Well friends and family who are keeping up on "Future House". The plot plan has been largely completed.

Click to enlarge

We have the plot of land. It's a little strangely shaped. It's about 3 acres overall. We've settled where the house is going to sit on the property.

Here is a closer up view.

Click to enlarge.

The driveway is subject to change as I am trying to avoid cutting down trees (though, sadly, we've cut down a lot of trees since this lot was 100% wooded).  The wood is being milled to be used on the house at least.

More to come.

How hard can it be to do file copying? Vista SP1 still hasn't managed to nail it.

Besides the fact that copying over a network isn't reliable if I use the machine name (it'll just randomly cut out, I have to use the IP address), there's a more fundamental one: They can't estimate time.

So I'm looking at the above dialog. I can tell by the items remaining (and the GB remaining) that it's copying at around 8 megabytes per second. But the speed says 188k/sec.  So it uses that 188k per second to do teh estimate.  Right now, it says it'll take 16 hours and 57 minutes to do this copy when in fact it'll be done in probably 5 or 6 minutes. (and in the screenshot it said 8 hours, so I actually lost time).

Seriously guys, this is pretty basic stuff.  You can't manage to write a shell copy routine in 2008? I don't care if Google stole the guy who wrote it  (remind me to sell my Google stock). Fix this stuff. This is just incredibly sloppy.

And now at the end of this post, which took about 3 minutes to make it says:

So in 3 or so minutes, it copies about 1.5 gigabytes.  So...Microsoft, what is 1.5 gigabytes divided by 180 seconds?

This holiday weekend my plan is to get some serious AI coding on GalCiv. I've been looking forward to it and my new home PC box has arrived.

I don't know if it's because I'm getting older or if there just isn't as much benefit to upgrading as there used to be but the box it's replacing is over 3 years old. I used to upgrade every year and now it's 3 years.

My new box is an Alienware machine. We do a lot of business with Alienware and in the past I haven't bought their machines because they were too loud. But with liquid cooled options and sound dampening, it's not bad.

The machine is a monster though. Besides being the fastest quad-core currently available, I also got two 64GB SSDs put in RAID 0 configuration. Yes, it's insane.

Only on the video side of things did I not get too crazy. I have a Radeon HD 3870 X2 in it -- but only 1. So, you know, it's only insane not INSANE. Ahem.

Right now, I'm installing the various compilers, updates, etc.

GalCiv is written in Visual Studio 2003 which is a bit of a pain these days. Microsoft hasn't been real good about making the latest versions of their tools very compelling. Word 2007 = Compelling. Visual Studio 2008 != Compelling.

In a few hours, this machine should be set up and ready to make the Drengin, Arceans, Altarians, and so on smarter.

Twilight of the Arnor has been a real treat to work on.  This week, we're releasing Beta 6 of it and then, over the next week, I'll be dedicated to the computer AI in updating it and balancing the races.

The plan is to do a game example for each race, documenting what things are working well and what things need to be balanced.   As I post my own observations, I am hoping that fellow players will be chiming in their own ideas and input and I'll be looking forward to integrating it.

Stay tuned!

This new machine is even faster than my monster machine at work which is saying a lot.

Testing out my new SSD drive.

The average read speed concerns me, it's only 66 MB/s.  HD Tach is the industry standard benchmark.

NPD has released the top 10 best selling PC games for February. Here are the results:
February 2008

1. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Activision)
2. Sins Of A Solar Empire (Stardock)
3. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest (Blizzard)
4. The Sims 2 Free Time Expansion Pack (EA)
5. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack (Blizzard)
6. World Of Warcraft (Blizzard)
7. The Orange Box (EA)
8. The Sims 2 Deluxe (EA)
9. The Sims: Castaway Stories (EA)
10. Crysis (EA)

Stardock's Sins of a Solar Empire was #2 overall for the month of February despite retail availability occurring near the middle of the month. 

With the upcoming merger of Activision and Blizzard, Sins of a Solar Empire is the only non-EA, non-Activision/Blizzard game in the top 10 at retail.

Stardock relecently released Sins of a Solar Empire v1.03. See the Sins of a Solar Empire website to learn more.

Version 6

I have to admit, I'm pretty excited about SkinStudio 6. Which is surprising in some respects because I was deeply involved in the design of SkinStudio 1 through 5.  With SkinStudio 6, the WindowBlinds team wrote it with my part being mostly that of providing input rather than design direction. 

SkinStudio 1 through 5 was designed to provide a quasi-Corel Draw style user interface.  The design worked out well in the early days when WindowBlinds wasn't that powerful.

Here is what SkinStudio 5 looked like:

As you can see, it got pretty complicated by version 6.

By contrast, SkinStudio 6 looks like this:

The difference is application designer versus task oriented design.  That is, with SkinStudio 6, the skinner simply walks through a series of steps and at the end has a finished skin. 

How this will affect the skinning community remains to be seen. But we now have a way for people to easily make their own skins. And best of all, SkinStudio is FREE.

After a year of rewriting SkinStudio from scratch, Stardock has released SkinStudio 6.

SkinStudio is a free program designed to make it easy for people to create WindowBlinds skins.  Version 6 has been completely rewritten to provide a much simpler user experience for creating skins.

Making your own skins

SkinStudio makes it a snap to design your own skins for WindowBlinds.  When a user desires to create a new skin, they start out with either Luna (if it's on Windows XP) or Aero (if it's on Windows Vista). From there, they can change as much or as little as they want of a given skin.

As users go through the different parts of the Windows GUI, they can replace different elements with new images. The WindowBlinds skinning engine is extremely flexible allowing for the repositioning of buttons, independent border sizing, animation, and much more.

A Completed Skin

A complete looking skin will have all new title bars, borders, buttons, Start menu, taskbar, etc.  It can provide a dramatically different look and feel to your PC.  You can share your creations with others on many different websites including WinCustomize.com, deviantART, Customize.org, Skinbase.org and many others.

A completed skin

SkinStudio Pro

Stardock also offers SkinStudio Pro for skinners who are really into skinning or looking to make skins professionally. SkinStudio Pro lets skinners look at the actual underlying code of a given section and includes a live animation editor for Start menu animations (WindowBlinds 6 includes 30fps start menu animations as seen in Dragon). SkinStudio Pro is $19.95.

SkinStudio Pro adds features for pro skinners like animation editing, code review, etc.

Download: www.skinstudio.net

Version 6 is now available!

SkinStudio is a free skin creation applications designed to make it relatively easy to make skins for WindowBlinds.  With SkinStudio, users can change virtually every aspect of the Windows XP or Windows Vista graphical user interface including title bars, push buttons, the task bar, the start menu, explorer controls, borders, scrollbars, and much more.

SkinStudio 6 is a complete rewrite of previous versions of the program. Over time, as the number of elements of Windows that could be changed increased, the older versions of SkinStudio became very complex.  SkinStudio 6 is re-designed to provide skinners a step-by-step way of creating their own Windows visual styles that, upon completion, can be applied with WindowBlinds.

SkinStudio 6 is a free program. SkinStudio Pro 6 adds an animation editor, code editor, and syncronization tools and is $19.95.

Download: SkinStudio 6

Screenshots: