Windows Vista has gotten a lot of bad press. A lot of it is unfair but as any Vista user can tell you, a lot of the bad press was avoidable.

Even the finest product can be marred by a handful of minor decisions that affect the overall experience.

In the case of Windows Vista, Stardock has identified these problem areas that Vista needs to resolve (either in a future SP or in Windows 7):

1. We need an OS, not a nanny. Vista has too many nags, confirmations, and reminders.
2. Vista is too much of a one-size fits all solution. As a result, there is a service or start up program for nearly every potentiality.
3. Usable information about the network, hardware info, and basic settings changes are too spread out and need to be consolidated.
4. System responsiveness and memory use. Vista seems to always have something running, scanning, or getting in the user's way when they're trying to use the computer.

Stardock's answer to this is TweakVista.  TweakVista 1.0 established a foundation. It basically gave users a way to know what was running on their system and control it to a much finer degree than normally possible but in a way that was safer than most other solutions. It also allows users to modify the security settings without simply disabling them.

TweakVista 1.1 is merely the first step on the journey to let users start tweaking Vista themselves.  Here's what's new:

• Snapshots. This is a basic feature that lets people mess with things in a lot safer way. It's more useful in many respects than "Microsoft System Restore" because what it does is pinpoint changes to what's loading on start up. The snapshot feature lets people pin-point apps that are causing problems and be easily eliminated.
• Process Exploration. Resource Page now has a services tab so that all those "svchost.exe" processes can be easily looked at to see what they're really doing.
• Service Explorer. It's not hard to look at services in Vista if you know what you're doing. TweakVista, however, lets users easily manage what services are running and includes a way for each service to be part of a web forum thread where users can discuss in depth each service and why they do or don't need it.
• Locked File Query. Ever have a file that you can't delete or modify because it's in use by some other program? Now you can find out which program is doing that and terminate it.

There are many other smaller new features in TweakVista 1.1.  The main goal was to set the stage to begin going more in-depth to let users regain more control over their computer and do so safely.

In the long term, Stardock hopes Microsoft will integrate some of the fixes and tweaks we're making into the base OS.  But in the meantime, you can take care of these things yourself in a secure, safe, and effective way with TweakVista.

Screenshots:

 

Download: www.tweakvista.net

Windows Vista has gotten a lot of bad press. A lot of it is unfair but as any Vista user can tell you, a lot of the bad press was avoidable.

Even the finest product can be marred by a handful of minor decisions that affect the overall experience.

In the case of Windows Vista, Stardock has identified these problem areas that Vista needs to resolve (either in a future SP or in Windows 7):

1. We need an OS, not a nanny. Vista has too many nags, confirmations, and reminders.
2. Vista is too much of a one-size fits all solution. As a result, there is a service or start up program for nearly every potentiality.
3. Usable information about the network, hardware info, and basic settings changes are too spread out and need to be consolidated.
4. System responsiveness and memory use. Vista seems to always have something running, scanning, or getting in the user's way when they're trying to use the computer.

Stardock's answer to this is TweakVista.  TweakVista 1.0 established a foundation. It basically gave users a way to know what was running on their system and control it to a much finer degree than normally possible but in a way that was safer than most other solutions. It also allows users to modify the security settings without simply disabling them.

TweakVista 1.1 is merely the first step on the journey to let users start tweaking Vista themselves.  Here's what's new:

• Snapshots. This is a basic feature that lets people mess with things in a lot safer way. It's more useful in many respects than "Microsoft System Restore" because what it does is pinpoint changes to what's loading on start up. The snapshot feature lets people pin-point apps that are causing problems and be easily eliminated.
• Process Exploration. Resource Page now has a services tab so that all those "svchost.exe" processes can be easily looked at to see what they're really doing.
• Service Explorer. It's not hard to look at services in Vista if you know what you're doing. TweakVista, however, lets users easily manage what services are running and includes a way for each service to be part of a web forum thread where users can discuss in depth each service and why they do or don't need it.
• Locked File Query. Ever have a file that you can't delete or modify because it's in use by some other program? Now you can find out which program is doing that and terminate it.

There are many other smaller new features in TweakVista 1.1.  The main goal was to set the stage to begin going more in-depth to let users regain more control over their computer and do so safely.

In the long term, Stardock hopes Microsoft will integrate some of the fixes and tweaks we're making into the base OS.  But in the meantime, you can take care of these things yourself in a secure, safe, and effective way with TweakVista.

Screenshots:

 

Download: www.tweakvista.net

So here's where we are at in terms of promoting Sins of a Solar Empire.

Magazines:

• PC Gamer
• Games for Windows
• Maximum PC

In terms of web:

• Penny Arcade (Stardock's huge fans of this site and we make our buying decisions based on this stie so we figure so do others )

So where else would you guys like to see us be promoting Sins of a Solar Empire that you think would have a good bang for the buck?

Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor is being worked on heavily. This week we started implementing a new feature that allows players to have the AI design ships for them. So for new players in particular who just want a decently designed ship, they can now get it with this new option.

Obviously the AI is going to be a major element of what we start working on. Beta 5, which is due out later this month to those who have pre-ordered it, will be the first beta with significant AI enhancements. It will also have a host of other tweaks based on increased internal play testing.

The last beta, beta 4C, was the first one to provide updated AI to the minor races. We haven't seen too many reports on any differences in their behavior. We'll be making a lot more tweaks to them. Basically, minor races will behave the same as major races in the final version except that they won't colonize new planets. But they'll invade, research, and just generally behave smarter than they have in the past.

For the past couple weeks, Stardock has had its collective attention on Sins of a Solar Empire. It's been a lot of work to get that out but the results have been fantastic. It's currently the #1 game in North America according to Gamerankings user interest polling. Sales have been phenomenal as well and the first few reviews have been very positive.

In the next week or so, we'll be migrating to an updated forum back-end that should be (in theory) much faster than what we have today.  It should also have a lot of cool new features. Naturally, everyone will hate it.

Most of the Stardock games team is working on the upcoming 4X fantasy strategy game which will be turn-based and have turn-based tactical battles and support multiplayer.  It uses a brand new engine we've been developing that allows players to zoom out and see the world as a cloth (Tolkien-esq) map or zoom in to see individual leaves on trees. The reason we've developed our own engine is so that we can have fine control on the hardware requirements. We want people with 5 year old systems to be able to play the game easily (and I mean play it VERY easily) but at the same time allow players with the latest DirectX 10 cards to get an incredible visual experience too.  We'll open that up for pre-orders (which will allow users into the beta) probably by end of Spring.

So that's what's happening.  Let us know if you need anything.

Cheers!

 

So you make a product and somehow you manage to get it at the store where millions of people see it. Pretty exciting eh? Thanks to the support of PC gamers, Sins of a Solar Empire is now at retail in most of North America.

Now, to thank you back, here's what we're going to do:

Take a picture of you (or a loved one) holding a Sins of a Solar box at a store, post the picture here in the comments along with which store you were at and get a chance to win an official Sins of a Solar Empire T-shirt.

The first 20 people to post pictures will automatically get one (we'll email you with shipping info and shirt size).  After that, we'll randomly select good pictures and keep sending shirts out while supplies last.

 

When skinning first got started, there was a kind of unspoken understanding between the people who made software and the people who used the software. There would be a symbiotic relationship between 3 groups.  The first group, the developers, would create software to customize the look and feel of your applications and desktop. The second group, the skinners, would create the content for these programs. And the third group, the users, would work with the first two groups to help test and ensure the software worked fine by giving detailed reports on betas and even releases to help perfect the program in general.  In return, the software was far far cheaper than software in other markets. Thus was borne the "skinning community".

Even into 2008, where a typical new game is $50 to $70 and the typical utility software is $50 to $70, the most popular desktop enhancement software programs remain $20 or less.  In fact, Object Desktop, an entire collection of desktop enhancements, is only $50. To put it in collection, WinRar, which is most commonly (let's be honest here) used to compress pirated software, is about $40 all by itself.

As skinning has become more mainstream, the relationship between the three parties has evolved.  Increasingly, the content creation is shouldered by fewer and fewer people. We created the Master Skinning program as an effort (a successful one) to encourage skinners with high degrees of talent to continue sharing their creations.  The net result is that content is starting to cost money because so few new users are creating it (even for relatively simple things).  Similarly, users are much less inclined to participate in open beta programs.  Look at the CursorFX release. There's multiple posts complaining in the vaguest terms that it doesn't work on their systems.  It works here just fine. Nearly everyone here is running CursorFX on XP or Vista without incident. We had an open beta but we received very few reports on it. 

The reality is, while the skinning "community" still exists, it is now a small sub-section of the "skinning market" which is made up of traditional consumers who simply expect (with good reason) to pay money in exchange for a program and content that just works.  There's nothing wrong with that. That's how every other market works. But those markets don't support products that are $10 to $20.  Those products are $50 to $70.   The only reason WindowBlinds isn't already a $40 program is because of the skinners and that it still gets significant help from the community in testing new beta versions (though drastically less than in the old days when, ironically, it had far fewer users).

Skinning is continuing to evolve. It's evolving increasingly into a more traditional consumer-oriented market.  Stardock, I suspect, will have to adapt with some system that allows users who are contributing time and effort to the community to get credits which lets them buy the software at a less expensive price while traditional consumers pay the un-subsidized rate for the products. 

I've written an article that goes into more detail.  Click the link below to check it out. 

Skinning first started getting popular around 1999. Back then, it was mostly about skinning Winamp and WindowBlinds.  Today, people expect to be able to customize virtually every aspect of their PC experience. From the moment someone boots to the time they shut down, everything a user sees they now anticipate the ability to personalize somehow if they choose to.

In the beginning, the content came from the community. The software itself was developed within the community as well. A given program would go through many beta iterations and technically savvy users would report problems they had, post their system info, and work with the developers to fix the problems. 

Because the community was essentially a partner in the production of the software, the software was relatively cheap. $10 to $20 was the typical price for any customization program. After all, if the user base was actively part of the development process and they were the ones providing the bulk of the content, how could anyone justify charging more than that?  And, as a practical matter, community participation drastically lowered the cost to develop skinning software which in turn opened the door to lots of freeware and shareware developers, working out of their houses, to create cool stuff.

When Windows XP came along in 2001, things began to change. Skinning became much more mainstream. The ratio between consumers of software/content to producers of software/content changed dramatically.  Once skinning went mainstream, users expectations began to change.  The number of people willing to create content dramatically decreased as a % of the user base.

In addition, the community that once would provide in-depth reports on bugs evolved into a community that increasingly would provide reports like "This is broke, it don't work on my computer. How could you release this buggy mess????" The same community that produced incredibly talented skinners increasingly became a community of consumers waiting for someone else to make things for them.

As the skinning community became more consumer-centric, the costs of providing software and content for that community increased. In many respects, the "community" of year year is long. Now it's a "market". Increasingly, unconsciously, even internally the word "market" has begun replacing the term "community".  The "skinning market" differs from the "skinning community" in that the former expects the software developers to do it all while the latter sees themselves as part of a team with the developers.

The net result is that most users simply want to buy a product and get really high quality content and not mess around with "community" content. Which, naturally, means that fewer people, as a % are willing to use the various editors and tools to create community content.

Similarly, today's users often become irate at the notion of running into bugs in software marked as betas. Very few users are willing to even try out betas and give feedback. Moreover, some people who do try out betas and do post expect that every issue they consider important will be quickly addressed and will stop contributing feedback if their particular issues aren't responded to in a timely way.

So what does this mean?

I predict we'll see the following trends:

1. Content will begin to be provided as an additional optional service. For example, a user might buy WindowBlinds for $20 OR have the option to buy WindowBlinds Plus for $40 which includes a 1-year subscription to WinCustomize.com.
2. WinCustomize.com subscriptions will continue to evolve to where content becomes increasingly the value-add users get.  Discounts on "Master Skins" and free content from Stardock Design will become the norm.
3. Users who contribute help in testing betas, giving feedback, generating content, helping in the community will get free subscriptions.

That's the 3 thigns I think will happen in the future as the skinning world adapts to becoming mainstream. In my mind, that's the best way for skinning to grow while saving its own soul.

Hopefully, people aren't taking what I'm writing as "complaining".  What I am doing is making observations about how the skinning world is evolving over time. The mainstreaming of it is altering the perceived relationship between the people who make stuff and the people who use stuff. The unspoken social contract between the two was traditionally that we developers make our stuff cheap and in return the users make the content and help us track down problems in an open and symbiotic way.  But that relationship has changed to being more akin to a traditional producer/consumer relationship. Which is fine if that's what the...market has chosen.

Wow.  We're just so happy that people are liking the game.  We're also happy that the reviews are coming out very positive so far.  And, well, we're definitely happy with the sales.  It's doing even better than Galactic Civilizations II did which was really well.

Here's our upcoming schedule:

1. Get a v1.03 update out
2. Make Demo
3. Start work on v1.04

We hope to get v1.03 out by the end of the month (no promises though). Ironclad (and Stardock) are pretty exhausted from the final weeks of effort and the first week of launch so resting will be done.

So think of v1.03 as a few key tweaks that you think would really make the game more enjoyable not just for you but other people.

Here's an example of things we're talking about right now:

• Updated AI players
• More Game Speed Options
• More aggressive AI players replacing dropped players (i.e. active AI)
• AI surrendering
• Improvements to ICO
• Unit cap increases

We have lots of ideas. But the key thing to remember, we want to get 1.03 out this month if possible. So sure, we can all imagine things like random events or fancier diplomacy or other things of that nature but those would take far too long to get into the game.