If I had more free time (and I hope to acquire this free time in the future as my schedule lightens up in early 2010) I would like to make something that does this:

A device that you would connect to your main power box in your house and then sends a wireless signal to your PC telling you how much power your home is using in real-time.

This data could then be shared, in real-time with on the net to a friendly website that would display with graphs your monthly power usage and compare it to other people with similarly sized homes.

The closest thing I've found so far is this.  The price is about right but it doesn't quite do the things I'd like to do with it.

But I think there's be a market for a $99 product that lets people monitor their home power consumption and see how they can reduce it.

The problem with our governmental tax system in the United States is that it has slowly been morphed into a coercive charity organization.

Below is a chart of the 2007 federal budget courtesy of the CBO:

If you look closely, "health" and "income security" (not to be confused with social security) now make up 25% of our budget and grow year after year.

Those programs are essentially government charity programs in which we take from one person to give to another.

Here's where the problem comes in: We have a progressive tax system.  In a society where 10% pay most of the taxes, it creates an incentive for politicians to pander to the remaining 90% for more free goodies.

If you are robbing Peter to pay Paul you can always count on the support of Paul.

What I would propose would be a system in which we maintain the progressive tax structure for governmental services (defense, education, roads, EPA, courts, federal police, etc.) but have a per taxpayer tax to cover the rest.

That is, if people really support having the government provide health care insurance for other people's children, then they shouldn't mind paying correspondingly more in taxes to pay for it.

In our present system, people can show their "compassion" for supporting programs like universal health care because, deep down, they know that only 10% (i.e. not them) will be paying for nearly all the bill.

In this system, people would finally start to see some consequences for the programs they support so earnestly.

A look back

Exactly one year ago, I wrote an article about how Stardock failed the skinning community.  It outlined 4 key issues that needed to be addressed this year.  So how did we do?

Challenge #1: Make it easier to create "stuff" for our software

This past year we saw the development of SkinStudio 6. A complete rewrite of SkinStudio from scratch.  It's still not quite done but it's in usable form and skinners seem to really like the direction it's going. 

In addition, the WinCustomize Wiki (wiki.wincustomize.com) project was begun this year to make it easier for skinners to learn about this stuff.  It's still in its infancy but it's a step in the right direction.

But overall, documentation has not substantially improved.  Stardock has brought on a dedicated technical writer to begin addressing this issue more thoroughly.

In summary, a lot of progress has been made but there is a lot more that still needs to be done.

Challenge #2: Organize support for Skinners

I don't think any real progress was made here.  DesktopX 3.5 is still in beta due to problems with Windows Vista SP1 compatibility.  Microsoft has taken a beating this past year with Windows Vista and a lot of it is pretty deserved.  They crippled a lot of software with their "security" initiatives.  As a result, a lot of things got delayed far longer than we expected.  Windows Vista has not been kind to the shell communities.

The challenge of having dedicated people working with the skinning community is a simple lack of funding.  The kind of support we envision for skinners is expensive.

Challenge #3: Get more involved in the community

Zubaz, a leader in the community, has helped out quite a bit. Island Dog has been making lots of good articles. And Stardock support is more present on the forums.  I have increased my presence too this year and have been pretty brutal at times in coming in and squashing exclusionary cliques. So I would imagine some people may wish I wasn't as involved as I was.  I plan to increase my presence further this next year as my other projects clear up some.

I am not sure if enough has been done though in this area. What are your thoughts?

Challenge #4: Lead by example

This is one area I think we have been pretty successful with.  Stardock Design has come out with a lot of stuff this past year. Nearly 40 skins of various categories were released this past year.  From DeskScapes animated wallpapers (Dreams), WindowBlinds skins, Sound Packages, gadgets, and so on.

In 2008, this will get a lot better as things really only started getting going in the latter half of the year. The big issue that needed (and still needs) to be resolved is showing off what can be done to serve as an example to others.  I think this has been pretty successful.  Even if you don't use SoundPackager (you should at least try it out) the fact that it was released with several sound packages provided by Stardock Design is a major break with the past where Stardock would simply throw a new piece of tech out there and hope people made stuff for it.

Similarly, WindowBlinds 6 shipped with several brand new skins. This was a marked contrast with the past where Stardock simply bundled popular skins from the community.

For Next Year...

So what does Stardock need to do next year for skinning?  Here's my list:

Resolution #1: More freely available skins from Stardock Design.  We have Aero Executive, Aero Graphite, and Elegance nearly ready to go. We had intended to release Elegance before the break but there are a couple of little buglets that need to be fixed first.  But overall, there needs to be more examples of how to do X from Stardock Design.  I think Stardock Design did well with the Dreams (animated wallpapers). This pattern needs to be followed into other areas.

Resolution #2: A new GUI Championships. We need to have another multi-site contest. Windows Vista will be mature and so will the software.  The contest needs to have more promotion than last time and have more forewarning.

Resolution #3: More documentation. We're trying in this area but it's difficult to do good documentation. Especially at the price points a lot of this software is.  The tough reality is that if we want to provide more services to customers, the price of the software is going to have to go up to cover it. I.e. If we bring in a full time technical writer dedicated to writing tutorials, manuals, documentations, user guides, etc. then that salary has to be paid for somehow.

Resolution #4: More polish on tools. You've hopefully seen that the over polish quality of Stardock's software has significantly improved this year.  Whether it be WindowBlinds 6, TweakVista, SoundPackager or CursorFX, there's been a significant level of polished brought here.  Similarly, SkinStudio 6 is quite polished and we'll be attempting to do the same with DesktopX going forward too.  The idea is to try to broaden the appeal of these things.

But if there are things you'd like to see us concentrate instead, comment below and let us know.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Before we headed out for Christmas break, we wanted to get a new Dark Avatar update out there since there were a couple of bugs introduced in the last update that were annoying us all. 1.8G fixes a Metaverse submission bug, a pathfinding bug, a typo, and a possible memory leak.

We also updated the beta of Twilight of the Arnor this week. We didn't add the Thalan or the Altarians as they are simply much more ambitious in some respects than what we've done so far. Over the holidays the AI and balancing we start being implemented to a much higher degree along with more fleshing out of all the civilizations.

Also, we've got some good news.  GameSpy rated Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar as the 6th best game released last year (all platforms).  It was also a finalist for strategy game of the year from G4's XPlay TV show and is a finalist for user choice "strategy game of the year" over at Gamespot (though user vote things tend to reflect sales and turn based 4X strategy games don't tend to have the user base as RPGs and such).

We hope you all have a great Christmas and happy New Year.  I'll be around if anyone has any questions and will be writing journal entries as I work on the AI.

Cheers

-Brad Wardell (aka Frogboy & Draginol)

As the end of the year approaches, I decided to take a look at my schedule for the past year.  For the past 51 weeks, I've averaged working 56 hours per week. If it weren't for my summer vacation, it would have been a higher average.  Assuming that average will hold for the last week (and it will despite it being the holidays) I worked 2912 hours last year give or take an hour or two. 

If you divide that by 8, which is the number of hours a normal American works and I worked 364 work days (or in other words, I worked the equivalent of every day but Christmas).

Virtually all my income is taxed at 35% federal. My state taxes are about 4%. And everything I buy is taxed with a 6% sales tax.  I also have property taxes, gas taxes, and taxes I am largely unaware of.

All told, about 47% of what I make ends up being taken by the government in some form.

Put another way, I worked for the government 171 normal work days.  Or, until the end of August I was a slave to the government.

And yet, there are some people that argue that I should work even more for the government. That I'm not doing my "fair share".  That because I work hard and work long hours, I can thus afford to work more of those hours so that other people's family, rather than my own family, can benefit from my labor.

Nobody forces me to work. This is the retort of the left. And they're right. Nobody does force me to work. That's something they should remember. They should also consider the consequences if people like me don't work when they start demanding that I pull their weight even further.  Some of them might say that if I quit, someone else would step into my place. History has demonstrated that to not be the case.

When people demand that "the government" provide services, ask yourself this: Would you, personally, be willing to work more hours for the government for that service?  Would you be willing to work from January to September for the government to support those services?  Because when the "government" gives out goodies to individuals, they do so by confiscating the fruits of another person's labor.

Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is up for Best expansion pack of the year at Gamespot.

Users are allowed to chime in with their 2 cents on the matter. See the link below to check it out!

[Stardock's Detailed Preview of Features]

Our story so far...

In Winter of 2007, Stardock released the first expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords (GalCiv II). This expansion pack was called Galactic Civilizations: Dark Avatar. It expanded the game play of GalCiv II by adding special planetary environments, asteroid fields, advanced espionage, user-designed opponents, more ship components, and much more.

Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar went on to be one of the highest rated PC games of 2007 and was awarded "Best Expansion Pack" of 2007 by GameSpy (beating out such excellent expansion packs such as World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade, Civilization: Beyond the Sword, Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts and many others.

How does Stardock top Dark Avatar?  The answer: Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor. The second and last expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations II.

The galaxy, as you know it, is gone

The galaxy is in turmoil. The evil Dread Lords play all sides against each other in an effort to grind down all opposition. But there is hope. The last of the Arnor have returned and have put their waning might behind a renegade Terran Alliance task force.

Preliminaries

Galactic Civilizations is a turn-based strategy game. Players choose a civilization to play as (or create their own), research new technologies, build planetary improvements on their worlds, design starships, conduct trade, fight wars, negotiate treaties, and attempt to reign supreme in a hostile galaxy.

Highlighted new features

Here are the key new features for Twilight of the Arnor:

• Each major civilization now gets its own unique technology tree.  We don't mean that each civilization gets a few unique technologies. We mean that each civilization gets their own, technology tree.  Even on technologies that are common, the description text changes from civilization to civilization giving different insights into the back story of the civilization.
• Terror Stars. Players can now build mobile bases of death that can destroy entire star systems!
• Vastly more planetary improvements. There are probably more new planetary improvements in Twilight than there were total improvements in GalCiv II. These improvements greatly enhance gameplay and add new strategies to the game.
• New types of ships.  Ships can enhance other ships in a fleet, behave differently when battles are fought in friendly territory, add more hit points to ships, and much more. It significantly alters the strategies available to players.
• New Victory Condition: Ascension. Scattered across the galaxy are shards of the Precursors. Build (and defend) star bases on these special galactic resources and work towards ascension. Of course, other players may want to put a stop to your march to victory. This greatly changes the game dynamics since players can make a desperate gambit for victory but also can no longer turtle into a corner of the map and go for a technology victory so easily. Like other victory conditions, it can be enabled or disabled.
• Map Editor. Now players can design their own maps. They can also be uploaded to GalCiv2.com and shared with others.
• Scenario Editor. As configurable as a GalCiv game is, the scenario editor lets people tweak their start up options to incredible levels. They can even save them and share them with others.
• Tech Tree Editor. Players can add their own technologies to the game and the computer players will even automatically use them intelligently.
• Planetary Improvement Editor. Now players can create their own planetary improvements and like techs, the computer players will automatically use them intelligently.
• Star Ship Component editor. New components for ships can now be created by players and like the others, automatically used by the computer players.
• Updated Planetary Invasion Screen. The old ugly planetary invasion screen has been replaced with ad ynamic one that has state of the art graphics.
• Metaverse On-Line Tournaments. Players can play a specific map with a specific scenario and compare their scores to others on-line to see how they match up.
• New Galaxy Size: Immense. For players who want their epic games to last months
• Massive graphics overhaul. Nearly all the graphics in the game have been re-designed. Moreover, they now use a fraction of the memory of the old ones. That's right, they look better and use in many cases 1/10th as much memory. Read this section to learn more on this as it's really cool.
• Tons of new content. More race portraits, new ship parts, new civilization logos, extra planetary improvement images for use by players, and more.
• Updated Sound Track. New background music and scoring helps keep the game fresh and new.
• Updated Computer AI. Taking the feedback from players over the past year, the computer players will play more intelligently. That means at lower levels they'll play like "newbie" human players and at higher levels they will play more like expert human players (the goal isn't to make the game "harder" but rather more fun).
• The New Campaign: Twilight of the Arnor. Discover the fate of the Dread Lords and the galaxy itself.

This doesn't count the hundreds of minor new features in the game based on implementing player feedback. The overall result is like having a whole new game.

Many reviews of Dark Avatar thought it could have practically been a sequel.  This is probably even more true of Twilight of the Arnor.

Unique Technology Trees

12 of them to be exact. There are 12 different technology trees in Twilight of the Arnor.  These aren't just technologies renamed. We went back and fleshed out every civilization in detail.  Below are some examples:

Here is the Terran Alliance tech tree which is the most similar to the GalCiv II default tech tree:

First thing to notice is that now you can see what a given technology gives you. The new improvement, ship part, ability, etc. is now displayed on the tree itself. If you mouse-over them, it will go into more detail.

Second, though this is only obvious if you've played GalCiv II before, the technologies are set up in a much more logical way than previously.

Nopw compare that to say the Iconian tech tree:

Xeno Communications and Universal Translators are still there.  And so are many other recognizable technologies. But huge swaths of these technologies are unique to the Iconians.  Each race has its own background, its own history. And to help explain this, civilizations have many background technologies that they come with that help explain a bit about them.

For example:

Right-clicking on any technology name now (another new feature) will bring up information on it. Players can read volumes of information and back story on each civilization in-game. Plus, they can see what technologies that brings.

Terror Stars

Terror Stars are an immensely expensive but incredibly powerful battle station that can stop the fusion reaction in a star. In doing so, all of the planets in a star system can be destroyed.  They are fairly fragile but great for civilizations who hold space superiority to make full use of it.

Terror Stars are not popular with the neighbors, however.

Planetary Improvements Galore

The magnitude of the fact that Twilight of the Arnor has 12 unique technology trees does not really hit home until you start playing and seeing all the planetary improvements.

Every single planetary improvement available in this screenshot is unique to this civilization. All of the planetary improvements except for the planetary capital and star port in the screenshot are unique to this civilization.  Also, notice how high quality the planetary improvements are. The star port in this screenshot is from Dark Avatar and is shown for comparison.  Players will immediately notice how many new and unique planetary improvements they have depending on which civilization they play. And these planetary improvements aren't simply new graphics and text for existing improvements. Each civilization has its own philosophy on how to get things done.

New Types of Ships

Another benefit of the unique technology trees are all the new unique ship modules. There are now modules that will speed up ships in a fleet, increase the damage fleets do, increase how much damage ships do in friendly territory, increase hit points (at great financial cost) on a ship.

Couple other notes about this screenshot. First, the extra components now are displayed together in a much better way.  Secondly, players can now assign parts to actually be animated on a ship (i.e. moving parts on the ship!).

Did we mention that all this comes with a reduced memory print over GalCiv II and GalCiv II: Dark Avatar?

New Victory Condition: Ascension

Previously, the technology victory in Galactic Civilizations has the player ascending to a higher level of being. This has been changed so that a technology victory has the player mastering the known dimensions and being able to develop weapons that affect space-time.

This paves the way for the new victory condition, ascension.  Players who capture and hold the ascension galactic resources eventually build up what are essentially victory points and win the game. Consider the game play ramifications of this. It may not always be a good idea to try to capture these ascension galactic resources unless you're prepared for other civilizations forcibly removing you from them (and vice versa).

The New Editors

Since Twilight of the Arnor is going to be our last expansion pack (we really enjoy making the expansion packs and they do sell well but we have to finish some major game projects going forward), we wanted to let players control the destiny of the game by creating a series of editors that will let them essentially create their own expansion packs.  Everything that one would imagine in a typical game expansion pack (i.e. new content) should be able to be made with these new editors.

New Invasion Screen

There's a reason why there are very few screenshots out there of the Invasion screen of Galactic Civilizations.  First, it causes nerve damage so there's a liability issue in showing what it looks like. Second..well it causes nerve damage.

The new one, by contrast shows, based on what improvements are on a given planet, what a planetary invasion would really mean:

Metaverse Tournaments

These could be described as specific scenarios for players to try out.  Many strategy games have this. GalCiv II lacked them until Twilight of the Arnor.  But to take it one step further, we let people record their scores on the Metaverse to see how well they do compared to others.  The game will ship with 3 with more released with official tournaments (with prizes and goodies to the winners) later.

Immense Sized Galaxies

The larger the galaxy, the more planets there are. The more planets, the longer a game takes.  Most strategy games, even turn-based ones, typically don't see games that end with players controlling more than a hundred or so cities, bases, worlds, stars, whatever.  Some players always want even more epic sized maps.  And thanks to the memory savings of the new graphics, we were able to add this new galaxy size.

Immense sized galaxies are a mile stone in epic strategy gaming. Each of the dots in that mini  map represents a star and around those stars are planets of which many may be colonized.

A Massive Graphics Overhaul

Improved graphics are nothing new in an expansion pack.  But the magnitude of the improvement using the same graphics engine we suspect may bring up discussion in the future.  For instance, consider this:

GalCiv II: Dark Avatar / Dread Lords

GalCiv II: Twilight of the Arnor

The difference in quality between the two is immense. It's almost the kind of before and after screenshot one expects when comparing a game console to a next-generation game console. Except that both models have the same number of polygons. The only real difference is the quality of the texture.

But wait, there's more -- the texture in Twilight of the Arnor uses less than 1/10th as much memory as the textures in Dark Avatar.  That's because in Dark Avatar (and the base GalCiv II) every ship had its own texture. To save memory, these textures were low resolution.  But in Twilight of the Arnor, all the ships of a given style share one very high resolution texture. And since each civilization's ships follow a particular visual theme, this provides some consistency.

Here's another example:

Bear in mind that the ship at the bottom here is sharing the same texture as the ship from the first example. But they share only parts of the same texture which allows them to look very unique even as they are very high resolution and use a lot less memory.

Another area are planetary improvements:

In Dark Avatar and before, the improvements were lower resolution. But now they are much higher resolution which makes them crisper, especially at higher resolutions. This will be important as players in the future play the game as higher resolutions. Nothing ages a game faster than dated graphics.

Then there's the planets themselves.

The top is an irradiated planet from GalCiv: Dark Avatar. The bottom is an irradiated planet in Twilight of the Arnor.  Oh, and the bottom uses a lot less memory and reduces the start-up time of a large-sized galaxy by up to 15 seconds on a typical system.  What the heck happened? A really really bad idea that seemed clever at the time. 

GalCiv II planets had randomly generated surfaces using fractals. Neat right? Every planet was different each game. The problem is, they were ugly and nobody really cared that they were truly unique since they were so ugly and increased the game load time. In Twilight of the Arnor, the planets have been created by artists but are still somewhat randomized to have some uniqueness. But there are so many of them that few people will notice repeats and they use about 1/3rd as much memory as the old system.

Here you see the Terran, Drengin, Arcean, and Yor home worlds from Dark Avatar.  Note how similar each world is (except for the humans who at least got their own Earth planet surface). See how their building options are all the same. Notice how similar the planets look.  Also notice that (ahem) the Yor, who are robots, have farms.

Below is from Twilight of the Arnor...

Two things to take away from the comparison. First, the planets don't just look a lot better, they are distinct per civilization.  Secondly, look at the planetary improvements each start out with. They're not just the same ones renamed with different graphics. They are genuinely different planetary improvements with significantly different capabilities. Each civilization is now truly different and looks great while at it.

The overall result is that Twilight of the Arnor just looks like a newer game. Even the game UI has been enhanced.

And so much more

The list of changes in Twilight of the Arnor would go on for pages and pages. Everything from interface tweaks to new game screens to the updated computer AI and so on.  The net result is that Twilight of the Arnor is arguably a complete re-imagining of what Galactic Civilizations II is. 

One might argue (correctly) that there are far more features in Twilight of the Arnor than are really necessary for a $29.95 expansion pack.  But we looked at this as our final opportunity to go and make significant changes to the game that will help ensure that the game continues to be fun for players for years to come. 

Getting Twilight of the Arnor

Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor requires that the first expansion pack (Dark Avatar) already be installed on the system in order to be played. 

Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor is $29.95 on its own. For players who only have Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords, an expansion bundle of $44.95 is available.

And for players who want it all, an Ultimate Bundle that includes it all will be available for $59.95.

GalCiv II is available at retail. Twilight of the Arnor will be available via TotalGaming.net.

All purchasing options are available here:  [Galactic Civilizations II shop]