Great article today at Town Hall.

“4 reasons the American Dream will be over unless we act”

Great quote:

"In 1985, just 16.5% of filers paid no income tax." Today, "roughly 120 million Americans – 40 percent of the U.S. population – are outside of the federal income tax system."

Meanwhile, the top 50% of income earners pay 97% percent of the income taxes. "In 1945, 41.9 workers supported each (Social Security recipient), while todayonly 3.3 workers support each retiree." That number will continue to shrink.

In other words, we're developing into a two-tiered society. Some people like to think of it as the "haves" and "have nots." However, it would be more apt to describe it as the people who pay the bills and the people who live off of the fruits of their labor.

But don’t forget, if you object to the unlimited looting of your labor, you’re just selfish and greedy.

I was too lazy to do a clean install of Windows 7 on my Thinkpad T400.  I didn’t want to monkey arounhd with reinstalling all my software.  In hindsight, I probably would have been better off doing so as there’s so much crud on my system sucking away its life that I am regretting my decision not to just start from scratch.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091103121605.htm

So it increasingly looks like sugar is really really bad for you – at least in the quanitites that the typical American now consumes.

I consume more than my share of sugar and I hate to sound unconcerned about my own health but you know, I might lose some years of life becaue of my love of sugar but I’d rather have sugar than a life lacking in sweetness.

I’ve always wanted to do this but never had the opportunity to try it out since schedules are usually too tight for it.  But would anyone here be interested in playing a game of Elemental…via pen and paper…over the Internet through a series of posts?

I would need 5 volunteers who are in the beta, are active players and would have enough time actually play a game back and forth online (almost like PBEM).  We’d set up a simplified rule set but the idea would be to work through game mechanics and decide what is, and isn’t fun.

I would be your DM for the game.  Respond here if you’re interested, have the beta, and have time to play.

Last week we spent time beta testing the new Demigods internally.

We couldn’t have released them externally even if we wanted because all the IT resources were consumed by the Impulse release of Dragon Age: Origins (a totally awesome game btw). Despite some sensationalist EA-bashing I read online, the launch of the game was pretty smooth outside some hicups with the free DLC that EA gave away which had been resolved within 24 hours.

If you ever wondered what a Baldur’s Gate – in spirit – game would be like if made today, BioWare has delivered it. It’s really that good.

Anyway, enough plugging. Besides, I’m bitter that my schedule is so tight that I don’t get to play it as much as I want – for now.

SO WHERE ARE THE DEMIGODS?!

So how are the new Demigods finally going to get distributed?

Assuming all goes well with QA, this Wednesday, we expect to release v1.2.  This isn’t a promise, this depends on QA.

Version 1.2:

So here’s what is in the new build we have:

#1 New AI options

Game options can now set what happens with AI Players. THIS IS A BIG DEAL for those of us who play online because AND in skirmish because you can now control how tough the AI Players are and what they give you when they die.

So in MP, someone drops, you have an AI Player you can now make it so that they don’t give much gold and toughen them up or some combination.

#2 The Mod Manager

Players can make mods and share them with others.  You can enable mods and if everyone else has those mods, voila they’re on like game options.

If someone has mods enabled and a user doesn’t have it, they can’t join the game. This is for security purposes – these ARE mods afterall made potentially by third parties.  We plan to get some mods out there as soon as possible so people can see what’s possible.

When I get time, I want to try to make “Brad’s Item Pack” which adds new items to the game.

#3 Gameplay balancing and tweaks

These probably won’t be in this build as they’re still being tested but amongst the changes:

• Queen of Thorns. I hope to have some good news on this this week.
• AI improvements.  I’ll get more specifics.
• Online play. We’ve requested changes to make MP smoother on “laggy” connections. That said, the best thing you guys can do is make sure “stuff” isn’t being downloaded in the background. Every time we investigate specific cases it turns out someone has Windows update downloading stuff on another machine in their house, has bit torrent going on or is streaming something via their Xbox or Play Station.  Basically, Ping tells you response time but it doesn’t tell you whether something else is eating your bandwidth.
• High End Favor Items. We’re discussing new high end favor items. They won’t be in this week but the idea is to have things beyond “blood of the fallen” and such that are simply better but cost more.

Trying out the new Demigods

Once the updated version of Demigod is out, I will start talking to people via Ready to Play.  At first, I’ll just be playing with people and I’ll have the Demigod.  Other Stardockians will be playing as well this way.  Then we’ll start adding the new demigods to people’s accounts and they’ll be playing it.

From there, we’ll get more feedback and submit that to GPG to tweak the demigods further and then everyone will get them in a follow-up to v1.2.

In our previous games, the story (or better yet, what little there was of it) was kind of crammed in after the fact. 

There is a lot of backstory to Galactic Civilizations but when it came time to put it into the game, it was the last thing.  For me, my priority in Galactic Civilizations was computer AI.  More accurately, Galactic Civilizations was mainly an AI project for me that we decided to let other people participate in playing though, truth be told, I enjoyed watching the AI play each other more than any other aspect of the game. 

By contrast, with Elemental, story is a big deal. AI won’t be taking a back seat by any means. It’s just that this time, we have a lot more resources to give the story the justice it deserves.

As a result, Elemental will still heavily focus on the “sandbox” mode (create your own world to play in) but its “Campaign mode” will let players really explore the world of Elemental and learn its various secrets and histories.

Our story so far…

Long ago, the world of Elemental was lush with magic. Men, dragons, beasts and even plants made free use of the abundance of magic to enhance their lives.

So much magic, however, attracted the attention of the immortal titans who lust to control magic. In time, they used their sacred shards to absorb all the magic they could hold. These titans intended to take their shards back to their own world.

To the horror of these immortal titans, once filled, the shards could not be moved. They were rooted to the world where they sat.

Greedy to control one another’s shards, the titans endlessly warred amongst themselves.  Eventually, some of these titans took men and used their power to twist them into creatures better suited for war and conquest – The Fallen.  The Fallen come in many shapes and sizes but are all, ultimately, derived from either men or dragons.

For centuries, the titans waged their wars. This war ended aburptly in a titantic battle that resulted in the cataclysm – the breaking of the world and the destruction of nearly all the life in the world.

Life is starting to return to Elemental now. The immortal titans seem to be gone. But the land has been ruined. With magic, the land can be restored to life. But only a select group of beings known as Channelers can still make use of magic.

Soon, these channelers will become great kings and emperors of the world as their abilty to restore life to the lands and make use of magic will attract the struggling peoples of the world to their growing civilizations.

What happens from there, however, is up to you.

The World of Elemental for us

There are literally hundreds of pages of backstory, histories, adventures, and lore that have been put together.  Elemental: War of Magic, will be the first game that makes use of it but the RPG we’re starting to work on will make use of it too and there are other games in the design process that will exist on it. 

It’s a world that we hope you enjoy being apart of and look forward to exploring it with you.

Who else is playing it? Where you at?

One of the areas that got optimized that is hard to demo is the speed of skin changing.  While not a huge deal for most people, being able to change skins quickly is something that we’ve been working on quite a bit for WindowBlinds 7.

This video is of the beta that will be going up this week for Object Desktop users. There is no editing. This is how fast it really is.

 

[Watch Screencast Video]

It’s no secret I was a bit disappointed with Windows Vista. It was an incredibly ambitious project that delivered a massive, under-the-hood update to Windows. Where it failed was that it was released just a bit too early.  Too early means not enough polish on things that could have dramatically improved the first impression of the new OS.

Here is what I said back in 2006 prior to Vista’s launch:

What will happen if they ship Windows Vista if it comes out in 1Q2007? I predict it will be a disaster. Driver compatibility, rough edges in software working, weird and unpolished UI design, etc.  The acronymn UAC will come to haunt Microsoft and they will rue the day they didn't wait just a few more months to get driver compatibility together.

Windows 7, by contrast, is all about polish. It fixes the mistakes made with Windows Vista.

Unfortunately, I still have to deal with Windows Vista. And now, even issues I hadn’t noticed before in Windows Vista become painfully obvious now that I’m used to Windows 7.

Below are 10 things that are driving me crazy about Windows Vista now that I’ve got Windows 7.

 

Reason #1: Nothing is ever responding

 

In Windows Vista, it seems like the OS is just waiting to declare a window isn’t responding. This is particularly obnoxious when it comes to network windows.  The Windows 7 GUI is much more responsive and it’s far less likely to have that annoying “not responding” behavior occur.

 

Reason #2: The UAC

I still can’t believe Microsoft hasn’t updated UAC in Windows Vista so to make it less annoying.  Every time I go back to a Windows Vista machine, it’s one of the first things that comes up. Prompts. Prompts. Prompts over the silliest of things.

On Windows 7, there’s a lot more control of these annoyances. Windows is still the “are you sure” OS but it’s a lot less annoying.

 

Programs like Tweak 7 make it easy to further refine this. For instance, the delay/darkening of the screen theoretically can add more security but it’s just annoying. On Windows 7, I can turn that off.

 

Reason #3: Basic Usability

In Windows Vista, if you want to change the resolution, you either use the video card’s built in add-on (seen at the top) or you have to jump through menus. It’s ridiculous.

 

in Windows 7, you can get to screen resolution quickly by default. A very nice touch.

 

Reason #4: The System Tray

I had no idea how annoying the system tray system of Windows Vista (and before) was until I started using Windows 7.  Going back to Windows Vista is like going back to system tray hell.

 

No comparison. On Windows 7, it’s clean and nice.

 

Reason #5: Explorer Usability

Windows Vista (above) is just a lot less useful with explorer even though it seems more cluttered (to me anyway).

 

By contrast, Windows 7 (above) has common sense options up above and the navigation pane on the left is much more useful as well.

Reason #6: Customization – Vista sucks at it.

For reasons unknown, Microsoft insisted on putting lots of hard-coded colored images in the Vista UI. 

Windows 7 still has the problem somewhat (baby blue) but it’s a lot easier for programs to customize a color than it is to deal with an image.  So if you run a program like WindowBlinds that lets you customize Windows, Windows 7 makes life even better.

 

Reason #7: Cyan borders.

This goes with Microsoft’s love affair with various blue-like colors being baked in. Vista had cyan borders on the edges.

On Windows 7, the colors are neutral.  I should also add that Aero doesn’t have that annoying reflection texture in it anymore.

 

Reason #8: Useless network object

How often are you going to want to sift through all the computers on your network?  Windows 7 cleans up (it could still be better) the network experience.

 

Reason #9: Devices

This is something that seems obvious in hindsight but Windows Vista does not have it. A nice, simple screen for dealing with the real world stuff that people use.

 

Reason #10: Windows XP mode

Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate include “Windows XP mode”. For most people, it’s not a big deal. But it’s a handy tool that one would have thought Vista would have included for programs that had compatibility problems.

You can install things from within the environment and then they will run seamlessly on your desktop.

So if you have programs that don’t like Vista (or Windows 7) you can run them within Windows XP on the desktop.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well with games very well.

But imagine how things might have gone with Windows Vista if it had had something like this. 

 

There you have it…

Well look here, I just got handed a Windows 7 Professional DVD.  Goodbye Windows Vista.