If you’re a Lord of the Rings fan…or more specifically, a Tolkien fan, much of this is known to you.  However, if you do not know the true history of Middle Earth, some of this may be shocking.

The will of Illuvatar

In Middle Earth, there are only two natural sentient races in the world. Men and Elves.

Everyone else, EVERYONE else, is unnatural.

In Elemental, those unnatural races are called The Fallen.  In Middle Earth, they are given different names: Dwarves, Orcs, dragons, and yes, even our beloved hobbits.

Of all sentient creatures, the first made were dwarves. But they were not sentient first. It’s a long story but dwarves were made by one of the Valar (similar in scope to a Mithrilar in our universe).

The elves were the first “natural” sentient race brought into the world. And much of the sorrow that later came to the world of Middle Earth was because of the uncertainty about when and where the second natural race would come from – men.

One of the Valar, called Morgoth, took natural creatures of the world (including elves) and using his arts created (or bred) orcs and dragons and other unspeakable things. Even some lesser Maiar (Gandalf, Sauron, and Saruman were Maiar – they’re equivalent in scope to Dred’nir and Elas’nir in our universe – see Twilight of the Arnor) got twisted by Morgoth – Balrogs.

Mortal Men and Dragons

Now, in Elemental, there are two “natural” born races – Men and Dragons.  Of the two, only men create civilizations thus only 1 playable race in the game is naturally sentient.

But there are several unnatural races in the world which we have referred to as Fallen. They’re called “Fallen” because the history books are written by men and have a man-centric bias. And ironically, men tend to be selective in what they call Fallen but that’s for another time.

The Fallen races in the game players deal with include the Urxen and the Trogs.  Urxen breed quickly. There’s a lot of them. Trogs are far less common but far more lethal individually.

There are also the Sions but they’re not a race as much as, well, children of the sovereigns. The sovereigns are channelers but their children aren’t.  Channelers have a very long life (hundreds of years – they’re effectively immortal in our game but they’re not truly immortal). Their children have a normal life.

The 4th age of Middle Earth

Now, getting back to Tolkien’s world, by the start of the 4th age, middle earth only had one natural sentient race – men.  The elves were gone. And while orcs still festered here and there, they were on the decline as well. The halflings (hobbits) were confined to a small area of middle earth.

Obviously, Elemental takes place in a totally different universe. But hopefully this helps players understand where some of the terminology comes from and how it is relatable.

Now that I can stream movies in HD, I just don’t have it in me to go out and go to Blockbuster anymore.

I can’t find Gran Turino on Zune (xbox360) or comcast so I’ll just go without it.  I’m just that damn lazy now.

So this week the dynasties got in.  To skip to the good part, your sovereign gets married and has children. Eventually, those children grow up and you can then arrange marriages with them with other sovereigns. Your children, in turn, will have children of their own.  And that’s where things got interesting…or more specifically: ugly.

For today’s code review, we were looking at the algorithms being used to produce off-spring.  We don’t want them to be just random but rather have the traits of their parents in interesting ways – both from a stats point and cosmetically.  To see how far we could take things, I had my daughter marry the son of an Urxen sovereign (one of the races of the Fallen).  Urxen look a lot like goblins.

Well, my beautiful daughter and the Urxen prince had a child.  And let me just say, there are things you cannot unsee.  A half-man, half-urxen is something that can’t be unseen.

So if you end up deciding to marry your children off to other factions, take a good look at their family first lest your grandchildren look like that half-human half-alien from the last Alien movie.

WinCustomize 2K5 home page:

• Displays top 3 most popular
• Displays 3 top most popular master skins
• Displays  featured skin
• Displays poll no one uses
• 1 Promotional item
• Right side has command bar and ad.
• Lots of icons that mean nothing to most users.

…Compared to…

WinCustomize 2K10 home page:

• Top 5 newest skin thumbnails
• Top 5 most popular skin thumbnails 1 click away (no page refresh)
• Featured skin
• Top skins and skinners available.
• 3 Promotional items available
• Mouse-over access to galleries, articles, news, and much more.

WinCustomize 2K5 Skin view:

• Top half of screen used to describe what WindowBlinds is in a wall of text.
• Right side has little that’s useful to readers and just adds confusion when someone is trying to link to a skin.
• Lots of text, little information.
• If you want to browse other skins, you have to hit the back button.

…Compared to…

WinCustomize 2K10 Skin view:

• Lot less wordy (though URls need to be fixed in comments)
• Can go to next skin easily
• Other skins by author displayed
• Featured skins for category displayed
• Further down displays top skins and top authors for that category.

We’re pretty excited about the new WinCustomize.  Here’s a video demo I did today during lunch (literally):

Many of you have played Age of Wonders. It’s a fantastic series of games.  I was noticing today that our lead composer (both on Galactic Civilizations II and on Elemental) is the same lead composer from Age of Wonders.

If you have a WinCustomize subscription the site should look like this:

If it doesn’t, let us know.

Normally I’d send these privately but since WinCustomize is a community site, I figured I’d make my report on the forum.

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Where comments start there should be a separator labeled “Comments”

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Article view still uses evil old code that isn’t friendly on Chrome and is just generally flaky.

campaign finance “reform”

healthcare “reform”