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:

As seen here, our future house is under construction.  Some of the general goals were in that first article but to quickly summarize what we are looking to do:

1. This will be our "last" house until old folks home.
2. Needs to be completed while our children are young so that this will be their "home" when they go away to college or sugar mines or whatever they are going to do.
3. Needs to be "green". I.e. I am willing to spend extra to make the house have as little impact on the environment as I can which will be tough given its excessive size.
4. Needs to be large enough to be able to entertain (for business and family purposes) and for people to want to come there.
5. Needs to have enough "features" so that two home bodies (Debbie and I) will be happy spending lots of time in it.

So what are the specific features we're looking to have on the main floor?

• 2-story library. I go through a ton of books each month and like collecting books and other nick knacks.
• Conservatory.  I have a 55 year old pet turtle named Cuddles. My boys and I love critters. My Internet handle is "Frogboy". So we want a room where, despite being in Michigan, we can have aquatic life forms living all year around as well as plants and such in a cool space.
• Media room. We want a place that is good for getting together for watching sports, movies, what have you.
• A huge "keep". When we have friends over, we end up being in the kitchen area anyway. So we want an area large enough where people can get together and have fun.
• A large formal dining room. Someday, we hope to host holidays with our kids and such and want to make sure it's large enough that it is the logical place to host such a thing.
• Big mud room and laundry room for dealing with the laundry and dirty needs of 3 children and a..ahem messy husband.

For the top floor, our goals are:

• Master bedroom that is practically an apartment unto itself so that if our kids' are having company or what have you, we can have some privacy upstairs.
• Rooms for the kids with the boys sharing a bathroom. Ashley, our little girl, would have her own room and bathroom.
• Guest room with bathroom so that when my friend Neil or other friends from Europe visit, they can stay for extended periods and feel like they're at home.
• Extra area for future expansion.

As for the bottom floor (walk out basement). It's going to have a 10 foot ceiling so it won't seem like a basement. We haven't decided precisely what we want to do yet. We have 2 years to decide that.

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

Give it a try, tell us what problems you run into here.

I've seen people who argue that Sins of a Solar Empire is not a "real 4X" but is really a conventional RTS.

I suspect most people are of the same mind as I on this topic: Sins of a Solar Empire is a game that combines 4X depth with real-time gameplay.  That is what the game promises and I think that is what it delivers.

Here are some of the game mechanics of Sins that I think make it quite unique for a game that operates in real-time:

#1 Each race has about 100 different technologies to research.  I just counted them up and if you count the military and civilian technologies plus the fleet supply technologies you end up with about 100. And that does not count the fact that many technologies have multiple levels to them. 

#2 Players can win through multiple paths. I won a game on-line with culture on Saturday for instance.

#3 The pacing of the game is unlike any other RTS I've ever played.  It's not about reflexes. It's not about how fast you click things. It's not about mastering hot keys to access special powers. It's about your ability to build a coherent, effective strategy to obtain specific objectives. OODA. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act.  That is the essence of STRATEGY. 

I could list many other elements but these 3 elements I think make Sins stand out from other real time strategy games.  That is why people have compared it to a Kohan in space or Master of Orion in real time. 

Certainly the game does not have the depth of say Space Empires V. But then again, neither does Galactic Civilizations.  But the fact the game does not require manipulating a spread sheet or what have you does not make the game a non-4X game.  Explore. Expand. Exploit. Exterminate.  Sins of a Solar Emprie most certainly satisfies that.

The reason the game has become so popular with players is because there are a ton of people, people like me and I suspect like most of you reading this, that have waited a logn time for a game that is about STRATEGY. That lets us observe the strategic situation of a given map, figure out a strategy and execute on it.

Despite the phenomenal success of Sins of a Solar Empire both in terms of sales and in reviews, we are just getting started! Ironclad and Stardock have a whole host of goodies in the pipeline for Sins of a Solar Empire.

First, we've decided to split the next major update into two parts. This way, we can release an update sooner. 

The first update will be called Sins of a Solar Empire v1.04.  This version will contain some balancing updates based on player feedback, more computer AI updates, and other game play tweaking. 

The second update will be Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1.  This will be a more significant update providing a considerable overhaul of the multiplayer system with more features and updated networking code to make it more robust under a whole series of circumstances. I can't go into too much detail but it's pretty cool stuff.  v1.1 will also include new graphical options including one with very high resolution textures.

After v1.1, we'll see where we're at and go from there.  Stay tuned!