I’m the anti-packrat.  That is, I don’t keep stuff. I’m not living anything like a zen existence but I don’t like to keep “clutter”. However, I do keep things that I form some sort of attachment to. Clearly, I’d never make a good Jedi.

Considering the number of moves I’ve made over the years, the threshold of importance to keep it through these moves would have to be pretty high. 

Here’s something that has made the moves: The Balance of power 1990 manual. I have it “just in case” I play Chris Crawford’s classic game again with it’s crazy copy protection.

I played it on the Amiga (both original and 1990) and again on the PC.  A truly classic game.

Do you have a game that fits this description?

Which one?

The Energy Detective is a kit that you can purchase online that lets people monitor how much power their house is using in real-time.  While there are newer kits that work with your power meter, many advanced power meters (such as what I have) won’t work with them.

The way TED works is as follows:

The measuring “donuts” hook up inside your electrical panel. These donuts then are connected (and powered) by one of the breakers. The electrical line connected to the breaker is used to send a signal to a remote “gateway” that can then be connected to your router.

Hooking this up is, unfortunately, non-trivial if you’re non-technical, especially if you’re not familiar with electrical equipment or have an electrician at your beck and call.

My Installation

My house has 4 different panels so I used their highest end model that came with 4 sets of “donuts” that connect to their MTU (the gadget that records the data and sends it out to the gateway.

Now, the documentation for TED (and the help forums) assume that the people doing this sort of thing can, on the one hand, afford a $500 gadget to measure their power output but on the other hand assumes the user is going to be unable or unwilling to spend a relatively small amount to make it easy to hook up.  As a result, there are a lot of aggravated users on the TED forums.

The main reason: The power line communications choice that TED uses.  Basically, TED sends its signal from its MTU to its gateway over your power line. This makes it very vulnerable to electrical interference and weak signals.  Even if you overcome this, odds are, it by itself will interfere with other gadgets are that using the power lines to communicate as well (security systems and other smart home features).

I decided to bypass this pain by spending an additional $100 on two things:

1) An additional circuit breaker + power outlet dedicated just to this.

2) Netgear WNCE2001 Universal WiFi Internet Adapter

These two things bypassed many many pages of frustration you’d get under normal circumstances.

The first is so that you have a clean line from your donuts/MTUs directly to the Gateway.  The second is to make it easy to get the Gateway data to my wireless router.

This is the Netgear Ethernet to Wireless adapter which I hooked up to the TED gateway.

This is my crappy setup. I’ll clean it up later once I’m satisfied it’s working.  Basically, all 4 donuts/MTUs output to a single line that goes to the outlet that the gateway is plugged into. By doing this, I bypass all the line noise nonsense/interference with my security system that I’d get if I tried to have it use a regular outlet. I had an electrician come over and install the outlet I needed.

This is my breaker box after I unscrewed the cover that hides the spaghetti. So those two donuts go around the black and red lines and are connected to the TED “MTU” (measuring gadget) that is then powered/connected to one of my breakers which is fed to a dedicated power outlet.

TED also has a decent real-time measuring system that you can see below.

Now, I picked this up because I was trying to figure out why my house is using so much electricity.  The big yellow jump there is the geothermal turning on that heats our pool room.  The blue line is the total amount.  The light blue line are the lights, control 4 and home automation controls. The pink is something I’m still investigating but mostly has to do with our kitchen (my wife was making dinner in our electrical stove during this).  The green I’m still trying to figure out what’s using that.

Verdict

If you’re pretty technical and not afraid of of messing with your electrical system a bit, TED is a good choice. I will admit that my casual/careless nature (you saw the picture above) meant I experienced a few shocks. You need to be careful when doing this kind of thing – more careful than I am.

If you can use a system that works with your electrical meter outside your house, I’d recommend that.  But for the large % of people who, like me, cannot do that then TED is really your only option.

In mid 2010, when the big game project in Stardock Entertainment was floundering, I had to take over the reigns of designer, producer, and lead developer.  And while I can design games, I’m not even remotely in the league of say a Derek Paxton or a Jon Shafer so it’s a non-ideal situation.  And while I can project manage, it’s insanely non-cost effective for me to do that given the sheer number of projects going on company-wide. And while I can do software development, I’m no where in the same ballpark as some of our top developers on the non-games side of the business.

So what exactly is it I do? What is my value-add? Basically I’m an oxymoron. That is, I’m the technologist-bean counter. I live my days in evaluating balance sheets, revenue projections, consumer trends, marketing analysis, technology reports, you name it.  In a pinch, I can inject myself into any part of the business but it’s a last resort.

Running a business is a lot like playing a strategy game. You have resources, you have obstacles and you have goals. The object of the game is to use your resources to overcome the obstacles to achieve your goals. The “hard” part of this game is that there’s a lot of unknowns (a lot of fog of war), a lot of math, and a lot of dealing with human allies and opponents who are of various degrees of skill or ineptitude depending on what you’re dealing with.

Over time, I’ve used my generalist knowledge to recruit people who are a lot lot lot smarter than I am in a particular area and let them do their thing. I think that’s one of the reasons we have no voluntary turn-over here at Stardock (Mittens left I think 3 years ago or so) which is a pretty impressive statistic for a technology company these days. The key here being we let smart people do what they do with as little interference as possible. My job is to count the beans and know the tech.

“Expansion Packs”

In the time before digital distribution, you had “expansion packs”. It is a concept that has survived well into the digital distribution age.

You’d release say Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar as an expansion for people who had the game and then Galactic Civilizations II: Gold Edition for new buyers.  Similarly, we released Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy and Sins of a solar Empire: Trinity for new buyers. 

So why was that done? The answer is, in the old days, there was no sure fire way to tell if someone had the original game. So you had to offer a second SCU just for those people.  On the business software side, all kinds of efforts have been made to try to get new editions down to a single SCU including installers that sniffed for the original version, send in a copy of your manual, you name it.

A New Team

Fallen Enchantress gives us the opportunity to have a very different fantasy strategy game than War of Magic. While the original intent was simply to eliminate an unnecessary SCU (we can simply have Fallen Enchantress with an upgrade price for people who have War of Magic), in this case, it lets us make an even bigger break from War of Magic because it has a new Lead Designer (Kael instead of myself) with Jon Shafer helping as well as we begin pre-production of Jon’s new game along with many other changes. It’s still Stardock but it’s a very different Stardock than what made War of Magic (or GalCiv II for that matter).

I’m still filling the role of studio lead developer and Executive Producer but we’re actively seeking out industry veterans to take over the role of lead developer of Stardock Entertainment.

A New Game

There is also another advantage to Fallen Enchantress being its own game rather than an “expansion pack”. And that is, it frees the team to make radical changes to the basics of the game while allowing War of Magic to still be updated on its own source tree.  A user of Fallen Enchantress won’t have to have War of Magic to play it and can treat War of Magic as a separate game.

This will be the same case for the third entry in the Elemental world which won’t be out for a long time still (but will be free for people who got War of Magic before the end of October 2010).  It’ll be its own game as well not requiring War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress but be available at a sharp discount to those who have the previous entries in the game world.

The Changing Market

A few years ago, this wouldn’t be possible. Retailers would have refused to carry just stand-alone expansion. There were exceptions and the Company of Heroes series did a lot of good for our industry by paving the way here. Supreme Commander’s “stand alone” expansion helps as well. 

Of course, no one has brought more attention to the changing digital model of PC games more than Blizzard with its recent release of Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty which will have two additional stand-alone games in the Starcraft 2 universe. 

Will this be a good thing for PC gamers? I think it depends on how it’s handled. Personally, I’d like to see people get discounts if they have other chapters in the series. That’s going to be our model for the foreseeable future but part of that is because we have our own digital distribution platform (Impulse).

Sometimes good things come in very small packages. v1.11 is pure AI and bug fixing.  Grab it now. I think you’ll be pleased.

Twenty years ago, if you wanted to make a real game you made it for the PC.  The toughest choice was to support either an Adlib card or a Sound Blaster card.

Now, game developers have to decide between PC, High End Consoles (Xbox/Playstation), Family consoles Wii), Handhelds, iOS, Android, or Web. 

My answer remains the same: It depends on the type of game you want to make. And the type of game you want to make should also consider how much money you have available to you.

The answer, however, is not good news for PC gamers.

If you’re a lone developer or maybe are a developer with an artist friend, the iOS devices look promising.  Big studios will continue to target the big consoles while up and coming studios are increasingly targeting Xbox Live Arcade. Where does that leave the PC? I don’t have an answer for that.

I’ve read so many “The PC is d0med” articles that no one really knows what it means. The PC isn’t doomed. But its piece of the growing slice will continue to decrease and fragment on genre and business model.

Piracy, or more accurately, the perception that piracy is a massive sales killer, continues to be a driving force in the PC development community. While piracy exists on all platforms, there is no doubt that the PC remains the platform with the highest % of people playing games who haven’t actually paid for them. Whether this really tangibly affects profits will be a subject for debate forever. The argument, however, is irrelevant because the people who make the budget decisions are convinced that piracy is a major revenue killer on the PC. This is giving rise to new revenue models (Free to Play, subscriptions, always online, etc.) that are much more difficult to pirate than the traditional models.

The biggest loss to traditional PC gamers is going to be felt from the games that just won’t be made anymore for the PC. Those games made by indies who migrate to greener pastures. This is largely a distribution issue more than anything. There is no PC equivalent to Xbox Live or the iPhone App Store (and no, Steam and Impulse don’t even remotely come close right now, though hopefully that will change in time as these services become more widely spread and provide much MUCH better streamlining for indies).

Another tough area for 2011 for PC gamers is going to be the loss of retail shelf space. Expect to see the major retailers chop their PC game sections even further. This will make it even tougher for the bigger studios to justify PC versions because, despite what some may lead you to believe, major titles still mostly sell at retail and not digitally.

On the other hand, the free to play model works best on the PC right now and that is an area that I think may become very exciting in the next couple of years. As a big believer of making games and supporting them long-term, I like this idea if you can actually make a sustainable living supporting these games long-term. It requires a significant logistical investment to do free to play.

All in all, 2011 is likely to be a pretty decent year for PC games. Better than 2010 I believe.

As we enter the New Year, 2011 has some hope in front of it but I’m not ready to predict anything too exciting.

For business owners, interest rates remain very low which makes capital for those with good credit ratings readily available.  3.25% interest rates are not uncommon right now for those who know how to obtain it.  Thus, it becomes a question of how certain you are to generate net revenue that exceeds what you borrow at the going interest rate.

Historically, I’ve disliked borrowing money in any way. The only times I’ve had to has been to cover accounts receivables and tax bills.  Because 2010 was a reasonably good year for my company, we aren’t likely going to have to borrow.  Our games unit underperformed this past year but the other two units made up for it.

The BMW X5 is an SUV for drivers who want an SUV that is both sporty (read: Can go fast) as well as works as a good utility vehicle. In other words, an SUV that really is an SUV as opposed to simply a car that is shaped like a closed pickup.

My previous X5 was somewhat disappointing. BMW has its “iDrive” system for controlling the internal gadgets and it was just awful.  The 2011 edition has a far superior iDrive with buttons that take you right to where you want to go. Its iPhone/iPod integration is better than any system I’ve seen yet in a car (though I look forward to AirPlay enabled car stereos). 

The 2011 X5 is also slightly faster than the 2008 edition I had and drives with a bit more assurance.  Overall, it’s very similar to the 2008 but the slight refinements made me happy I picked it up.  I still consider it, the best SUV for the price.

Hello. I’m a Mac and a PC. That is, I’m the happy owner of a very new MacBook Pro. Core I7, Solid State Drive, 8 GB memory. And a ThinkPad T400 (Core Duo, Solid State Drive, 8 GB memory).

Some people get attached to pets. Some get attached to their cars.  Me, I get attached to my computers. I’m a zealot. A fanatic. A fanboy. And both these machines rock but for very different reasons and they both suck in very different ways.

My degree is in Computer Engineering. My day job is software design. I love hardware and software. I know how it works and truth be told, I’m pretty good at it. And as I use these machines, I recognize bits of genius far beyond my capability and a lot of half-assery that is disappointing and surprising.

Generalizations

Let me summarize the key difference between a Mac and a PC in my opinion: Mac hardware is sublime, designed by the best and brightest. PC hardware is dumb, spec’d by suits and engineered without passion. On the other hand, Mac software is flash over substance. Elegance at the expense of productivity. And, frankly, surprisingly inconsistent even as it’s slick while being inconsistent. PC software, by contrast, tends to be ugly but designed for maximum productivity.

Specifics: Hardware

The Mac hardware is a joy to use. Its multi-touch touchpad is a joy to use. As a Trackpoint fan, I am surprised with how much more enjoyable and useful a well designed touchpad can be. I say well designed because I’ve found no touchpad on the PC to be remotely as useful.

The MacBook’s touchpad works like this.  One finger to move the cursor. Two fingers will scroll a page (and do so incredibly smoothly and instantly). Three will let you go back and forth on a browser or other app. Four will let you quickly go between windows and programs.  On the PC, the touchpad experience could be considered, well crap. I’ve got a lot of different laptops here and nothing comes close in this area.  The ThinkPads, however, at least have a Trackpoint which serves as a good alternative. But PC users who love their TouchPads would likely return from using a MacBook rather pissed off at how clunky and half-assed their PC laptop’s touchpad was implemented.  This is mostly (but not completely) a hardware issue.

PC laptops, in general, are just awful in comparison to a MacBook. Even the Lenovo ThinkPads are starting to fall behind.  I open up a PC laptop (any brand) and maybe it’ll come out of sleep. Maybe I’ll need to hit a few keys to jolt it. Maybe I’ll have to hit the power button quickly to jolt it awake or maybe I’ll end up rebooting. Depends on the maker and the circumstances. When it does come out of sleep, maybe I’ll get my WiFi connection back within 10 seconds or…maybe I’ll have to rejoin the network or maybe I’ll have to reboot it to recognize something. Oh wait, the forums say I just need to turn off the blue tooth. Or maybe I just need the new drivers..etc.  PC experts know what I’m talking about. Every version of Windows promises to fix this but nothing will fix hardware makers who just don’t seem to give a crap.

MacBooks, by comparison, are wonderful. You open the lid, it’s on and it’s connected. Every time. Always. Perfect. They are well made, well thought out, and clearly made by people who care about what they’re making.  Talk to an engineer at a PC manufacturer and you’ll often hear frustration in how the designed by committee of people who barely use computers decided X or Y was going to be made.   The hardware capabilities versus the software realities are rarely considered by PC manufacturers. It’s depressing.

Specifics: Software

On the other hand, there is no equivalent on the Mac for Windows Live.  iMovie is more powerful but a much bigger pain to use for “simple stuff” than Windows Live Move Maker 2011 (note the version since it took Microsoft awhile to get this right).  I was surprised at how many steps it took to make a simple movie via iMovie versus Live Movie Maker (especially since the source material was on my iPhone).  This sort of behavior is exhibited throughout the Mac versus Windows 7 (note the version).  Simply put, when it comes to getting things done quickly and effectively, Windows 7 is better in my opinion. And it’s better by enough of a gulf that I have a hard time seeing how anyone could come to any other conclusion (then again, I see Android fans clinging to the belief that Gingerbread is remotely as nice as iOS 4.2).  See, I’m an equal opportunity offender.

Now, the versions matter here because Snow Leopard is so much better in every way than say Windows XP to use on a daily basis and MacOS X was better than Window for so long that it’s no wonder there are so many Mac zealots out there.  

Historically, the Mac’s elegant OS and software were its biggest advantage. It’s amazing how long it took Microsoft to get their act together on software and now that they have, it’s under appreciated (though the IE team UI designers should be flogged – the MS engine team do this wonderful job only to have the experience part of it made by people who clearly should not be making computer software).  But Chrome on Windows and Chrome on the Mac are both wonderful so it matters not.

Compared to Windows 7, Snow Leopard makes me feel like I’m jumping through hoops. It’s still really good (especially if you’re coming from Windows XP or to a lesser extent Windows Vista) but it’s definitely not as efficient overall as Windows 7.

It. Just. Works.

The MacBook still has a big advantage in the “It just works” camp over Windows 7. As soon as Windows has to reach out to hardware…well, bad things happen.  My favorite home printer is a Canon Pixia wireless printer.  On the PC, getting it set up is a bit (but not much) of a pain. On the Mac, I just pressed a button, it saw the printer and I chose it. The drivers, scanner, and other goodies “just worked”. No CDs, no going to a website, nothing. It just worked.

Final Thoughts

Now obviously the Mac has the advantage that the hardware and OS are made by the same company. But consumers don’t really care.  The good news is that, really, they’re both so good at this point that you really can’t go wrong. It’s just so disappointing at how poor PC hardware is by comparison when it comes to usability. What’s worse is that the bad hardware designs from the PC side of things comes from depressingly dumb decision making. It’s not even an engineering issue as much as just dumb decisions at the corporate level – where the specifications are made.  If the PC makers could just make it a qualification that you have to have a genuine passion for technology before getting to make decisions, the PC guys would catch up overnight.  Because it’s obvious that the Mac designers love what they’re doing.

At the end of the day, I’m using both my ThinkPad and MacBook depending on what I’m doing.  If I need to do “serious work” I gravitate to the PC unless it involves “serious” video editing and then it’s Final Cut Pro (sorry Premiere, you’re too flaky these days) on the Mac. It’s a lot easier for me to gather my “stuff” on the PC than the Mac but the Mac is more fun to use. 

So that’s just one guy’s opinion as a fan of both Macs and PCs. In 2011, it’s nice to be able to say that overall, they’re both really excellent.

This is by no means a complete list of things that are on our mind for Elemental for 2011.  For those of you just joining our community I should first start out with an explanation of what Stardock is about and what makes our games a bit...different that is the norm in 2011. It might be more accurate to say that Stardock is how game companies in the PC industry used to pretty much operate prior to the flood of IPOs in the late 90s that changed our industry so dramatically.

At GDC 2011 I will be doing a talk about game designs that fail and will be using Elemental's development and subsequent launch as my case study example as this may help up and coming game developers learn some of the pitfalls of when you transition from having a small game team to a much larger one.

Anyway, Elemental: War of Magic was released in August 2011.  Contrary to what some would have you believe, it was a finished game when it shipped. It just sucked and was horrendously buggy.  We didn't think it sucked or was buggy but given we had been working 90 hours plus for months on end, I think, with the benefit of hindsight, that our judgment was a bit impaired across the board.  But what is past is past.

However (and this is important), Stardock is both the developer AND the publisher. Next time you load up a game, pay attention to that first intro screen that lists TWO names: The guys who make the game and the guys who publish.  Since we're both on Elemental, we could go back and revisit all the things in the game that went wrong and do something meaningful about them.

So here's a partial list of things that we think are big deals that we want to address this year in the Elemental universe in order to make it the classic PC fantasy strategy game of its time.

1. Core Engine Stuff.  This means smarter memory management so that we can have larger maps, faster late game performance, etc.

2. Core Strategic AI stuff.  This means an AI that plays the game strategically in an intelligent way.

3. Core Tactical AI stuff.  This means that when you have a battle tactically, the AI units play as if they were being controlled by another human.

4. Core Diplomacy AI stuff.  More interesting and intelligent diplomatic options available to players.

5. More overt AI differentiation. That is, each faction plays different to the point that players can see a difference. They're not predictable but rather they have different ways of achieving their objectives.

6. More faction differentiation. That is, each player is blatantly different across the board. Techs, improvements, weapons, racial attributes, etc.

7. More interesting tactical battles. Specifically, tactical battles that blend the best of strategy and RPG together. A complete rewrite of what we have today.

8. More interesting and important city differentation. That means, more explicit ways to specialize cities, more interesting ways to make different cities unique and strategic on their own.

9. Vastly more interesting world. We have this great world with great lore behind it but you don't see it in the game. This is going to change this year as the lore of Elemental comes into play both in terms of actual game mechanics and game play but in the general feel of the world.

10. Much more modding support than what we have today.

Start Monday, 3 new people join Stardock and are being added to the Elemental team.  And two of them are pretty well known and the other is an amazing game developer that we've bee fortunate enough to find.

Stardock is looking to hire more people for the Elemental team (in particular, Kael and I are trying to recruit a seasoned lead game developer). Please contact myself of Derek if you know anyone who would fit that description.  Stardock has some other game projects that start up this year as well and the publishing group is working on some new things as well. So it's going to be a pretty exciting year for Stardock gamers.

The list I have above is not even remotely a complete one but it summarizes some of the big things on our mind.  I approved the necessary budget in December to fund Elemental for both 2011 and 2012 (most of Stardock's revenue comes from other parts of the company -- we don't live or die on our game sales but we care deeply about our games).