So Stardock is working on its successor to Impulse. As some of you know, Stardock sold Impulse to Gamestop this past spring.  Stardock is out of the digital distribution – for third parties – business.

So with the knowledge that we’ll only have our own stuff to purchase, download, and update, we’ve been building something new. And guess what? It’s practically invisible.  I don’t even have a cool screenshot to show you because, well, there’s not much there. It’s just about updating “your Stardock stuff”, largely automatically, largely in the background (all options of course). 

This isn’t default? Jesus. So I recently discovered the wonders of AHCI and decided to look at how my Toad-2009 machine was set up.  Sure enough, IDE.  My wonderful Intel SSD drive was fast and could copy the WinSXS directory onto itself at 30MB/sec.  Switching the bios to AHCI however changed that to 50MB/sec. 

So for 2 years, I’ve been getting half the drive performance I could have been getting because the PC manufacturers still default to IDE.  Heck, why stop there? Why not use MFM or something too “just to be safe”.

Grrr.

Got my brand new monster machine up and running. Now to start loading software onto it. First stop, Object Desktop. Now, I’m not saying you have to have Object Desktop on Windows to do work. I mean, I’m sure my aunt or mom could function without it.  Maybe. But for people who actually use Windows, I just can’t imagine functioning without it.

I used to get a new PC every year. But we’ve so long been in diminishing returns of noticeable performance that I’ve stopped doing that.

So first off, my new monster machine has a 240GB OCZ SSD and a traditional 1TB Seagate drive. I ordered a SATA 6G controller with the machine. Naturally, they had hooked the non-SSD to that (ack).

Second, the machine supports the new AHCI standard which, when enabled, gives about a 20% boost to write performance on any drive. However, it MUST be enabled in bios before installing. If you do it after, you have to reinstall Windows 7 and it's not on by default as I discovered.

Third, while Windows 7 works like a champ out of the box, it turns out that the generic drivers are pretty conservative and if you want to eek out max (and measurable) performance, you need to download drivers for system components like the Intel AHCI Controller (or better yet, an nVidia one), as well as a JMicron controller and of course you'll need the Marvell controller driver if you want to actually access that 6G speed (otherwise it's 3G).

Fourth, Windows 7 still doesn't come (even in SP1) with USB 3 drivers so you have to install them separately.

Fifth, since I ordered a custom system from Cyberpower, the front case USB 3 connectors do nothing because...the motherboard doesn't have any connectors to it, only ones on the back. So I'd need to get a separate USB 3 PCIe card, put it in, tear apart the case to connect those things on the front. Unbelieveable.

Sixth, once you get into looking into updating drivers, you realize that there’s a ton of obscure stuff that can be updated/improved…the network card works out of the box and I would have not realized how much better the specific driver was if I wasn't already diving around for drivers anyway. The difference is how fast they connect on bootup (very noticeable now that I've seen it).

Don’t get me wrong, I'm loving the machine's speed. It's sick fast. 12 cores (well, really 6 but hyperthreaded). That'll make compile speeds insane. And "real world" copy from drive A to drive B on here is about 600 MEGABYTES per second (which doesn't come up often but if you're moving a lot of video around, it's very nice).

And one piece of advice for those of you looking to get a custom PC: Get the quiet components. This thing is quieter than my Mac book Pro.

I miss Impulse. I really do.  I also think that it would have wiped out Stardock’s games unit if it had gone on for another year. Profit is something all businesses strive for – within reason.  The problem is, profit can become such an overwhelming motivating factor that it can warp all other considerations.  Was Stardock making games in order to make cool games or what it making games to enhance the installed base of Impulse?  By the end of 2010, it was starting to get blurry.

Now, we live in a world where we still keep an eye on the bottom line but it is a much more abstract, long-term concept.  I don’t have to care about the profitability of Fallen Enchantress, for example. It would be great if it makes a ton of money. But our primary objective for it will be to be seen as the #1 PC strategy game of the current age.  And we’re willing to do what it takes, even if it doesn’t make short-term business sense, to make that happen.

Moreover, I’ve forbidden any PR on it. I’ve been nixxing interviews and preview shots being sent out. ONLY when the beta goes out does the press or anyone get stuff.  Because, and I shouldn’t say this, but many members of the press are friends of mine and they have great integrity and it’s important that tends of thousands of users, who have the beta in hand, will be in a position to back up the early previews that yes, Fallen Enchantress delivers the goods.

Let me put it another way, in 2012, if you want to play a modern PC, turn-based fantasy strategy game. Fallen Enchantress better be the #1 choice, by far, or we failed.

YMMV but having both PCs and Macs (Mac hardware blows away PC hardware) it is my opinion that when it comes to usability and ease of getting things done, Windows 7 is a lot better than MacOS X Lion.

If you’re just joining us, welcome to the second strategy game in the Elemental universe – Fallen Enchantress.  Like War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress is a turn-based strategy game set in the world of Elemental.

Unlike War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress takes place in a much less…civilized part of the world.  The beta for Fallen Enchantress is expected to begin this Fall but in the meantime, we’ll start showing you some bits and pieces of what we’re working on.

Setting up your world…

Relias, the narrator from The War of Magic told his story from the point of view of men. From his vantage point, there were only two types of beings – Men and Fallen. And “The Fallen” were simply a bunch of monstrous humanoids of unknown origin.   In addition, Relias, being a man of the west, was very concerned with ideology. Specifically, whether one respected concept of royalty (Kingdoms) or whether one embraced random chaos (Empire). Random chaos, being from the point of view of men.

One of the Kingdoms of men, Kraxis, did not agree with the concept of royal succession. And they, unlike the other kingdoms of men, joined the “Empires”.

This matters in our story because Fallen Enchantress is told from the point of view of Ceresa, the beautiful but deadly enchantress of Resoln.  Ancient beyond any other channeler (even Procipinee), Ceresa has a much broader view of the world than Relias had.

A dangerous world

We won’t be giving out a lot of details until just before the Fallen Enchantress beta is made publicly available. One reason for this is that we don’t want to “hype” Fallen Enchantress. We want its excellence to speak for itself. Or put another way, we want the game to be so good that the beta group themselves will see that their hopes have manifested.

That said, here are..

a few…details…

#1 Research Paths.  You can queue up research.

#2 Cleaner city management and no more “random” naming for anything with names based on the lore of each of the unique factions.

#3 The world is much much more interesting

#4 Way…way way way more spells

This is just what I start with on turn one and the spellbook button is always present. Players are encouraged to be enchanting often. Researching new spells is part of the tech tree.

#5 Champions and resources must be earned.

#6 Designing Units much more interesting

#7 The world is far more vibrant and distinct

#8 Lots of new modding options

This is a seemingly little thing but for those of you who like to create really cool areas with the map editor, now you can save them and they’ll be inserted as part of randomly generated worlds.

These aren’t, by far, the biggest changes, just a sampling.  Fallen Enchantress is less a sequel to War of Magic and more of a new take on a TBS game in the Elemental universe.  We hope you like what you’re seeing and can’t wait to get you guys playing this Fall.

Greetings! Long time no see!

So what’s going on with Object Desktop these days?  The answer: A lot. Much of what we’ve worked on for the past year hasn’t gotten communicated very well to our consumers and I apologize for that. 

As some of you may know, we sold Impulse to Gamestop last year.  A lot of people couldn’t believe that we would sell our most profitable business unit. But I suspect some of you will understand why.  It was consuming us.  In another year, Stardock would have been Impulse and little else.  And if money were the only purpose in life, maybe that would be a good thing.  But Stardockians want to make cool stuff, not put all our time into selling other people’s stuff no matter how cool it is.

This past year

That isn’t to say we haven’t been able to release some really cool stuff in the past couple of years.  Fences was recently regarded as the “best. program. ever.” by CNET. WindowFX 4, DeskScapes 3 upped the ante and while not part of Object Desktop, ObjectDock 2 came out this past year. And there have been updates to WindowBlinds, SkinStudio, IconPackager and Theme Manager in recent times to keep building on their success.

The cost of compatibility

At this stage in the development of desktop enhancements, we have to make some tough choices.  The #1 slow down to our development cycles has been trying to get things to run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Vista 64, Windows 7, and Windows 7 64.  And we are already developing for Windows 8 as well which is, in itself, a pretty significant departure.

So on the one hand, customers want new stuff and lots of updates but on the other hand they want their OS supported and we just don’t have the manpower to do that.  Back in the Windows XP days, we could crank out a ton of cool stuff.  Now, we have to worry about whether certain system DLLs will be available on Windows 7 “Ultimate” vs. Windows 7 “Home” or whether they were taken out entirely after Windows Vista Business.  Desktop Enhancements: Fun times.

Of course, in the old days, I was around to keep everyone in the loop on this stuff. For a lot of our long-time customers, it’s not the slow down in new programs but the lack of communication. Hence, the hidden cost of the focus on Impulse for the last couple of years.

Where we are now

So let’s talk about what’s happening NOW

Tiles

Our most radical new program is called Tiles. There’s an early beta of it on Object Desktop right now. It’s designed to enable users to manage their tasks in “pages” of tiles that represent what they’re currently working on or will be working on.

In the old days, we made virtual desktops. That made sense when we were all running on individual, low resolution monitors.  But today and into the future, high resolution, multiple monitor setups are how power users work and what they need are things that let them make full use of that.  That is the purpose of Tiles.

Carousel

In a similar vein, we’re working on a new program that will let you more effectively switch between running tasks via your keyboard.  Microsoft and Apple have each tried their hand with this but we have felt they spent too much effort in making it demo well versus being a practical tool.  And let’s face it, Alt-Tab is starting to get pretty long in the tooth.

WindowFX 5

WindowFX 4 was a significant departure from the old “special effects” concept of WindowFX.  That was because on Windows Vista, all those cool DWM effects were not hardware accelerated (Microsoft wasn’t hardware accelerating a lot of things in Windows Vista and had deprecated GDI+ and at first had removed hardware acceleration).  But in more recent times, hardware acceleration has returned, particularly in Windows 7’s DWM.  This has meant we can start adding lots of cool effects.

DeskScapes 4

DeskScapes is continuing to evolve as we prepare for the day of letting pretty much everyone make their own dynamic content for it.  The idea is to make it so that the desktop background isn’t limited to being pretty but can be made into a useful area.

WindowBlinds / SkinStudio

There’s not a lot to tell (publicly anyway) as a lot of work involved with Windows 8 that we can’t discuss.

Fences

There’s been screenshots of Fences 2 floating around. We have no ETAs on it yet as seeing what is (and isn’t) doable on Windows 8 is taking up some time.  But there’s a lot of interesting new features in the works including letting users define a directory as a Fence as well as having Fence “pages”.

IconPackager

We’ve had a hard time with Windows 7 folders and we’re not sure if this is going to be cured in Windows 8.  If it’s not, we may make changing the default folders of Windows 7/Windows 8 become a “hidden” (i.e. off by default, unsupported) feature.

Program X

Not so much a secret but rather we haven’t come up with a name for it yet. It’s a program for skinning the new Windows 8 immersion UI.

Program Y

Same thing, not secret but a program that takes some of the non “FX” parts of WindowFX and graduates them to their own program.

DesktopX

I don’t have a lot of good news to report on this.  The effort in making it work well on all these versions of Windows is not going well at all.  We are still deciding its future.

Theme Manager

Theme Manager 4 has become our preferred method of applying suites.  We killed MyColors entirely.  So over the coming months you’ll see a lot of of the MyColors themes become Theme Manager .suite files.

CursorFX 3

We are looking at updating CursorFX to support the DWM but it is still in the planning stages as we’re not sure the demand vs. cost of this yet.

SoundPackager 2

This is more an area where we need to bring in more developers.  We’re hiring btw.   If you’re a great developer you can even work from remote.

Tweak 8

Just waiting for Windows 8…

Legacy Programs

Some… a lot of programs are not going to make the cut.  One decision we have made is that if we can’t make it work on Windows 8, it’s dead. That doesn’t mean we won’t still have it available but we won’t be doing updates for it anymore.  Another decision is that we will be ending support for Windows XP pretty soon. We haven’t decided a date but what it means is that after that date, we won’t be testing on Windows XP anymore on new releases. So a program may work…or it may not.  The same is true with Windows Vista.  It’s absolutely murdering us trying to support all these OSes.

So let’s look at the programs that won’t be getting love:

RightClick, TweakVista, Virtual Desktops, LogonStudio, BootSkin, MyColors, ObjectBar, Keyboard LaunchPad.  They’re still available but we won’t be supporting or updating them.

GUI Championships

There will be a GUI Championships in 2012

WinCustomize 2012

There will be a revamp to WinCustomize 2012.  It will be more evolutionary than revolutionary. The main area will be performance and new features rather than a whole new look or something.

So that’s where we’re at.

For the past few months, I’ve been on my long promised sabbatical.

2009 and 2010 were horrible horrible years personally. While my company had good financial years, they were both professionally disappointing.

In the Summer of 2010 things really came to a head with the launch of the first title in the Elemental universe (War of Magic).  It was a disaster. And it became obvious that no particular sector of the company was getting sufficient attention.

Sometimes, you just need a big shock to get change done.  So we sold off Impulse to Gamestop, brought in industry veterans to take over running the software unit and the games unit and beefed up the management teams across the board. 

Selling off the most profitable part of our organization may seem crazy until you realize that its profitability was allowing us to mask our underlying lack of focus. 

I was slowly killing myself (and my senior staff who did the same thing) by taking on Boxer’s philosophy – I’ll work harder.

I’ve been starting to get back into the fold by checking out some of the cool software projects we’ve got going and fixing up War of Magic a bit before diving into Fallen Enchantress, Sins: Rebellion, Object Desktop 2012, etc.  But I feel a lot better knowing that all these projects have people dedicated to them rather than competing for the limited hours a week I was able to give them before.

It’s not that I’m planning to be off grid.  But I really like the idea of being self-sufficient.

This 20KW solar array will let my family be electrically self-sufficient.  It goes live this week.