This month the ObjectDock 2 beta is scheduled to begin. I got to visit with it today and took some pictures of the trip.
By day I’m the happy CEO of Stardock. At night, I’m either the sugar daddy or scurge of Neowin.net depending on who you talk to. I’ve been an administrator on the site for some years and its amazingly talented founder and President, Steven Parker (Neobond) has led the Neowin development team to create the latest incarnation of the site code-named Ignition. I must say, I’m incredibly impressed with the work they’ve done.
If you’re not familiar with Neowin, check it out. It’s a great place to stay on top of tech and has a fantastic forum setup.
Today marked week 4 of my pound a week diet.
I started at 180 and this week I weighed in at 175.8 pounds. I’m definitely not an over-achiever.
I find it easier to lower my calories than I do exercising. When I get home from work, I’m tired. I don’t want to work out. And I’m too lazy to get up early enough to go running. I do manage to get some working out in during the week but no where near what I had planned to do.
Probably the best thing I’ve done is stop drinking so many calories – pop and juice. Easily 300 calories a day reduced just by drinking water instead of orange juice at night for instance.
I am using my pedometer every day. I had intended to do 10,000 steps a day but I am averaging around 7,000. But I’d estimate that I’m putting in about an extra 2500 steps a day simply because I’m conscious of how inactive I’ve become.
btw, if anyone is interesting in my boring life, you can view my twitter page here:
Galactic Civilizations II still sells amazingly well. Both at retail and digitally.
As a token of thanks, I was thinking of working on an update in my spare time after I turn in the book manuscript next month. Are there any small updates you guys would like to see in there? Mind you, it would be just be me. On a couple of cold weekends doing this.
I don’t like creating friends lists.
I also don’t like having to remember a bunch of different logons but that’s not nearly as annoying as having to deal with multiple “social networks”.
The good news is that in another couple of years, it won’t matter. Your virtual you will be one entity rather than having it all divided up amongst Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Live, Impulse, Gmail, Steam, AOL IM, whatever. The reason: Federated IDs.
Here’s how it works: User enters in their UserID and PW for a service that supports federated IDs. It then talks to all the other services you belong to that also support federated IDs and gathers up your “friends” list, achievements, status updates, etc. and puts them together.
So you can picture logging into Impulse with your Live ID or Facebook ID or what have you and have it use your Facebook friends that also have Impulse and so forth.
Right now, Facebook is, not surprisingly, leading the charge. Between them and Twitter, an embryonic federated ID system is already in place. And because of them, others will follow suit – are following suit because not supporting such a system puts those who try to keep their ID system proprietary and closed will be at a significant disadvantage.
Federated IDs are win-win-win: Mutually beneficial for social networks and beneficial to users as well.
I’m a Shacknews junkie and was reading about Valve’s announcement of Steam’s growth last year. I was pretty jazzed at the news as it means that the trend to digital is continuing and widespread. Impulse’s growth, not surprisingly due to its relatively smaller size, was much higher than 205% but that’s only because Impulse is still in its early growth phase, it hasn’t reached maturation like Steam – that’s why Steam’s strong growth is such good news – the market isn’t even close to saturation.
I suspect Direct2Drive, GOG, GamersGate and the others have experienced similar levels of growth too. It’s a good time to be a PC gamer. Regular sales, competition. Do they have weekly sales in the console universe?
So I’m sitting here blogging, surfing, etc. from my cumfy chair in our bedroom and I hear the 3 year old singing from the bathtub. She makes up these songs as she goes along. All 3 of our children have always loved taking long baths and playing with toys and singing. Love the sound of it.
I can only speak for myself on this but Stardock is my “happy place”. People often ask me what it’s like to work at Stardock. The answer I give them is to imagine being back in college where you hung out with your friends talking and doing cool and interesting things. That’s what it’s like at Stardock for me and I suspect many others there as well.
In the morning, I’ll walk by the QA and support team. Any fires? One nice thing about Stardock is that based on what I’ve heard from people who have worked in support elsewhere, we have awesome customers. There is something to be said about making software for your own demographic. People “like us”.
During lunch, people played board games. The cafeteria seemed to have each table with a different board game going. My new planner, Betsy, found the mouse that had escaped from the cage. A sad end in the building’s basement. We still have one mouse left in the cage. I think that Kay, one of our amazing new graphics designers and resident critter expert took care of cleaning it out but I could be wrong.
After lunch, the part of the Sins of a Solar Empire team at Stardock was debating on how powerful pirates should be. An internal beta – that had gone out to some reviewers – had the pirates able to wipe out planets. A bit too powerful. But their lively debate and rationalization of why pirates should have this or that was highly interesting.
A typical early evening will include plenty of people who are still there for various reasons. Maybe they’re on a deadline or maybe they’re playing some new game or doing something else entirely. Tonight some people were playing Star Trek online which is about to come out – possibly the best MMO I’ve ever seen. One of my coworkers/friends I’ve known for 10+ years was sketching out UI designs for some future software on his whiteboard and talking to a few others who were around about where he thought user experience was going to go. Downstairs, a couple guys were playing TF2. Sometimes they’re playing Demigod or Sins or L4D2 or WoW. I suspect there will be a lot of Star Trek gaming going on during the evenings based on what I’m seeing.
While I was doing a code review of Elemental tonight, Toby came by to show me some cool new stuff on the new WinCustomize site being put together. It’s really pretty awesome stuff.
Then Jeff came by to show off the new APIs for Impulse Reactor v2 (there’s a sneak peek) that we’re introducing in a few weeks. I’m humbled by how much easier it is. I love working with brilliant people.
As I headed out, I tried to shoo Sarah to go home. She was insisting that she was “this close” to a breakthru on the Dynasty screen in Elemental. Jacob was also there getting in all the new clothing the artists had made for people to customize their Elemental sovereigns and their children. No more bald, bearded women in game I guess.
Usually the last person I see or talk to is our VP, Kris Kwilas. Phish blaring in his office. He’s usually figuring out some clever way to make something a little smaller. A little faster. Last week talked about the merits/problems with the iPad. Others will hear our discussion and join in. Sometimes he’ll give me candid feedback about a chapter in the book I’m writing. Today we talked about the joys of Mass Effect 2.
And tomorrow is another day.
Just a note on the upcoming Magic & Spells beta of Elemental so that people are prepared: The beta will be about bug testing the spells not about game balance. As a result, feel free to indulge yourself on doing very very bad things in the world.
Here are some of the spells we’ll be testing:
a. Mass Heal
b. Raise Land
c. Lower Land
d. Raise Forest
e. Raise Desert
f. Raise Swamp
g. Charm Monster
h. Teleport to friendly territory
i. Revive Land
j. Imbue Hero
We plan to give most of these spells to players very very early on so that we can make sure that they’re working as designed. Obviously, being able to raise mountains and exile an enemy city onto its own island are not things that are going to be just doable willy nilly in the final game.
So for a couple of builds, players will be able to just go nuts with magic without consequences.
The beta us due out a week from today but it is possible we may delay it an additional week for more polish and get more assets in (we’re juggling a lot of balls right now).