There's something to be said about walking into a room and seeing that the 18 month old has thrown all the books on the floor making a big mess with the top most book being the book on discipline.  I think she's sending a message.

I have a lot of obnoxious opinions on a whole range of issues. But I never allow my personal opinions to be injected into software. Our customers are buying products and services from us. They don't want to be forced to deal with my diatribes.

But on-line is a different matter. If you're visiting my blog or reading one of the off-topic forum categories on one of our sites, something I write might pop up.  I value my freedom to say what I want more than anything.  I'd sooner close the company before I'd give up speaking my mind on my blog.

Every so often some user comes on and tells me how I'm damaging sales or losing customers due to my opinions. One user on another site even wrote in response to the announcement of one of our products "The CEO's a vocal Republican. Pass."

Besides the fact that the person is wrong, I'm not a Republican, I'm independent but definitely not a Democrat, anyone who would make a purchasing choice based on the political or philosophical opinions of the CEO alone is not someone I'd want to have as a customer.

Let me be very clear about that: If the CEO has an ideology or philosophy that you disagree with and that ideology ends up shaping the way the company makes products or provides support then by all means, that's a legitimate issue.

I'd be pretty annoyed if someone started trying to shove their philosophies down my throat with their products. If I go to a concert, I don't want the singer to start telling me about global warming.  But I could care less that Bill Gates is a liberal nor do I care what he does with his money. Bill Gates can talk all he wants about liberal causes as long as their software doesn't start popping up with ads telling me what I should belief.

That said, I realize there are some people who are so ideological that they aren't willing to support, no matter how tangentially, anyone who has opinions they disagree with.  That's fine. But I still think they're idiots.

I will continue to say what I want because I can. I'm not just the CEO I'm the principle share holder. And as if that wasn't enough, I've long since passed the point where I could just close up shop and retire if I wanted to. So I'm not inclined to put up with nonsense from anyone because I'm not in this for the money at this point. I'm in this to have fun.

Gamasutra has posted the in-depth post-mortem on Sins of a Solar Empire.  For gamers as well as developers who want to see how a hit game was made that was done almost completely differently than the typical publisher/developer system, you'll definitely want to check this out.

It also has screenshots of very very early builds of Sins that you'll probably get a kick out of.

View: Sins of a Solar Empire Post-Mortem

When we send out review copies, we also send out review guides. That's because we're painfully aware that we're a small company and we want to make sure we can help reviewers quickly find out what's new and not new.

But we also tend to get pretty silly in our review guides. The Dark Avatar review guide included a recipe for Drengin fire chile (it involves pieces of a Torian).

Here are some excerpts:

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably played a lot of expansion packs. If you were making your own game, I suspect you would do a lot of things differently than what typically happens in the game industry. 

As a gamer, I often feel like game developers are milking me by the time they do their second expansion pack.  Am I getting my money’s worth or am I helping pay for someone’s boat? And if so, is it a good boat? Does it have one of those cool fishing thingies in the back? Either way, it’s not like I’ll get to try out their boat, I’ve just purchased an expansion pack to a game I know and love.  The point being, often times gamers tend to get less and less with each expansion pack.

Re the ship designer:

Probably the most popular feature of Galactic Civilizations II was the ship designer. It’s like being able to play with LEGOS in public without everyone looking at me. I mean, without everyone looking at the guy playing with LEGOS in public.

Re press contacts:

Thank you for reviewing Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor.  If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.  If you have any concerns about the professionalism, grammar or spelling found in this media guide, please do not tell our PR contact about it…it’s better this way.

Twilight of the Arnor is just about gold. Check out the journal entry for a gallery of images from the release candidate!

Seriously, the number of new things in this expansion pack is immense. If you've been in the beta for it, now would be a good time to go back and play some Dark Avatar or original Dread Lords so you can really feel the difference.

A lot of improvements have been made this week to gameplay, AI, pacing, and more.  We're very excited (and nervous) for next week. We hope you like what we've wrought.

[Screenshots]

New opening cut-scene of course...

Tournaments:

The Campaign:

New Start-up Options: Immense sized galaxies, Tech stealing option, Ascension Victory Condition:

New Logos:

Lots of different Technology trees to choose from:

Much better planet graphics:

MUCH better ship graphics - a total overhaul and a reduced memory foot print!

Starbases tell you how many modules are still available:

Ascension starbases add a new diplomatic twist:

Finance Manager:

Much improved computer AI all-around:

New ambassador from Earth:

Each race has their own set of planetary improvements:

Lots and lots of unique technologies per civilization:

New random events:

Historical Events:

Updated Trade Screen with interactive help:

Technology Details dialog:

More sophisticated AI for trading:

Unique technologies that fit the civilization using it:

Familiar planets look so much better:

Even the humans get a bunch of new, meaningful technologies with rich descriptions:

The technology tree now has icons that tell you what you get with mouse-overs:

Even the improvement descriptions can be lengthy and useful now:

The enhanced graphics really do make quite a difference:

Immense sized galaxies are offensively large. Ridiculously large. You people are insane.

Because every civilization has its own technology tree, the technologies can be used to provide backstory:

New Options:

New Ship Design screen with the ability to animate any part:

Lots of new...ahem...dialog:

By default, the computer will design ships for you:

Improved UI graphics:

AI going for ascension victory:

Improved battle effects (thanks to I-Mod):

New ship components such as the Integrity field can add extra hitpoints to your ships - at a cost:

Other new components can give bonuses to weapons in fleet battles.

And of course, Terror Stars!

So here we go, we're in the final stages. Lots of features being tweaked. The computer AI has been enhanced. I will go so far as to say that it is about twice as intelligent as the last publicly available beta. If people find this AI unsatisfactory well, they can go write their own game.

So in my testing, I want to make sure that the AI personalities are doing a good job and just make sure all the new content is working right.

Setting up a custom civilization.

Playing against...

...It begins

Note that in debug mode, the shading and such is turned off so my graphics will seem a bit..odd.

I really love designing ships, even still. I'm not very good at it. Twilight makes it a lot more fun since you can now animate the pieces (my radar dish up there rotates) and the ship components are so much nicer.

The first guys I come across are the Krynn. I don't know if people realize that the Krynn aren't a race per se. They're a religion made up of many races. They're essentially a collection of minor races under a single ideology.

And yes...the Snathi are here...

Expanding

Sometimes when you role play you realize that if you continue to play in character that you will ultimately be doomed. I only have 2 planets but there are some juicy minor race planets near by.

I hate to say this but I'm going to need to take them.

Oh yea, I'm real scared...

..much later

Okay this isn't going how I had hoped. The AI is definitely a lot more lethal than it previously was. The Thalan are a serious threat every game now. I was playing on tough so I may have to take down the difficulty a bit.

I read a news announcement about a new freeware program that does some cool stuff. I check it out and it is vastly superior to an existing freeware program. Yet when I read the comments, the new, superior freeware program is being flamed. Why? Because the guy making it also offers a for-pay version that has more features.

I check out the forums of a game I enjoy playing. Normally people are singing the praises of this game. Now, the forum is full of flaming and angst. Why? Because the developer started offering optional premium content for players if they want.

Let me tell those complainers a truth about life: Money is exchanged for goods and services.

Before the current generation of l33t-speaking complainers became the norm on the net, we had a concept called shareware. Someone would make something cool and offer a version of it to try. This version might time out or it might have fewer features or it might just work on the honor system. If users liked it, they bought it. End of story.

Nowadays, we have it better. People make free stuff and release it. No nags. No missing features when compared to other "free" competitors. No time outs. But the developers will also release an even better version. And the complainers get vocal.

What annoys me is that the whiners are attempting to bully people from making stuff that many people like me want.  I don't live with my mom in her basement. I don't begrudge paying a few dollars to someone who made something I want.  I recognize that I already pay $80 a month for my cell phone and $60 a month for cable so bitching about paying $9 to $20 for something I want is pretty ridiculous. 

And I certainly recognize that the mere existence of premium stuff doesn't hurt me. If I want it, I'll pay for it. If I don't, I won't.

Let me give you two examples:

The program ObjectDock is the best dock out there. We make it so I'm biased but it has far more features than any dock out there. It's also free. You want a cool dock on Windows, this is what you get. But there is also ObjectDock Plus. It's $20 but adds a ton of features like tabbed docks. And so what do people say? They'll say that ObjectDock is "payware" or "crippleware".  Why? Because a non-free improved version exists.

Similarly, I love Team Fortress 2. It is a great game. And you know what? If Valve created a new character I could play as for say $10 I'd buy it in an instant. I want more characters in TF2 to play as. But you know the reaction they'd get. They'd probably get flamed because the parasite-class would argue that they should get that for free because buying something once to them means that the developers are perpetual slaves to them after.

I understand that we all want to keep from getting nickled and dimed but one assumes that we can make our own judgments as to whether something is worth it or not and allow others to make the same judgment.

Last week Object Desktop 2008 was released. For the first time since its introduction on Windows in 1999, Object Desktop has been provided in two forms: Object Desktop and Object Desktop Ultimate.

The normal Object Desktop focuses on transforming the Windows experience.  Object Desktop Ultimate targets power users who want to take said transformation into their own hands.

We've put together an Info guide. It's meant for print but we've managed to finangle (is that a real word?) it to get it onto the web.

You can check it out at the link below.