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.
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.
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..
#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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
There will be a GUI Championships in 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.
There's been a number of negative articles about the Chevy Volt for some reason.
Let me tell you, it's the best car I've ever owned. Here are some of the cool things about it (and please feel free to ask anything you'd like to know because a lot of what I'm writing here hasn't been talked about):
So I've had it 6 months. And in 6 months of normal driving, I have never had to fill the gas tank. It's still using the gas that came with it from the dealership. Something like 2500 miles so far. That's because it gets 40 miles on electric and it's very rare for me to have to drive more than 40 miles at a time.
So here are some of the things about it that make it "worth it" for me (YMMV):
1. It's silent. And I mean silent. Not quiet. Silent. This is a nice thing if you live in a small city and are just cruising around the downtown on a Saturday morning. Open the windows and just relax. It's amazing how much of a difference to the experience that makes.
2. No refueling. This is obvious but I don't know about you guys but I hate having to go and get gas. It's never at a good time.
3. Wonderful in the summer heat. I go to town and I leave the car running 100% of the time when it's hot out. You don't have to keep the key in the car (there's no ignition). So I just have the car run with the air conditioner on. No engine to run, just battery (trivial amount for it) and so I get back to the car, it's cool. I have a dog and this means I can bring my dog with me and not worry about the heat.
4. Remote starting. This is part of the OnStar system but it takes off with the Volt. After a day at work, I turn on the car via my iPhone and it's nice and cool. And because it's silent, no one even knows it's on (and since the car is powered via my home solar array, it's all renewable energy anyway).
5. It emails me. Also part of OnStar but the Volt setup is particularly nice in letting me see how I could be more efficient, status of my oil and tires (my tires need air).
6. The interior. Car magazine editors (to me anyway) seem out of touch with normal people. They focus on things that I don't think most people care about. As a non-enthusiast of cars, I only care about getting from point A to B. So I do care about things like cup holders and how easy it is to plug in my gadgets and how well set up the interior is and the Volt has the best interior of any car I have. It makes my 2011 BMW X5 look primitive by comparison.
7. Insanely good iPhone integration. I've never seen anything come close. Our company fleet has Fords, BMWs, Toyotas and more and none of them come close. The LCD screen lets me control my iPhone (or XM radio) much nicer than anything else I've tried.
8. Touch screen is both touchscreen AND knob/button controlled. Some cars (Jaguar and Toyotas) have touch screens. Others make you use knobs (BMW). The Volt lets you do both and there are times you want one or the other.
9. Great hands free. The blue tooth in it has much better mics than anything else I have. Which is frankly, annoying given how expensive some of the other cars in our company fleet are.
10. Great ergonomics. It's a 1000 little things that come together. The center holder has little holes in it to let you put your USB cables through (my expensive BMW, by contrast, does not). The rear hatchback has been designed so that when you open it, the water that might be on it flows out onto the ground (the Toyota van and BMW X5 flow the water right into the trunk/rear of the vehicle). There are back seat cup holders. And on and on. There's just a bunch of small nice details that make the car fun to drive.
11. It's peppy. Forgot to mention this earlier but the car drives fast. It has spunk.
Could they improve it? Sure. But I think that the first gallon as electric is the wave of the future. I've been shocked at how little gas I've used as a result of having the first gallon equivalent (~35-40 miles) be battery powered instead of electric.
For the first time since The Corporate Machine, I have a version of one of our games 100% in my hands.
So v1.4 is all mine. Everyone else is now fully on Fallen Enchantress.
I'm not on FE yet because some of the mechanics are still being implemented so I can't work on its AI yet.
It's just you guys and me. So it's like being a modder again except I get to play with the source code.
In this thread, I'll be hanging out talking about the "stuff" I'm doing.
1990s
During the creation of the history for the Galactic Civilizations universe a number of stories are assembled regarding the earliest days. These become known as Elemental: Guardians of the Telenanth, Elemental: Mascrinthus & Draginol, and Elemental: Destiny’s Sentinel
Early 2000s
Stardock attempts to license Master of Magic from Atari to create a Master of Magic 2. Negotiations stall over legal requirements.
2006
Galactic Civilizations II is a hit, team starts to get serious about the design of “not-MOM”.
2007
War of Magic: Design 1
Design 1 was essentially Master of Magic + Dynasty System + Multiplayer
2008
Sins of a Solar Empire released
2009
Core WOM team refocused to help on Demigod. After launch, team revisits where War of Magic is a 1Q2010 release still hoped for.
War of Magic Design 2 is created. Cost of having significantly different (i.e. different body types) and having player designed units beyond budget. Two main humanoid styles chosen (Men and Fallen) with the different races fitting into those styles.
2010
Full studio is now on WOM but the new game engine (Kumquat) has limited particle effects support and memory management.
War of Magic Design 3 is created. Economic and terrain system is simplified. Control of resources is now key to victory. City building is streamlined.
Release of War of Magic v1.0. Kumquat proves unstable on various hardware configurations and just plain buggy. Reviews of WOM are mixed. Stardock and its fans very unhappy. Sales are initially strong but end up lower than GalCiv II or Sins or Demigod.
Release of Destiny’s Embers (book) is more favorable, sales are good.
Stardock brings in veteran designers and producers to focus on a “super expansion pack”
2011
Fallen Enchantress moves from being an expansion to being a sequel.
Fallen Enchantress moves a lot closer to the original WOM concept (Design 1) where terrain and city building matter a lot more, magic matters a lot more, and units and their abilities matter a lot more. System opened up so that the different factions can be made far more diverse (whether that’ll be in FE or an expansion to it depends on budget). Everything is XML’fied for more extensive modding.
To be continued…
I own (as of August 2011) the top end Samsung (active 3D) and top end LG (passive 3D) televisions. Just bought them both this Summer.
The Samsung’s active 3D glasses are state of the art. They use bluetooth and give a stunningly sharp 3D picture.
The LG came with several pair of passive 3D.
Here’s the verdict (and frankly, I can’t imagine any sane person coming to a different conclusion because it’s not a close call): The passive is better – by far.
Yes, the active is slightly sharper. But the fact is, right now anyway, active 3D means 60hz which means flicker. Watching something on active 3D glasses for a length of time is going to give most people a headache. It’s a great demo though.
By contrast, the passive 3D is comfortable. It’s like watching 3D at the movies.
I don’t really find 3D very compelling anyway – in general. It is, however cool that both sets will convert 2D to 3D and do so quite well – remarkably well. So watching the occasional home movie on either one is nice. The active 3D is sharper but gives you a headache. The passive is less sharp but comfortable. I’d prefer comfortable.
So there you go. If there’s a future for 3D glasses, and I’m not sure there is, it’s passive.
I'm interested in doing another GUI Championships.
Who's with me?