I can't say enough good things about GameSpy.  First, as an independent game developer, we don't have corporate overlords to keep us from saying politically incorrect things. So let me say this very plainly: Gamespy rocks.  They have always been quick to support games regardless of the size of the company.  They have no bias against games that lack multiplayer even though they are best known for their multiplayer software extensions. And their reviews and coverage are independent of advertising. We just love them.

Anyway, they have the latest internal build of Twilight of the Arnor up which has some features that aren't publicly available.  You can check it out here.

Between now and the release of the upcoming expansion pack, Twilight of the Arnor, we will be adding a new editor called the Starship component editor.  It will let users easily tweak and add new starship componetns into the game.  The computer AI will automatically use them.

The addition of this new feature won't affect the release date. What happens is that we just keep coming up with new stuff we want to put into the game and so we end up making it.

We are still on track for tomorrow for Beta 3 which adds the Iconians (read about the new info here) and Terror Stars!

Tomorrow the Iconians will be introduced in Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor Btea 3.

In the creation of the Galactic Civilizations universe (when it was just a series of unpublished stories), the Iconians were one of the first named civilizations.  A race of beings who were nearly wiped out of existence by their malevolent creations, the Yor.  Even in Galactic Civilizations I, the home world of the Yor was known as Iconia (even though the Iconians were not in that game).

The Yor used a biological plague to destroy the Iconian civilization. In the stories, the Terran Alliance discovers the Yor and Iconians quite by accident when humans begin dying from an unknown disease after discovering the Iconians.  This leads the humans far across the galaxy to discover the Yor in an effort to find a cure for the disease before mankind is wiped out.

The Iconian civilization is the only civilization that existed during the noontide of the Precursors. Before the Precursor civil war, which saw that civilization break into two factions now known as the Arnor and the Dread Lords, the Iconians were the servants of the Precursors.

In time, the Precursor war saw the Iconians as unwitting pawns in their struggle. The Precursor civilization resulted in the near extinction of the Iconian race. However, the Iconians have far more knowledge of the Precursors than any others.

Unfortunately, Iconian culture has not lent itself to technological research. Economics, industry, and research as we know them to be are completely foreign to the Iconians. The Iconians replicated the Precursor way of life in all its forms. The Precursors, however, were potent because of their innate being. That is, the source of Precursor power was inherent. By contrast, the Iconians are a biological organism that evolved over millions of years on Iconia. As a result, the Iconians were always little more than a pale reflection of their masters.

The challenge of the Iconians is to develop a modern economic, cultural, and manufacturing civilization. To jump start this the Iconians have access to a great number of partially translated works of the Precursors to call upon.

The Iconians have many many unique technologies, improvements, and ships because frankly, the Iconians are a very unusual civilization.  They have, for instance, access to many Precursor technologies in watered down form.  They also have their own robotic technology:

The Iconians, in their quest to have servants of their own, constructed ever more advanced machines to labor for them. Just as the Iconians were servants of the Precursors, so to did these near-sentient machines act as servants to the Iconians.

During the civil war between the Precursors, the faction known today as the Dread Lords modified the robotic servants of the Iconians to achieve sentience. Thus was born the malevolent race known as the Yor. The Yor quickly sought to exterminate their creators. They did so first using a biological plague since, at first, the Iconians vastly outnumbered the Yor. With the population of the Iconians decimated, the Yor then set upon the scattered survivors methodically in an effort to wipe out the remaining grops.

With some help from the Arnor, the Iconians escaped to a distant world now known as "New Iconia". To this day, Iconia is inhabited by the Yor.

While the Iconians lost much of their technology, so skilled were they in the construction of robots that this is an area that the Iconians continue to lead. Of course, they are very careful now to construct their servants such that they are no where near what could be considered sentient.

The core of the Iconian strategy is thusly: They are not as good at weapons as other civilizations. But their ships are incredibly tough thanks to access to self-healing armor, organic hull technologies, etc. 

In the classic RPG Baldur's Gate, I remember thinking at the end of the game that my character was really impressive.  Then I played Baldur's Gate II and realized just what real power meant.  That's the essence of Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor.  The civilizations are getting more powerful.

This week, Beta 2B for Twilight of the Arnor was released. No new races have been added. But the existing races are much more powerful than previously.

For instance, the Arceans get the Stellar Forge Galactic Achievement. And they get it right away.  Once built, it increases the hitpoints of ships made on that planet by 25%.

The Terran Alliance, however, get their own initial Galactic Achievement they can build called the Innovation Complex which makes ships built on that planet go +1 in speed.

The Yor get some love too with some tweaks to their initial improvements and the Maintenance Coordinator which improves their morale.

There will still be balancing needing to be done, but the clear direction of Twilight of the Arnor is that the younger races are starting to become quite powerful in their own right.

I just got back from the future in my time machine. Lots of cool stuff and not so cool stuff too.

But one of the things that surprised me was how eBooks ended up succeeding in ways one didn't expect and failed utterly in the areas it was expected to do well in.

It all started with the Kindle.  The Kindle was the first mainstream (seriously mainstream) attempt to get eBooks going.  With Amazon getting behind it (just like the did the Segway incidentally) the Kindle became pretty successful in its time.  But in the end, it failed as a product once people concluded a few things about books:

1. People like books (physically).
2. The people who buy lots of books like to have them around.
3. People like the share books.
4. If you damage a book, you might be out a few bucks, damage Kindle and you're out $400.
5. Books don't have idiotic DRM issues.
6. Books are easy to hold and read (Kindle doesn't have enough text on screen).
7. Books can be sized and have print designed for that book (Kindle is a one sized fits all solution).

I buy about 4 to 6 books per month. I spend a lot of time reading. I'm also a techie. I'm the ideal customer for the Kindle.  Besides the fact that the thing is ugly, overpriced, and can't even handle PDF's directly, it does have an important niche use: The ability to read many different things while traveling.

And ultimately, that's where eBooks will end up taking off.  In the future, people buy physical books still but they also get a license to the Kindle version (good for Kindle, its format becomes the standard -- Amazon gets rich off of licensing the format even as its device fails). 

So when you go on a trip, your iPhone G5 will have your Kindle books on it too that you can read while the physical book remains at home.  Which is nice since I don't have to drag with me 2 or 3 hard cover books (that's the problem with non-fiction books, they tend to be big hard covers).

But Kindle, as a device will fail. But once Amazon figures out how to sell Kindle content with the actual book for tiny extra fee, it will succeed as a format.

With the recent announcement that DeskScapes 2.0 will be out by February and that it will work on all versions of Windows Vista, the question is no longer if but rather when will animated wallpaper be widely available.  Stardock expects to release the first beta of it to Object Desktop users before Christmas and include some premium animated wallpapers (which we call "Dreams") with it.

So how mainstream will animated wallpapers become? It's an open question.  Like all customization, the answer is, most people won't use it. Most people don't even change their default wallpapers.  But I believe that animated wallpapers will become surprisingly popular. Here's why:

In the past month, Dreams have more entries in the top 30 than any other category other than WindowBlinds.  And considering that only users of Windows Vista Ultimate can even use them at present, that's an incredible statistic.  And considering how gradual Vista adoption has been overall and that Ultimate users make up only a tiny fraction of that group, one can imagine a future where animated wallpaper is quite popular.

Some people have argued that animated wallpapers are a waste of system resources.  And while it is true that some animated wallpapers (particularly video ones) can use quite a bit of CPU, that's not the general case.  Moreover, I remember people who thought static wallpapers were a waste because, after all, a 1024x768x24bit wallpaper used over two megabytes of memory which, back in the 90s was a lot of memory.  What seems resource intensive one day seems trivial in later days.

Like regular wallpapers, the popularity of an animated wallpaper will depend on its quality. Regular wallpapers can be pretty obnoxious. Animated wallpapers have the capacity of being even more obnoxious since they move.  But that doesn't mean animated wallpapers can't be compelling. 

Only time will tell but I suspect that animated wallpapers will become an extremely hot commodity in the coming years.  We'll see.

At home, when I'm coding or playing games I do it on my trusty Dell XPS Gen 3 PC.  It's blue, it's loud, and it's powerful.  Or at least it was in 2005 when I bought it.

But this weekend, when I benchmarked my various PCs, the trusty machine came in last. By far.  My new laptop is much faster. Heck, my OLD laptop is faster.

So now I'm in the position of trying to decide whether I should retire the Dell home mega machine (not mega anymore) and instead simply get a docking station for my ThinkPad T61 and use that for everything at home instead.

Though, it does go to show that PCs don't become obsolete very fast anymore.  My new machines may be much faster on paper but I don't feel that much difference.  The Dell from over 2 years ago is still fine for playing Company of Heroes, Galactic Civilizations II, and any other game I've recently thrown at it. 

CO2 produced by humans is causing the recent increase in temperature is a hypothesis. But it has no evidence to support it. It's not even what one would label as a theory. It could be correct, it might not be correct.  I have about the same opinion of it as I do for the hypothesis of "intelligent design".  Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. But there isn't evidence.  Given the movement's spotty record for yearly temperatures (it's actually gotten cooler since 1998 incidentally, not that you hear much about that little tidbit) it's hard to argue that it's firmly based on "science".  Theories are science and they make testable predictions. (see theory vs. hypothesis).

Methane is also a green house gas. It traps heat at over 20X the level of CO2.  Moreover, while CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up some since the start of the industrial revolution, the rise in methane has gone up vastly more in the past 50 years in particular.

But at the end of the day, the hypothesis remains: CO2 is a green house gas. Green house gases trap heat. More trapped heat will cause temperatures to rise. Temperatures have risen in the northern hemisphere since 1976 slightly. Therefore, it must be CO2.

Of course, temperatures in the southern hemisphere have not risen and the antarctic ice cap has grown. 

But I will grant that the northern hemisphere has definitely increased in temperature.  And I'm willing to also grant that humans are probably helping it a long.

Therefore, what should be done?

First, we have to decide whether global warming is a "bad thing".  The case really hasn't been made that it really is a "bad thing" (Al Gore's ridiculous arguments that the sea level will suddenly rise by a dozen feet or whatever notwithstanding).

Then, we have to decide what we would do about it.  Even if we removed every car off the road, it would make a trivial impact on worldwide CO2.  Humans only produce 14% of the CO2 that goes into the air each year.  And CO2 only accounts for a couple % of the green house effect. (this data is available on the global warming advocate websites btw, they don't dispute these facts).

The bottom line, there is really very little we can do to affect the situation other than largely eliminating all worldwide use of fossil fuels AND largely moving to a vegetarian diet (methane levels have gone up because the population of animals for meat is now several BILLION -- people don't like talking about this fact).

As a meat eater and someone who likes to use energy, I don't really want to give up my pork chops or my air conditioning in the Summer.

Talk about raising fuel standards or Kyoto accords or what have you are not serious discussions as they would have no impact.

Which is the problem with global warming as a religion. Because its adherents are generally ignorant of the details of it, they've simply been hammered with "the debate is over" mentra, they don't really understand the ramifications of their belief.  It's sort of like the person who believes that the old testament of the bible must be followed literally only to get ticked off when we start talking about Leviticus and stoning his wife for being out in public during certain times of the month. 

That is, if you believe that CO2 is the cause of global warming and that the CO2 in question is from humans then only deinustrializing most of the planet is going to cure that.  Getting rid of SUVs or switching to hydrogen based cars or solar power isn't going to have much impact unless it's done completely, worldwide and even then, the effect is going to be miniscule (especially as long as we have billions of methane producing livestock hanging around).