For many years, Object Desktop was synonymous with the phrase “What the next version of Windows might have in it.”

The first Windows version, released way back in 1999, introduced GUI skinning, ZIP files being treated as folders, the Control Center.

In fact, here’s a screenshot of Object Desktop from 1999.

Object Desktop in 1999

Those features we take for granted now in Windows.  GUI skinning? Windows XP provided that.  ZIP files as folders, old hat now.  A “Sidebar”? Windows Vista users know something about that.  Features like gadgets and widgets and icon changing and other such things were also part of what made Object Desktop so forward thinking.

Object Desktop in 2009

Object Desktop became extremely popular and its users and Stardock became invested in the feature set that made it so popular.  The problem is that Windows itself has moved on and Object Desktop has to move on too.  That means it’s time for some tough love.

On October 5, 2009, after a nearly 3 year absence, I have returned to being in charge of Object Desktop again.  Being away from the desktop enhancements area has allowed me to take a fresh look at the state of the art in Windows tech, the “Skinning community”, and so forth.  And I must say, there’s a lot of work needed here.

Decisions

After looking at things, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to make some pretty big changes.

#1 Our focus will be power users. NOT casual users.  For the past 3 years, things like MyColors have focused on casual users. The idea is very sound and I was an early supporter of the concept of MyColors – grow beyond power users into the much larger base of casual users.

The problem is that casual users barely do more than change their wallpaper and they’re not likely to pay $50 (let alone $70 for “ultimate”) to spice up their desktop. 

#2 Make Windows better. Object Desktop was never supposed to become a cosmetic product. The idea was that Object Desktop fixes the things in Windows. Windows was not competitive compared to say the Mac or even Linux visually and Object Desktop helped solve that.  But Windows Vista and Windows 7 look pretty good. Our objective should be to focus on making Windows better overall and there’s plenty of work there.

#3 Eliminate “Ultimate”.  Breaking Object Desktop into Standard and Ultimate editions was a mistake. It should be Object Desktop. Period. So people who have Object Desktop Ultimate will get their access to it extended and we will return to a single version with the launch of Object Desktop 2010.

#4 Content is NOT king. A lot of time, energy, and money was spend making suites and themes these past 3 years.  While many users like the themes, many of them don’t like it coming via MyColors.  MyColors is going to be moved to our enterprise group for license and distribution through our OEM partners.  Mixing and matching the two is not a good idea in my view.  Instead, content will be provided as .suite files that users can then manipulate however they want in Theme Manager.

#5 Sunset programs. There are many programs that we’re going to have to sunset.  What I mean is that new users of Object Desktop won’t get them. People who have Object Desktop already will continue to be able to download them but they won’t be getting updates.  RightClick, Virtual Desktops and ObjectBar will make their way into the sunset.  Others will start to follow soon.

Basically, if a program doesn’t work on Windows 7, 64-bit within the next month, it’ll be sunsetted.  That doesn’t mean that that type of program will go away.  We’ve already started putting together a design document for a replacement for RightClick that we think is a lot better.  We have new ideas for virtual desktops that can make use of WPF and other newer techs.

Now, I know many people reading this will be horrified at some of this.  The focus going forward is going to be Windows 7.  That doesn’t mean users of Windows XP are going to be dropped. They’re not.  But we are going to need to start concentrating our resources on a single platform and that platform is going to be Windows 7.

As a reminder of what kinds of cool stuff we were able to do when we could focus on a single OS:

 
Object Desktop in 2002 with “Toon-XP” suite applied

My objective for the next 6 months is to make sure Object Desktop becomes synonymous with cutting edge technology again.  And do that, we will need to make some tough choices and focus our efforts onto doing cool stuff that hasn’t been done before that make using Windows better.

We’ve been combing through the forums looking at ideas people have had for the game.  Now if anyone wonders why we’ve extended the beta testing period for this game need wonder no longer: We want time to put in your ideas.

So let’s walk through some of them here.

Creating your sovereign

The idea has come up on the forums and we agree that sovereign creation should get its own screen and that the sovereign is independent of the kingdom/empire you choose. That is, you shouldn’t be “stuck” with a particular “wizard” based on your faction choice.

Main UI and info cards

I had originally planned to link to the individual posts where these were discussed but I realized that would take longer than just taking screenshots and showing what was discussed.

Sovereign Handling

People do not want luck to decide the fate of their sovereign in a battle. Many people don’t like the idea of ones sovereign dying meaning the end of the game.

The sovereign being a unit in the game is key to the game mechanics that will become more apparent later. But we have been convinced by the feedback that there shouldn’t be an “evade” ability.

Instead, we’re now leaning towards if your sovereign is attacked and your side loses, the sovereign flees to the nearest city. However, if you attack with your sovereign and you lose, your sovereign dies and the game ends. So you can control whether your sovereign is in any peril.

Game Performance

Beta 1A has pretty bad performance.  This has been fixed internally due largely to a couple of one line type bugs that affected a lot of stuff.

General Bug reports

Kryo has been documenting these.  I’m torn between wanting to put up an interim build this week that lets people have the bug fixes sooner and waiting until next week when there’s a lot more features. By waiting until next week, we don’t have to fixate on a build and more will get done so we’re leaning towards that.

Thoughts on Mopping up

Since there is magic in Elemental it frees us from a lot of the usual “mop up” issues found in traditional strategy games.  At least, that’s the theory.  Over the next several months you guys will have a lot to say on this.

How similar to Master of Magic?

Well, that’s a discussion unto itself.  Elemental isn’t designed as a clone. But it is definitely pretty similar in the key elements that, IMO, made MOM special. 

One of the things I’ve noticed is that people say they want transparency in things but in action, they really don’t seem to want it.

For example, politically, I’m a conservative (more of a libertarian).  I am not particularly “into” politics but I do follow it pretty closely and will debate any issue even if I have to switch sides in order to debate it.

But other people take it seriously. Very seriously.  When someone links to one of my blogs, it shows up on my article (cool feature) and so I see people calling me things like “the worst kind of political nutball” or “a total douche” or whatever because my political views don’t match theirs.

That’s just the thing though. The more transparency you have, the more likely you are going to find yourself disagreeing with someone on something.  I’m pro-choice, agnostic, skeptical on human caused global climate change but an environmentalist (my new house will use virtually no fossil fuels), socially liberal, fiscally conservative, and on and on. Just what I’ve mentioned is enough to offend a whole host of people.

If you take your politics that seriously, you’re going to spend a lot of your time being offended.   I have the luxury of being able to say what I want because I’m the principle shareholder of my company. I’ve read how that annoys people but on the other hand, it means I can put into action business theories that seemed (at one time) crazy.

My viewpoints are all over the place because of my background probably. When I say I grew up poor (for an American) I mean literally poor to the point where food was a genuine concern at times.  I only have Stardock now because I started it to pay for school until I could get a “real job”.  But it does mean I have lots of opinions that people may find controversial.

The CEO of a larger company or one where the CEO doesn’t have total control of the company (which is the norm of a company our size or larger) is going to be a lot more politically correct and restrained.  But in becoming restrained, consumers and users lose out I think because there is so much “stuff” out there that the average person knows nothing about that they can find out about because of the anomaly of one of the larger “indies” happening to be controlled by a single individual.

Obviously, it means my politics will offend people at times. I make a point not to donate to any political causes.  But my views are all over the map.  I listen to NPR in the morning on the way to work, Tivo Fox News “Special Report” and MSNBC’s Hardball.

If you are easily offended or base your opinions of other people on their positions on specific political issues then obviously my blog is not going to be a fun place for you to visit.  But on the other hand, if you like to read a lot of stuff on a variety of topics from someone who has had the opportunity to see and do things that many others may not have, this can be a very interesting place.

The more I work with the beta of Elemental the more I think we need to integrate info cards into it.  Those of you who have played Sins of a Solar Empire know what info cards are. They are one of the major game UI innovations that Ironclad has introduced to the genre.

The idea is that when you mouse over something, a “card” appears on the screen that gives detailed information about it. They’re kind of like super tooltips.

Well, for Elemental, that’s what we’re looking to do too. In this case, I’m thinking we should have them look like cards:

So the idea is that you could have your units on screen, mouse over them and see the card. Same for improvements in cities, artifacts, etc. It means a lot less click click click. 

It also gives another opportunity for players to customize something that has a practical use because they could, when designing units, have some control over the info card and thus be able to make distinctive cards for units they want to be able to recognize at a glance.

I’m getting overexposed. I’m as narcissistic as the next guy who refers to themselves in the third person in the name of an article and even I am not that interested in my opinions.

At PAXX I gave an interview to Shacknews primarily on Elemental but we talked about all kinds of other things including my thoughts on Games for Windows Live.

It’s no secret that I’ve been an advocate for Games for Windows Live.  But over time, a handful of the emerging policies have come up that came to a head when I was asked directly about it.

The particular GFWL show-stopper I have had is having to have your app go through any sort of approval process before being updated.  On the console, that makes perfect sense, particularly with regards to a universal achievement system.  But on the PC, where we have to make updates for reasons beyond our control, that’s a problem.

For example, on Windows Vista last week, Microsoft released an update that broke WindowBlinds on Vista. We were able to fix it and get an update out in less than 24 hours. But imagine if we had had to go through some approval process at Microsoft?

Then there is the issue of being charged for these updates. To date, Microsoft hasn’t charged anyone to do an update but it’s been made pretty clear to me that that there would be a limited number of “free updates”.  I don’t want to go through an approval process with a third party to put up an update to my software.

But I do love the concept of Games for Windows Live.  I like the idea of the platform owner (Microsoft) having a series of services available to be used. I’d even pay for it. I don’t want to have to worry about match making and network connectivity.  Anyone who was part of the Demigod launch knows the pain it can be to work out that sort of thing.  But using such services shouldn’t mean that they gain some control over my updates. 

All of Stardock’s recent titles and new games use Games for Windows (not GFWL). I very much like the program of there being some standardization for game developers to adhere to and don’t mind going through an initial certification. It is the post-release update certification I object to as well as the potential of having to pay for it unless the value add was far greater than what it is today.

I wasn’t intending to “slam” GFWL. I simply could not abide by the current model of GFWL and hope/think they will change it as it evolves.  Hopefully all my friends at MS won’t beat me next time I’m over visiting.

Related Articles:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/95194-Stardock-CEO-Dishes-on-Sales-Numbers-GFW-Live-and-More

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2009/10/05/stardock-slams-games-for-windows-live/1

http://www.co-optimus.com/article/2713/Stardock_CEO_Reveals_the_Truth_of_Digital_Distribution_and_the_Industry.html

http://www.destructoid.com/brad-wardell-on-gfwl-you-can-t-do-that-on-the-pc--150639.phtml

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/11923-microsoft-charging-devs-for-games-for-windows-live-patches/

Sycraft has created an Elemental Beta Wiki that you can check out here to get information on how to play, changes, etc.

http://elementalbeta.wikidot.com/start

Kudos to Sycraft taking the initiative on this.

If you don’t already have Impulse Ready to Play’s beta definitely sign up. People who have Demigod are going to be getting a copy of it added to their Impulse account this week. It’s just a beta but holy cow, it makes a huge difference in getting games going.

http://readytoplay.impulsedriven.com

Some of you in the beta are probably starting to recognize the influence you now have and why we had the beta be so primitive – so that your ideas can really REALLY go into the game.

So let’s talk about how units should be designed in the game.

Here’s how it works:

Players design their own units. It’s not like Civilization and such where you have knights or warriors. You start out with a person.

The key traits of that person involve their attack (how many HP damage in an attack they can potentially do), defense (how much of an attack they can potentially deflect), their health (how much HP they have), and their speed (how many attacks they get in a round).

These traits come from giving the unit weapons, armor and equipment.

It’s in what you equip your unit with that things get..interesting.

Let’s look at a late game unit that a player might potentially design (and none of this is set in stone as beta testers will have a lot of say on this):

I have created a unit called “Dread Knight”.

Equipment:

• Twilight Honey Pack (adds 10% more HP to player).
• Koladia leaves (increases health regen by 10% per turn).
• Potion of Valor (provides 10% damage bonus)

Weapon:

• Mithrilian Long Sword

Armor:

• Mithril Helmet
• Mithril Plate Mail
• Leather Boots

Now this may even be a simplified unit design depending on where the beta takes us. The point being, the creation of this unit may hinge on several different resources being under the player’s control.

Now, in say Civilization IV, if the player didn’t have oil, they couldn’t build tanks. A unit would have a single resource requirement total.

But here, because players are designing their units, there may be several resource requirements. Which begs the question, what happens if you lose control of one of them? How should the game handle it?

I can think of a few different options:

• Option A: Unit can’t be built. Straight forward but it could get tedious as players would have to design a backup unit or something which could get very micro-managey in a non-fun way.
• Option B: Unit takes longer to be built. The issue here is how much longer should it take?  If it’s only a little longer, then controlling resources is largely meaningless. If it takes a lot longer then it’s almost worse than option A because the player may be unaware that their main unit is now taking 5X longer to build because they lost control of their twilight bee apiary several turns ago.
• Option C: If the missing resource is weapons/armor then the player is informed they must substitute the weapon/armor, if it’s equipment then the item is not included on the unit. This simplifies things somewhat and encourages us to try to make as much of the “bonus” stuff fall into equipment. In the case where the twilight bee apiary is taken by another player, the unit is still built minus the twilight honey pack. The player would be able to see that they’re missing it still and the game would go as normal.

I’m a little biased for option C because I’d like to see the resources treated as bonuses rather than as pre-requisites. We keep the armor and weapons as straight forward as possible and have the “power” be in a large number of optional equipment the player can add on.

This next week we’ve got a ton of things to do. Most of what we’re working on doesn’t show up in the game.

In no particular order, here are some things on the high priority list:

1. Gotta expose the AI to Python. Need that so that I can start doing serious surgery on the AI without constantly having to recompile and re-run the game.

2. Nail down what resources we want to have in the game.

I keep thinking that it’s better to have more resources than fewer. I’d love to hear how others feel about this.

I also am of the opinion that controlling a resource shouldn’t be a pre-requisite for building something but rather controlling the resource acts as a bonus.

For example, if I research metal weapons then I should be able to build metal weapons.  metal deposits will be displayed on the map which can be controlled but those should act as a very large bonus.

I.e. every city produces say 0.1 metal per turn no matter what. If you control a metal resource then that amount goes to 1. If you control 2 then it goes up to 2. And the city that actually has the resource gets another bonus.

This is scheduled for the next beta.

But what we haven’t decided is how many resources should be in the game. 

I was thinking there could be resources that give bonuses to research, prestige, along with resources that let you add equipment to your soldiers that give them more hitpoints or increase the speed of their attacks or increase their healing rate or how fast they level up and so on and so on. 

Obviously, the more you add, the more micro-management you potentially expose yourself to.

For instance, let’s say we have a “twilight honey” which is a resource that is displayed on the map when you research it. It is a type of equipment that increases a soldier’s HP by 10%.  Now, if you have the resource, equipping it adds no time to the time it takes to produce the soldier. But if you don’t have the resource and have a design that uses it, then it would add say 3 more turns.

So you can see some of the problems that this could introduce if it’s implemented that way.

With enough UI work, you could also have an option to make it so that a given piece of equipment can be picked as “required” versus “optional”.  That is, if it’s optional and you don’t have the resource, it won’t use it when constructing the unit. 

There are many different ways to address the issue but each one has its own pros and cons.

How would you guys like to see this sort of thing done?

One of the things that I’m surprised isn’t offered up on the desktop version of Windows 7 more easily is telling the PC to go to sleep after N minutes.

A high end PC can eat up quite a bit of power if left on 24/7 – which I do.

But over the last couple of versions, Windows has gotten pretty good at coming out of sleep mode really well.

Below is step by step on how to  set up sleep mode on Windows 7.