Fire-Watch pointed out that I’ll need to get a virtual image of Windows XP going in order to program GalCiv.  Otherwise, I’d have to take some people off of Elemental to migrate the GalCiv II project to Visual Studio 2005 or 2008.

Right now, I’m on a bit of a sabbatical to get back to focusing on tech. So installing a virtual PC image (or VM Ware) is kind of cool.  I’ll let you guys know how it goes as I’m doing it.

So I’m on a sabbatical which was planned a long while ago.  Basically, it’s an opportunity for me to get back to my roots.

One of the things I’m working on during sabbatical is GalCiv II (Twilight of the Arnor).  It’ll be lots of little tweaks and improvements (AI, gameplay, balance, bug fixing).  But this is the kind of thing I enjoy but can only justify on vacation.

It seems like for the last couple of years my role has been less CEO and more fire fighter anyway. While the company I work at has grown tremendously since GalCiv II’s release, my ability to work on the things I enjoy has diminished.  Ironically, what I’m best at is running a business which, if you think about it, is a lot like playing a strategy game. Perhaps I owe everything to Sid Meijer after all. 

I’m going through the posts I made previously to see which things I can nail the easiest.  Stay tuned.

Our family recently moved to the house I’m typing from. It’s not quite done yet and nothing is bigger reminder than that than the constant sound of contractors pounding on things from various distances.

Our IT guys got me set up so I can do AI coding from remote via VPN and Incredibuild (which lets me use all the lab machines at the office as slave boxes for compiling).

The main thing I miss when working from home are the people. Stardock really is a different kind of company. The people there are just wonderful.  Imagine a place where all “our kind” got to work together.  I really enjoy being around them.

Still, as people keep telling me, it’ll be good to be away for a bit.

Day 1 of the sabbatical has begun.

Apparently I have 3 children.

Today we took a walk in the woods.

One of the biggest problems I’ve run into as a business person is that I’ve never treated the PC game industry as a genuine business. It was a hobby side project.  I’m one of those guys who want the game industry to work better and I want to make games for those vocal people on net.

When Elemental: War of Magic didn’t live up to the standards we had hoped for, it was pretty stinging to my “my people” turn on me so quickly and so adamantly.  It was a bitter lesson that required me to stop thinking of PC games as a hobby and more of a business – which is what I’ve started doing. 

The problem has continued to be, our games are made by and for those people who yell loudly on forums. I’m not happy unless they’re happy. I want to be happy.

When deciding what to invest in going forward, one thing that I know many software developers are seriously looking at is the ubiquitous potential of iOS.  Right now, it is confined to two form factors – a tablet and a handheld.  But there is nothing stopping it from becoming a fairly universal OS, potentially supplanting Windows in the long-run.

This is not something I’d like to happen. But I see it as becoming increasingly likely.

Greetings!

My reign of terror has come to an end.  Now, Kael’s reign of terror begins.

I’m not disappearing entirely but after v1.1, Derek Paxton (Kael) will be calling the shots on the day to day on the game and design implementation (at Stardock, the Project Manager aka Producer is the god of the game).  I’ll be returning to my traditional role at Stardock on our games (AI and high level design input).

We’re working to get a beta of v1.1 out the door as soon as possible so people can start seeing the improvements we’ve been making for the past few weeks.

With that said, it is my honor to introduce you to Derek Paxton.  Prior to joining Stardock, he was a Project Manager at Novell and known to many gamers as the creator of the Civilization IV mod expansion, Fall from Heaven.

So we’re in the process of setting things up so that a series of computers runs the lights, audio, televisions, heat, etc.

We’re using Control4 and so far, I’m mixed on whether I like it or not.  It has both an iPhone and iPad app which is a major plus.  But its user interface (in those apps) is terrible and ugly (ugly to the point of being distracting).

Given the popularity of Control4, I wonder if I’m missing something given how awful and primitive it seems to be so far.  Its ability to hook up with Lutron (lighting) is nice and it does work but I guess I was expecting a much better experience with it than I’ve gotten so far in terms of usability.

I’ll keep you up to date on how it’s going.

So as some of you know, I recently built a big house. And by big I mean ridiculously, offensively big.

Naturally, the class warfare people have come out of the woodwork in certain circles to complain.

Do I need such a large house? Nope.

Then why?

Because I wanted it. It was one of the personal objectives I had set out for back when I started my business.

But doesn’t such an extravagant display of wealth merely demonstrate how unfair our system is? Sure, I may have worked very hard for 20 years to achieve this level of financial success but so have plenty of other people. I work with people who have worked their tails off over the years. Why me and not them?

One word: Risk.

A guy starts a business. He needs seed capital so he gets a $100,000 loan on his house. He hires a guy and pays him $50,000 a year. At the end of the year, his business has failed and he has to sell his house and move to an apartment. The guy still got his $50k but the owner is out of a house. 

9 out of 10 times, that, or something like that, is what happens.

Over the 20 years I’ve run a business, I’ve made a lot of calculated risks. Usually they pay off. Sometimes they don’t.  When the OS/2 market tanked in the mid 90s I nearly lost everything. It was a scary time.  It was a very close call. I could have ended up with 7 years of crazy amounts of work with nothing to show for it. I would have lost my house and had no retirement. My wife, young son, and I would have had nothing.

Most businesses fail. But such failings are so common that we don’t tend to notice them as much as we do the guy who gets the big house.

Someone asked me recently if there were any activities that I had had to put aside that I really missed.  The answer was easy: blogging about social issues.

People now take politics very seriously and some people, mostly liberals to be honest, take politics extremely personally.  Conservatives and liberals can be very passionate in their beliefs but in my experience, liberals are a lot more likely to hate someone for having a different ideology than themselves.

One of the sites I used to hang out regularly was Quarter to Three.  But once the regulars learned I was politically conservative and started reading my blog, some of them (just some) started to become militantly opposed to me on all topics.  If you want a taste of the political views of the regulars there, go here.

I enjoy discussing politics but I must confess, I’m not passionate about it.  I couldn’t imagine going to a rally or a protest march or anything about that. I’m as interested in debating politics as I am in debating Protoss vs. Terran strategies which means, I’m pretty interested in discussing and debating it but it has no real deep seated meaning to me one way or the other.

But other people take it very seriously. They get very angry and it takes up a major part of their emotional identity.

As I’ve become more “notable” I’ve had to largely cut down on my postings because the media has been inclined to take bits and pieces about what I write and senationalize it.  So I’ve had to become much more careful about what I say online.  Such is life.

I do believe that ideology matters a great deal in the bigger scheme of things. I care a lot about the political ideologies of our elected representatives – they control the men with guns.  But I can’t imagine disliking a private citizen for their political beliefs unless they were shoving those beliefs down my throat (i.e. if I’m at a concert, don’t make me sit through a tirade on how much you hate some politician).