My 9 year old loves to design games.

We need your help.

For DesktopX 4 our goal is to clean up DesktopX and put it in a place where we can start to build up on it again in a way that is, to be candid, economically viable.

So to start here is what we have in mind specifically for DesktopX 4.0:

New objects

It has been a long time since we have updated the content in DesktopX 4.

To many of you, this sort of thing isn’t that big of a deal. But to end users, having animated objects on their desktop that do interesting things can be very enticing.

Cleaning up old problems

This is where we need your help. I’m sure there are plenty of posts that outline this or that issue that users would like to see addressed. If someone can consolidate them that would be extremely helpful so that we can look and see which are doable, which are doable but only helpful to a tiny number of users, and which ones just can’t realistically be done.

Windows 7 and UAC

As a practical matter, we won’t officially include or support anything that doesn’t work perfectly on Windows 7 with UAC on its default setting.  That doesn’t mean users can’t create things that require UAC to be off or only work on Windows XP but those things won’t be supported by us.

Open Sourcing the plugins

These are the plugins that come with DesktopX. Some of these will likely go away but the source code will be made available.  Note that right now, none of these are certified for Windows 7. Until they are certified for Windows 7, they’re at risk of being removed.

Adding new plugins

Going forward, we won’t be developing new plugins. We just don’t have the budget for it. We never had intended on creating any plugins beyond samples (otherwise, we would have just made the features a base part of the program).

If someone wants to submit to us plugins they’d like to include with the program (we’d need source code for liability purposes) let us know.

Things likely to go away

We will probably move away from taskbar and system tray functionality. It gets increasingly difficult to manage that sort of thing. If someone wants to create a plugin for it, that’s great but we want to move away from having to having to support such functionality because every version of Windows ends up with a different way of getting to that data (particularly the system tray).

So that’s where we’re at

Please comment here on what you’d like to see. Be as specific as you can.

Thanks!

I don't think the build I have is the public build but here are 5 big deals for me personally about Sins Diplomacy;

#1 In single player, I now have some means of influencing relations with different players that I didn't have before.

#2 Three words: Diplomatic Victory Condition

#3 Cruel AI level. Yea, the AI isn't always as intelligent as I'd like but at Cruel, it's pretty bloody challenging.

#4 Envoys. 'nuff said.

#5 Pirate Missions. Now I actually have the option to play the game as an economic power rather than just a military power. The more money you pump into pirates, the nastier their attack.

The WinCustomize forums going to be getting some serious upgrades in the coming weeks. For one thing, they'll return to the original design of a more flattened experience with sub-forums being "tags". It make it much much easier for people to find things than it is currently.

Another area of improvement is the search. We plan to do a lot there.

And lastly, we want to have skin comments be tied into the forums.  

Stay tuned!

The February 2010 issue of PC Gamer lists the Top 10 games of 2010.  And guess which game made the list? That’s right’s Starcraft II. 

But there’s one other strategy game on there – a turn based strategy game at that: ELEMENTAL along with an exclusive screenshot.

Here’s a little teaser (not the same shot but similar):

One of my observations on the net is that the better known I become, the more likely someone will flame me and try to explain how much more they know than I do in one of my professional areas of expertise.

Whether this be the game industry, business, or PC software development, I increasingly will find some guy on a forum who will smugly try to tell me how much smarter than they are than I am.

Now, maybe they are smarter than I am. But strangely, what I suspect is more likely is that they think that if they can knock me down a peg that this somehow raises them up.

Ah, vacation is over.  So much to do.  The next public beta is scheduled for Thursday, February 4th.  That build should have the dynasties and quests in it.  Don’t worry, it will NOT be fun yet, I promise. I try to suck out all the fun in the betas. I need to.  Below is a picture of me at work that might help:

2009 sucked. There. I said it. Deaths. Stress. It was just a bad year.

And I gained weight.  My ideal weight is 165lbs.  I’m now 180lbs.

My goal is to get to 170lbs in 10 weeks.

1. 180
2. 179
3. 178
4. 177
5. 176
6. 175
7. 174
8. 173
9. 172
10. 170

Each Monday I’ll weigh myself to see how I’m doing and update this post to display my shame (or progress).

Since it’s a pretty modest diet, here’s the basic plan:

• Get 10,000 steps at least 5 days a week.
• Eliminate drinking soda 5 days a week.
• Switch from P&J to healthier lunches

Pretty mild stuff.  But 10,000 steps should burn about 2500 more calories a week and the soda another 500 calories. That should be enough to lose that pound a week – especially when my non-binging weight is around 176.  It should be pretty easy to get to 175lbs. It’ll be the last  5 pounds that get a little tougher.

Once to 170lbs, I’ll see where to next.

So what’s on the agenda for 2010 at Stardock?  Anything cool? Of course! That’s what we do!

Let’s walk through some of the items on our list…

Wincustomize 2010

In March, WinCustomize 2010 will launch.  It will go into beta this month.

The new site is a total rewrite and represents a great deal of development labor to clean things up to be faster and present information a lot more easily.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy

If you like Sins of a Solar Empire, you’re going to love the Diplomacy expansion pack.  Not just because it adds two new AI levels, not just because it adds a new multiplayer speed option, not just because of the new ships. No. The reason it’s turning out so well (besides the open beta where we’re getting lots of good ideas) is because it makes the game feel truly rounded out. 

Given able to give the pirates or other factions missions or send over envoys to get more money and resources and have other means to win the game rather than simply blowing everything up as fast as possible has really helped the game feel more well rounded.

Of course, I can’t just go without a little live battle.  With diplomacy, this scene belies my Palpatine like strategy of making the AI do my bidding.

Elemental

Another big thing for this year will be Elemental which we expect to release this Summer or Fall if all goes on schedule (which we make no promises on because Elemental is “our baby” and it won’t go out until it’s awesome).

The above screenshot is not really representative of what the final version will look like. The final version will look vastly better than this. But for anyone who has ever wondered what an epic turn-based strategy game and an role playing game put together might be like, Elemental is what we’re going for.  It’s our most ambitious game ever and has the longest beta program we’ve ever done in order to ensure we nail it down.

WindowBlinds 7.x

If you haven’t checked out WindowBlinds 7, you will definitely want to look at it. Even if you’re not into “skinning” the subtle improvements it can do to the Windows GUI can be quite nice.

WindowFX

Sorry, no screenshots yet but this is going to be a major effort this year too. There’s a lot of new improvements to Windows 7, Vista, and XP we will be making this year.  Users of Object Desktop get all our desktop goodies first. And this year, there’s going to be a lot.

DeskScapes 3.x

At the very end of last year, our animated wallpaper program, DeskScapes, got a major new version.  Last year was to get the foundation set.  This year, we can go to town with this technology.

What’s magic about DeskScapes is that on Windows 7/Vista it uses the DWM to deliver animated wallpaper. So what does that mean? It means the cool stuff happens on your video card rather than your CPU.  The only time your CPU gets touched is if you’re running a video as your animated background (and even then, it’s just the decoding of the .WMV or MPEG or whatever).

For this year, a lot of new effects and features are being added so that even your existing “static” wallpapers can get cool effects done to them – either kept static with effects or animated.

Impulse: Phase 5

It’s hard to believe that Impulse is barely over a year old.  In the past year, Impulse has gone from being a fairly primitive download utility with only Stardock software on it and a handful of indies to a full-blown digital distribution platform with titles available from Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubi Soft, THQ, and so on.

Impulse: Phase 5 might as well be called the “community release” of Impulse.  Because Phase 5 will be a nearly complete revamp of the platform to greatly expand its community features.  Moreover, a lot of work has been done behind the scenes to open up Impulse to third party developers to integrate community features into their applications and games as well as streamline their publishing and distribution onto the net. 

General Theme

The big theme for this year is probably “Community integration”. We will show screenshots of some of this stuff as we get closer.

That’s not all

Of course, this year we’ll still have plenty of updates to lots of other things from Demigod to DesktopX to new Object Desktop programs and so on.  Plus we have some unannounced projects that we hope to finally be able to make public this year.

It’s going to be an exciting year and we can’t wait to spend it with you guys (and gals!).

If you work with people online, I’ve not found anything that touches the recent versions of Skype.

Skype has gotten so good that I almost feel like they should change its name because a lot of people have come to remember Skype as being that thing for doing crappy video and audio calling. 

Over the past year it has become, imo, the best chat program (text, voice, video, whatever) out there.