Next week the Impulse Preview will be officially released.

May 5, 2008 will be the "official" launch of Impulse.

 
Object Desktop 2008 is here!

The world's best, most powerful, easiest way to transform your Windows experience!

[Read More]

Object Desktop 2008 is here!

The world's best, most powerful, easiest way to transform your Windows experience!

[Read More]

I'm going through all the civs with AI updates and such but are there any civilizations in particular you would like me to take a look at in depth and if so, what changes would you guys like to see?

Also, I want to reassure you all that just because Twilight of the Arnor gets released doesn't mean we won't be doing updates. I LOVE working on the AI and doing updates. I'd do it for free. Twilight of the Arnor is simply the last thing we currently plan to charge for. It doesn't mean it's the last time we're updating.

This year marks the 10th year I've been in the skinning community.  It's hard to believe it's been that long.  Most people don't "get" why I'm into this stuff.  But you guys do I suspect.

Here are 5 reasons why I'm still into this stuff.

#1 The people.  Let's face it, you guys are awesome. Each year we seem to attract awesome new people while hanging on to a lot of great folks from around the world. I've got to meet some extraordinary people thanks to skinning.

#2 Tinkering. I love being able to mess around with programs to see how I can change the way they look. There was a really cool Impulse skinning thread (I don't ahve teh URL handy) that reminded me just why I got into this in the first place.  People taking things apart to control how it looks.

#3 Being on the cutting edge.  The stuff our community considers old hat becomes the "latest" craze for everyone else.  Widgets? Meh. We were doing widgets here on WinCustomize years before Konfabulator or Apple "discovered" them. Msstyles? Hah. Old news for us on WC.  There's nothing more amusing than watching some msstyles "advocate" trash talk WindowBlinds even as they're using boasting how great something that was derived from WindowBlinds 2 without even realizing it.

#4 Commentors. If there's any particular feature that needs to be explored more, it's the managing of comments on skins. I love uploading something and seeing people comment on it.  Go around the net and see comments on stuff and you quickly realize how wonderful WinCustomize is as a community. Helpful, thankful, generous comments make it worth it.  Sure, there's teh occasional creep but they're few and far between.

#5 The Skins.  I've met people who say that they can imagine cool stuff in their mind but just can't get it on paper or on the computer or whatever.  I'm not one of those people.I simply can't imagine the cool stuff that skinners take for granted.  Mike Bryant or VStyler or Mormegil will show me something incredible and it's just beyond anything I could have imagined.  One doesn't need to be an artist to admire talent.

And so that's why, after a decade, I'm still into this. Every day. I love it. I am always keenly aware how lucky I am that I can make a living doing this kind of thing.  You guys rock.

I mentioned in a post here that I've been ill. I don't like getting sick. I particularly don't like getting stick while on a 10-day business trip where I have to walk miles. Obviously I died. But I'm getting better, slowly.

I don't know how many deadlines were missed last month. I think quite a few.  I do know that SkinStudio 6 made it out and that's a pretty big deal.  Seems like there was a time when skin editors and such were "cool".  SkinStudio 6 is certainly cool. And CursorFX came out, that's very cool too.

Now, one of the things I hope people have noticed is the quality of releases lately.  You could almost say we had a New Year's Resolution to really bump up the quality of new releases. It has required quite a bit of work but if compare SkinStudio to older versions or CursorFX with older versions and the upcoming Impulse with Stardock Central and so forth, hopefully you're seeing a positive trend.

This Wednesday we're scheduled to release Object Desktop 2008.  And just because we love you, here's a sneak peek at the new Object Desktop website. The web team is going to kill me for showing a page that hasn't officially launched yet but by the time they see this news item, I'll be safely hidden somewhere in South America.  Compare that site to the current site. Big difference.  And guess who designed the new site? Alexandrie. 

Which reminds me, one of the coolest changes over the past year has been the coming together of the community. I get to work with Treetog and Alexandrie and MikeB and Voo and Hippy and Essorant and Danilo0c and more every day. It's just awesome.  The projects they're working on you guys will get to see in the relatively new future.  That's the one down side of working at a software company, everything you guys see is stuff that was done last year and we often can't talk about the cool stuff being worked on for next year.

This year will definitely be the best year ever for Object Desktop users. Particularly Object Desktop Ultimate users.  For one thing, we've finally gotten the MyColors discounts in. So on MyColors themes where there isn't a big licensing royalty, we are able to pass on big discounts to Object Desktop users.  Best of all, when a MyColors theme is installed, it inserts the individual components into the proper application data directories (i.e. WindowBlinds skin in the WindowBlinds skins folder).  Why is that a big deal? Because let's say you want to use the cool icons from Aqua Marine as clipart? No problem, it's in the IconPackager folder where MyColors installed it.

Speaking of MyColors, for early adopters, let me express my heart felt thanks for your patience.  As any techie users can explain, MyColors is an engineering accoplishment that's never been seen before, well basically anywhere.  MyColors not only has self-healing tech for the components but will automatically update itself or the content when there's updates.  I can't think of any other software out there that can update both itself and external content in such an integrated way.  Which meant, naturally, while it was first released it was a pain in the rear.  But it's looking pretty good now I think.

And lastly, for those of you into games, you may have heard Stardock's big announcement: Gas Powered Games (makers of Supreme Commander and Dungeon Siege) has signed on to have Stardock as its exclusive world-wide publisher.  Here's a funny statistic from NPD: In February, Stardock was the 7th largest PC game publisher in the world.  Not bad for a skinning company!

While we're not making any promises, we plan to have Sins of a Solar Empire v1.04 ready this week.  v1.04 is the first serious attempt to user-requested game balancing. 

We've gotten a lot of feedback in the past few weeks with some great ideas on tweaks to each of the different sides to make the game more enjoyable to players.  Obviously a lot of time has had to be spent play testing (and yes, we get paid to do this, so there, mom!) these changes to make sure the result truly is a more satisfactory experience.

Often times, what seems balanced (or unbalanced) on paper does not work out quite that way on-line. There are a lot of factors that just have to be played to be seen.  Moreover, a player's skill level along with strategy can completely alter one's perspective on balancing which has been both a challenge and quite enjoyable to observe. 

Both Stardock and Ironclad play multiplayer games pretty regularly (we don't usually advertise who we are) and it's really quite refreshing seeing new strategies being developed over time that we never would have considered.  This is one of the reasons why updates such as v1.04 will continue to be needed -- as players come up with new, innovative strategies, we will have to continue to update the game to ensure that no single strategy becomes too dominant -- this is what you pay us for, after all.

If all goes well, we hope to arrange a game night with the entire community.

For those of you who would like to try out Impulse, check out the link below.  Note that the precise version numbers won't match up between Stardock Central and Impulse since they have different backends.

If you'd like to try it go here:

http://storage.stardock.com/files/Impulse_setup.exe

There's a LOT more being added to it but you should find it pretty reliable at updating things.

On a bit of a serious note, I have to confess that a lot of my success in life has been due to my health. I don't get sick. Ever.

Let me put it into perspective, until 4 years ago, I never had to blow my nose. I actually didn't know how because I had never had a cold or flu that resulted in my nose being stuffed up.  It was actually a pretty big deal at the time.

But man, I got some virus a couple weeks ago. I've been dog sick. 

I was out of town for all of last week on business infecting people around the country no doubt. 

You can hear me on GfW podcast last week: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3148397 I'm the dying sounding one. It was pretty bad.

Anyone else there finding that this Winter has been a really bad season for the flu?