I just finished finalizing the story for Twilight of the Arnor.  While Dread Lords and Dark Avatar were interesting in their own ways, I think that this campaign will be the most fun and interesting of them all. Players will really get to learn about the Precursors and there will be a LOT of Dread Lord action in this. There are entire missions where it's just you vs. Dread Lords. It's no holds barred.

One interesting mechanic will be the addition of the new Immense sized galaxy which one of the campaign missions makes use of.  With 400+ sectors in a given map, there will be plenty of action.

All players of GalCiv will also benefit from Twilight of the Arnor since we'll have to optimize a lot of code in order to make possible some of the things in Twilight.  And some of those optimizations will be made available throughout all versions.

Hopefully people will like what we're doing with Twilight. It's going to play a lot differently in the campaign than the previous ones.

I am in an airport right now communicating with my Verizon 5750 which is an awesome air card.

I am also finishing my first business trip with the LG Env cell phone which just rocks.  The cell phone part was very helpful (it has great speaker phone capability) but where it really came in handy was its built in GPS and local search features.  Being in Manhattan, there's a lot of stuff everwhere but it's really nice to be able to look up the local Best Buy or a good Italian restraurant or whatever and have it show you real time directions on how to get there from where you're at.

It also has email syncronization which is really nice so I can get messages on the road.

My only complaint about Verizon is that they have way too many UserID's and passwords. I can't even get into half of the features because I odn't know all the passwords to my account.

But the phone itself rocks.

I'd love to hear the thoughts of skinners on whether the new SkinStudio beta (version 6) is working out well.

Skinning has to get a LOT easier than it's gotten in the past year or two.  So how are we doing?

We have so many ideas that we've documented based on player feedback that we could keep doing expansion packs indefinitely.

Some people might say, "Why not do a sequel?" but as a practical matter, whole new games are much more expensive to do than expansion packs are. 

In the case of Galactic Civilizations, the soonest a GalCiv III would come out would be like 2010 and that would be a best-case scenario.  That's because the bulk of our development resources are working on the unannounced fantasy strategy game.

But expansion packs can be done with smaller staffs since you have the basic game there to do.  But that raises the question, how many expansion packs do people want and how radical should they be?

For example, I would be open to revamping the whole economic system in a future expansion pack to help streamline it.  I'd also like to expand the United Planets to allow civilizations to submit "bills" to the UP to vote on.  I'd also like to see more types of ship components, more diplomatic options, and so on.

Other players have requested things like multiplayer, tactical battles, fast carriers, invasion improvements, and so forth. 

But the question is, would players be interested in another 2 or 3 or more expansion packs in the future?  (or put another way, would there be enough players interested to pay for the cost of development)?  Or would it make more sense to have Twilight of the Arnor be the final expansion pack and move fully on to other projects and do a sequel in 3 or 4 years?

What do you think?

This is a real tragedy but a woman in a mini van was racing through a parking lot to try to beat a train to the crossing.

She lost.

Inside her van were her 4 children. Two of them (her two daughters) were killed.  Her two sons survived but were badly injured as well as the woman.

32-bit gaming is going to come to an end.  Not today. Not tomorrow, but a lot sooner than most people think.

That's because no matter how much memory your PC has, no matter how much virtual memory you have, a given process on a 32-bit Windows machine only gets 2 gigabytes of memory (if the OS had been better designed, it would have been 4 gigs but that's another story).

Occasionally you run into people in the forums who say "I got an out of memory error".  And for months we couldn't figure it out.  We don't have any memory leaks that we know of and the people who reported it had plenty of virtual memory.  So what was the deal?

The problem was a basic misunderstanding on how memory in Windows is managed.  We (myself included) thought that each process in Windows may only get 2 gigabytes of memory but if it ran out of that memory, it would simply swap to the disk drive.  Thus, if a user had a large enough page file, no problem.  But that's not how it works.  After 2 gigabytes of memory, the system simply won't allocate the process any more memory. It simply fails and you will end up with a crashed game.

This is a very significant problem.  In Galactic Civilizations II v1.7, we'll at least be able to address this with more aggressive dealocation routines (which I really hate having to do, I really prefer the idea of once something is used, to keep it around for performance -- I've always been a proponent of performance over memory use).  But we'll be able to do it here without any noticeable affect in performance.

No, the real problem is in future games. If 2 gigabytes is the limit and a relatively low impact game like Galactic Civilizations is already running into it (and it's no memory hog), what's coming up next?  How about this -- when your video card runs out of memory for textures, it goes to system memory. And I think (but haven't tested this) that the memory it grabs belongs to the game process. 

Console game developers would simply laugh at our complaints and say that we just need to get better at de-allocating memory.  But that's only a short-term solution.  Gamers, particularly PC gamers, want to see their games get better looking and more sophisticated. 

So at some point, in the next few years, serious gamers and high-end games are going to have to require 64-bit machines to play them.  It'll probably be several years before it becomes common but it's coming. 

The good short-term news for GalCiv players is that we'll be able to have larger sized galaxies in GalCiv II: Twilight of the Arnor without running out of memory and users of GalCiv II will be able to avoid running out of memory once they get v1.7.

Next week is the last week of August. Fall is starting to loom which, in the customization world, is when things start getting exciting again.  Here's some of the highlights from this past week.

• WinCustomize Magazine: August 2007 (emailer in process of being sent)
• This week in skinning
• ObjectBar 2.1 beta was updated this week for Object Desktop users.
• Stardock Virtual Desktops got updated for Object Desktop users.
• TweakVista was released
• DesktopX 3.5 beta was updated this week
• Internal Stardock IconDeveloper 2.0 beta updated

We've also become increasingly aware of an issue that is going to become more pronounced as users move to Windows Vista: The UAC makes it a lot tougher to have system monitorng plugins.  That is, if you use Litestep, Aston Shell, DesktopX, AveDesk, ObjectBar, etc. Odds are you are going to have some difficulty with some of those CPU meters, memory monitors, drive space info, network speed info, etc. plugins.  DXPerf in DesktopX, for instance, is dead on Vista.  It will have to be rewritten from scratch. The entire NT-based sub-structure now falls under the purvue of the Vista UAC which prevents it from running.  Definitely a bummer.  But new plugins will be made, it will just take time.

And lastly, BIG kudos to the community for producing the best community suite we've seen in years: Citrium. A big hand to Buzz, fairy, Don, WebGizmos, Night Train, and everyone else who helped create that awesome suite.

Have a good weekend!

Windows Vista delivered some outstanding icons.  The new icons in Vista are natively 256 pixel by 256 pixel images.  This is great from an aesthetics point of view.

But there are some downsides.

First, any icon (whether in a program or elsewhere) that doesn't have a 256x256 version gets its 48x48 version used even if a higher resolution icon is available (such as 128x128 icons).  This means that many of the great icon packages of all time that supported the 128x128 Windows XP icon format won't look great under Windows Vista.

Secondly, as you can imagine 256x256 is pretty big.  To put it in perspective, the icon in this news item is only 128x128.  A 256x256 image is FOUR TIMES bigger.  So you're talking about a lot of artwork needed to make it look good (a lot more detail needed). This vastly increases the artistic capability necessary to make them.

The article linked below talks about some of the challenges. What do you think is going to happen? 

You can now use Microsoft Word 2007 to post your blogs on JoeUser.com.

To do it, do the following:

Choose new blog from Word 2007. Then, for the API choose MetaWebBlog and for the Posting URL use this:

https://www.joeuser.com/api/xmlrpc.aspx

Then enter your UserID and PW from JoeUser.com and voila.

And that's it!

The number of college students I meet these days whose life goals are purely to accumulate wealth is getting pretty distressing.

They pick their career paths based on the path of least resistance to "getting rich".  When they meet me and ask me questions, my answers tend not to be reassuring.

What I tell them is this: Do something you love that happens to make money. Because if you love what you do, you'll tend to get very very good at it.  And only through being the top of your career path, whatever that might be, will you ever make a lot of money.

There is, a second problem they have to face too -- to love what you do you can't have money be the object.  I got into computer game development and desktop utility software because I loved doing it.

For instance, back in the late 90s, when we were fiddling around with customizing the way Windows looked, nobody had any idea if anyone wanted to do this sort of thing.  The term "skinning" wasn't really known outside of Quake yet.  And there was, contrary to what some people have tried to argue, no "community" of skinners or developers out there.  But we loved tinkiner with how our computers looked and felt and over time found other people who felt the same and teamed up.  But we had no idea whether it would make money nor did we really care.

The problem with materialism as a goal is that it is ultimately empty.  The first problem is that money is a means. Not an end.  Personally, I tend to use money to buy me time.  That is, I'll purchase services to provide more time that I can then spend with my family (for example).

The second problem with materialism is that you get into diminishing returns more rapidly than many people (especially ambitious college students) realize.  The lifetstle of a billionaire and someone who has $50 million is probably indistinguishable.  By contrast, there's a huge difference in lifestyle between someone who makes $20k and $50k.

In my limited experience, I'd say the real point of dimishing returns hits somewhere after $10 million in liquid assets.  You can buy a dream home for $5 million (if you don't live in a super expensive area to begin with).  The best cars that aren't obnoxiously conspicuous are less than $200k.  And a chartered private jet costs about $10k per ride. 

In short, what happens after $10 million is you simply have more of the same.  It starts happening actually before that.  So the quality of life of the person who brings in $4 million a year and $20 million a year might be remarkably difficult to discern -- materially.

But the quality of life of someone who loves what they do for a living and has time to spend with their friends and family is very easy to discern.