Better late than never..

Alexandra (marketing manager) and Jeff (ObjectDock lead developer, designer of Impulse)

Brad Wardell & Kristen (Executive Planner)

Stardock costumed gang!

Someone should really keep an archive of the various global warming prediction graphs and then match them with actual data.

I remember back in college when global warming was just getting..warmed up with predictions of doom and gloom.

I managed to find one:

So here we are, 20 years later and the temperature is about the same. Possibly an increase of 0.2 degrees.

Now I'm not saying there isn't global warming nor am I saying that humans aren't the cause. But I think people need to hold the global warming alarmist crowd accountable.  Remember, these people want fundamental changes in the global economy and how we live to deal with this.

I have Office 2007 and kept running into an annoying problem where Excel attachments and Excel files couldn't be opened from Outlook or even Explorer.  I would get the "Windows cannot find" error dialog.

Strangely, the solution was this:

Open the Excel options, go to the advanced tab, under the general heading uncheck the box that says "Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE).

Hope this helps others that may run into this.

I'm setting up a game today to play on this day after Thanksgiving. Here are screenshots from the game (I'll be updating this over the course of the day):

Large galaxy with no tech brokering (a tech I trade to someone else can't be traded by that civilization to someone else).

I want to have few stars but those stars should have lots of good planets.

I set up a custom player.

Gave my custom player their own techs, abilities, look, ship style, etc.

Randomized opponents.

Home planet.

Starting location.

I don't like the Korath anymore..

When you see a bunch of these coming, that's bad.

For most people, discussing politics is like discussing football. Sure, it's interesting but it has very little actual affect on their lives at first glance.

But in reality, people rarely recognize the unintended consequences of their beliefs.

For instance, nearly every conversation with a tax hike supporter inevitably goes something like this:

Me: I'm against raising the taxes on anyone, including the top 5%.

Tax Supporter: Why? You can afford to pay more in taxes. You've got a big house and a fancy car, etc.  You got way more than you need.

Me: Yes, but I'm still one person, one vote. At some point don't you consider the equality there? That is, I use the same services as you do. I'm not suggesting no taxes or equal taxes but if my tax bill this year is >$1 million and your total tax hit is less than $3k how can you seriously argue that your opinion is the opinion of someone who's compassionate or concerned when all you're doing is arguing for me to pay for your beliefs?

Tax Supporter: But the money taken from you helps all of us because that money can then be given to people who need it more. You can live with less.

Me: Are you sure of that? When I pay taxes, it's just another expense. My lifestyle is unaffected. When taxes go up, I hire fewer people or am forced to lay people off.

Tax Supporter: Well then you're just being greedy. You should take a cut before laying people off.

Me: But I'm not the one causing it. It's the government's taxation -- supported by you. Do you live for your job? Is your job the ends unto itself of a means to an end?

Tax Supporter: I work so I can buy food, clothing, shelter.

Me: Same here. Working is a means to an end. I work so that I can have the big house and the fancy car. I don't exist as a public asset to be used by the "body politic".

Tax Supporter: I'm not saying you should.

Me: Sure you are. You support higher taxes on me. You expect me to continue to do what I do best - create jobs and employ people but at a lower salary. You unconsciously see me as something that is expected to work to create jobs as a higher priority than work as a means to an end. You expect my motivation to work to be singularly unique amongst mankind - you work so you can buy stuff, you expect me to work to provide you and yours a job.

Tax Supporter: I just don't think it's fair you should have so much while others have so little

Me: Nothing's stopping someone else from trying to do what I do. I got no special breaks. I worked hard, took calculated risks, stuck to it and built over time a successful business. It's just that not too many people are willing to do that. There's a lot of risk involved in starting a business after all.

Tax Supporter: Yea but now you make more than you need.

Me: Who decides "need"? You? You who has the latest iPod, latest-gen video games and other consumer goods. Putting that aside, concepts like fairness or need are in the realm of philosophy, not reality. The fact is, when you raise taxes, you are having the government take from those who are the best at taking money and creating more money with it that inevitably gets spread out one way or the other. 

In short, your beliefs do have consequences whether you realize it or not.

Some of the concepts we're talking about will be hard to envision without actually having the game but one of the real innovations we're trying to introduce with Elemental is the concept of unlimited expansion.

The key to this is not hard coding civilization capabilities but rather leaving them open-ended.

So let me start at the beginning:

When someone first gets into Elemental, the relationships will be simple between things. A player who wants to design a horse mounted knight will need to have researched animal husbandry which lets them train horses. They will need to have a city that has used one of its tiles to make use of a herd of wild horses on the map. They will need a mine on a metal deposit to create the armor.  And once they have all those things, it'll be a matter of training and equipping the knight.

The above example is one of the more complicated relationships one will see initially in Elemental...

But what about users who want to keep making more and more sophisticated relationships?

Maybe I want to have knights equipped with sunfire dread chain mail riding tamed Demon steeds and the knights have a secondary power of carrying tomes of unmaking which vastly increase their damage in battle?

Well, there would be a host of technologies one would have to have researched. There would have to be spells researched as well and new city buildings that produce these tomes and then have been enchanted to make these tomes magical. The demon steeds would require various technologies and the finding of demons to be tamed in the first place and so on and so on.

How do you control the level of sophistication here so that it doesn't become too complicated?  The answer is with a new series of game options that are practically games unto themselves.

Because, did I mention, that all the things mentioned in the second example were things produced not by us but by players and broadcast to all other players so that you have access to them automatically? No expansion packs needed. No paying for mini-content needed. It's just thousands of players creating cool stuff and broadcasting it to one another.

So here's how players control it.  They have a screen called the Bestiary where they can control what types of creatures are in game. When someone broadcasts content, Stardock moderators rate and define it more closely. From this screen, players can decide what types of creatures they want, the quality of the submission desired (we will rate the broadcasts in terms of production values as well), etc. These creatures will have associated technologies that are attached to them that are required.

There will be additional screens for managing resources, techs, etc.

So for most players, they will probably stick with what we include or maybe a handful of expansions that Stardock provides. Others will insert some content made by other players. And still others will go for a truly huge scope experience.  But the point is that players control this.

Now someone might say that a lot of this sounds too ambitious. But Stardock already does a lot of this, today, right now, on WinCustomize.com with its non-game stuff. 

Now what is the gameplay result of this? One of the cooler things that will result is that the units that players make use of will really be different from game to game. And there will be a real pay off in the battles for players who have managed to assemble the necessary components to create some of the truly sophisticated units.

In multiplayer, the default it going to be the least common denominator settings. We will probably have other options but we won't know until we've had a chance to play it online with you guys to see what other settings are the most fun.

I've seen the argument that we should have the federal government raise taxes back to where they were in the Clinton years.  Such an argument ignores the bigger picture because when the federal government lowered taxes, a lot of states, including Michigan where I live, raised theirs.

Let's look at Mr. Rich guy who makes $1M a year (after deductions) and owns a $1M home and lives in Michigan.

About $300,000 of his income will go to federal income taxes.

Another $40,000 will go to the state of Michigan.

He will have about $20,000 in property taxes on his house.

So this person, with 1 vote who is using the same roads, schools, and other services as everyone else is paying $360,000 right off the bat.

When he goes to buy something, another 6% is taken for sales tax.

Often times, I'll read about someone not understanding why many people who aren't rich are so adamantly opposed to such taxation even though they're not affected. The reason is principle. There is something inherently corrupt about the idea that one person with one vote is having $360k taken from them purely based on the argument that "he can afford it".

This becomes especially true when one looks at how Mr. Rich would have spent that $360k versus how the government spends it. Because that wealth is going to be spread either way. It's merely a question of who spends it better.

We can all talk about social contracts and what not until the cows come home but at the end of the day, there is something just plain wrong about the government taking so much more from some people than others in an age where increasing amounts of that money are simply being given to others based on "need" where "need" is defined in narrow political terms.

If I were building a machine for best long-term value and short term performance, this is what I would currently put it together with:

CPU: Intel Core i7

Graphics Adapter: ATI Radeon HD 4870X2

Memory: 12 Gigabytes

OS: Windows Vista 64-bit (moving to Windows 7 with the first beta)

Hard Drive: Intel X-25E Extreme SSD for the boot drive, A 1 Terrabyte drive for secondary.

Monitor: Good 24 inch LCD.

Must-Have Software:

• Object Desktop Ultimate
• Multiplicity
• Windows Live Mesh
• Impulse
• Microsoft Office
• Steam
• Corel Draw
• TechSmith Jing

Must-Have Games to install immediately

• Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate
• Sins of a Solar Empire
• Left4Dead

Must-Have Games to prepare for in 2009

• Demigod
• Dawn of War 2
• The Sims 3 (yea, I admit it)

Ironclad's Blair Fraiser has put up a terrific development diary on a topic that affects many multiplayer strategy games - the anatomy of desyncing in multiplayer. It's well worth checking out.

Also, I have written a little piece on living with Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1.

View: Sync Woes!

View: Living in Sins..v1.1