

http://screencast.com/t/cNIa7m9WIfp