It's been years since I've had a dog and my kids have never had one. So after a lot of research and thought, I decided to get an Entlebucher and found a breeder. After a lot of waiting, the puppies have been born and in several weeks we'll be traveling to indiana to pick up the pup.
Here are some pictures:
2 days old
The mom
Well it looks like v1.2 is going to pretty much take care of the memory stuff. The next step will be to have the game mechanics take care of the remaining things and that'll be in v1.3. That is, the system is open ended and that'll have to be squashed (there's literally nothing stopping you from having 500,000 individual soldiers running around with their own unique clothing and items).
It's a bit painful testing beta v1.19f because of all the debugging info. Late games take literally minutes to go through turns for me because it's writing so much to disk and to the output buffer to track every bit of memory being allocated.
For marketing reasons, v1.2 isn't scheduled to come out until March 22. Right after that, we're going to head into v1.3 which will be the most significant gameplay update to the game since v1.1 and in some ways, it'll be a bigger change since v1.3 is purely designed to take everything we as a community have learned about the game to add more fun elements into the game rather than game mechanic changes.
But we'll talk more about v1.3 in the coming weeks.
Over the years, Stardock’s Object Desktop suite of utilities has been the source of many innovations on the PC. It is where the concept of “widgets” and “gadgets” was born. It is where ZIP files being treated like folders came from, it’s where GUI skinning came from, it’s where animated desktop wallpaper came from. And more recently, it’s where the popular icon organization program, Fences came from.
This year, Stardock is proud to add Tiles to the list of new Object Desktop programs. Tiles is to tasks what Fences is to desktop icons. It is designed to allow users to more effectively manage what they are working on.
“The current PC task management metaphor hasn’t really changed in over 18 years,” said Brad Wardell, President & CEO of Stardock. “In recent years, mobile devices have been able to introduce users to more modern metaphors of arranging their digital life. Tiles has been designed to update that metaphor to the PC experience.”
Tiles works by taking advantage of the wider aspect ratios of today’s desktops. On the right side of the screen, a page of tiles is displayed. Users may have multiple pages that they organize as they see fit or make use of several sample page filters such as displaying only active windows or only web pages. Users can then switch between pages either by clicking on the page title or on touch systems by sweeping their finger across the page to “turn the page”.
Users add tiles to a page through either holding the shift key down and dragging a window onto a page or by dragging an icon onto the page. When the tile is active, it is displayed as with a thumbnail of the window. When the tile is inactive, only the program’s icon is displayed. Users can configure Tiles to be different sizes, automatically maximize the windows selected tiles, automatically hide and show windows based on the tiles on a particular page as well as dozens of other options to enable users to customize Tiles to their work style.
Tiles is currently in beta exclusively on Stardock’s Object Desktop software network. Users can get Object Desktop at www.objectdesktop.com. It is expected to be generally released this Summer.
Download:
Video:
http://www.screencast.com/t/u4oK0520uoK
Screenshots:
One has to wonder what’s going through Charlie Sheens mind. But I suspect that I’m not the only person who’s wondered how often the mega successful think “Why should I put up with crap? I’m rich!”
The problem is, that place only leads to ruin. As tempting as it is to lash out at your critics and demonstrate your capacity to operate without restraint, no man is an island.
When my son was younger, he asked me why certain words were considered “dirty”. I told him that these were were selected, fairly arbitrarily, by society as being unacceptable for polite conversation. I told him that he should do what he thinks is right and not feel he is forced to live by social norms but at the same time to recognize that there are consequences for violating social norms. My message: Pick your battles carefully.
Charlie Sheen is demonstrating that he is not bound by social norms but he is also paying a price for it – social ostracization (is that even a word?). So unless he plans to live in his own private fortress, he isn’t winning. He’s losing. Badly.
I’m writing this from the plane. I tell ya, air travel is a lot more tolerable with WiFi and power outlets.
We got to talk about Elemental: Fallen Enchantress along with plans for Elemental: War of Magic coming up. Got a lot of good questions.
And of course, we talked about Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion which is the first really big “expansion” to the Sins of a Solar Empire universe.
There was also a big announcement regarding Impulse::Reactor Free to Play. There’s a pretty good chance this will show up in War of Magic as an option. Right now, the plan is for the DLC to be $0 on it so that we can try out the system in real world conditions. If people are liking it, we’ll see if there’s interest in some additional DLC that we wouldn’t normally give away so we can find out from our fans what things they like about it or don’t like about it.
One of the reasons I’m passionate about Free to Play and DLC (DLC has gotten a bit of a bad rap – deservedly so imo but the concept is still awesome) is I would like to see the base price on PC games go down. Way down. That doesn’t mean gimping the base game. Rather, it means setting up a system where people can keep expanding the game without having the overhead (which is a lot) of marketing and distributing it. I think a lot of people would love to see new little things released for GalCiv II over the past couple years. But we had no means to do it other than releasing an expansion pack which drives the cost way up. The concept is still developing but I do think PC games need to have a lower sticker price one way or the other (see Minecraft for an example of doing it right).
I also participated in a panel regarding failure. That is, what tends to cause game projects to fail.
This was one of my slides.
Since I was talking to developers, the goal was to help Indies avoid the trap we fell into. When you’re a small indie shop, you can get away with an adhoc development system like we had in Galactic Civilizations. But War of Magic had 18 people directly involved (not counting shared resource personnel). That’s why when people say “They should have delayed it” that the response is no, it wouldn’t have made a difference. This sort of thing could have gone on for years. The team thought it was ready for prime time.
So in my session, the magic number I gave was 7 people as the maximum number before you have to really go after it as a software engineering exercise. Some would argue you should do it with 3 people and I wouldn’t argue with that. I’m saying that with 7 people, our collaborative, easy going development ways still worked and beyond that they felt apart into chaos.
And so now you know why we brought in Derek Paxton and Jon Shafer. Great designers. Derek’s job before Stardock was an enterprise level project manager. So now all things go through him. Even my requests have to go through him.
During the tour I answered some other interesting questions such as why we refused to allow War of Magic to be re-reviewed (a few sites offered). My answer was that that would set a terrible precedence. Sure, War of Magic is pretty decent now and it’ll keep getting better (I’m itching for v1.3 and we haven’t released v1.2 yet). But the day you make it generally available for money as a “non beta” is the date I think reviews should start and once done, they’re done. Plus, it would be horribly unfair to all the smaller indies out there who don’t get media coverage. I remember being one of them.
Ok, about to land, so off I go. Have fun! Sorry for typos. 
The Internet is full of haters. Haters hate. Nothing you can do. But what has surprised me over the years is seeing cliques of haters. That is, specific groups of people who are friends who get off on trying make someone else miserable. It’s a stunning thing to see on message boards I lurk on from time to time.
I’m on the plane now lurking on various gaming and tech forums and I just feel disgusted when I see what is a reasonably organized effort to harm some other forum goer for whatever reason. Usually, the target is someone who definitely leaves themselves open for it. Maybe they look weird or post way way too much about their Furry thing or what have you. But in most cases, the target has done nothing to these people other than being an easy target.
It really saddens me when it’s people who are in my industry doing it. The closest personal experience I’ve had to deal with was when a group of people like that smeared my book on Amazon.com (and one making a stand alone web review under the guise of objectivity when it was actually a pretty transparent effort to “avenge” her husband’s banning for stalking me on a particular web community. This was awhile back.
And we’re not talking about dumb people here. We’re talking about highly intelligent people who choose to spend effort to make the world a little crappier of a place.
It’s called Aerotitus. And it sucks.
Every time I fly I get vertigo. Every time. When I was a kid, I had a lot of ear infections and is messed up my Eustachian tubes. So when the plane takes off or lands, my ears plug up and I get vertigo.
Over the years, I’ve tried pretty much everything to address it.
Gum chewing. Pinching my nose and blowing air. Yawning. Decongestants. Nasal Sprays. Ear plugs. Patches. Ginger. Asperin. You name it. They all help to be sure. But they don’t eliminate it. They just make it less horrific. And sometimes, like today’s flight, it is still pretty darn horrific.
My next step is to go to a specialist. Not that’ll help. They’ll prescribe a steroid to take before the flight. But it will only reduce it. Sucks.
For more information:
http://medicalsymptom.blogspot.com/2010/03/aerotitus-ears-pain.html
At the top of the Journals page we’ve set up a new poll.
We’ll be getting into a lot of details about Fallen Enchantress as we near the beta (which we anticipate starting this Spring).
Below, are 10 random facts (amongst many) about it:
Feel free to write in the comments section any questions you may have as we plan to start back with FAQs in March.
Don’t forget to answer the poll!
If you didn’t see the recent Gamespot updates to Fallen Enchantress, you can see them here.
While the art-style in Elemental: Fallen Enchantress won’t be completely different from Elemental: War of Magic, it will be different enough that there will be no confusion about which game you’re looking at.
Ironically, the screenshot I show at the right shows barren land. But the big change in Fallen Enchantress is the sheer number of terrain types. In War of Magic there were only a few. As a result, the world tended to look either “brown”, “very green”, or “very dark brown” with the occasional bits of snow once in awhile. In Fallen Enchantress, the Fallen areas are being revisited to not give off the “evil” vibe.
Just wanted to give you a head's up that Gas Powered Games has been selected as the lead developer for Age of Empires online.
A big congratulations to all our friends at GPG!