Transform your entire Windows desktop experience with the new Pirate Premium Suite! This suite, when applied, will change nearly every element of your Windows GUI!

Some users have asked to be "wowed" by Stardock Design and the Pirate suite aims to deliver that WOW.

The suite includes:

• A WindowBlinds visual style (which supports both XP and Windows Vista)
• An icon package that not only has 117 icons but has full Windows Vista icon package support (that means 256x256 sized icons and live folder support!)
• Multiple wallpaper backgrounds
• A CursorXP cursor pack that will work both with the current CursorXP and with the upcoming CursorVista enhanced cursor applying program.
• A new Logon screen 
• A boot screen
• ObjectDock background
• A weather, clock calendar, media player gadget!
• And to top it all off, a talking Pirate gadget!

This is definitely one of the best suites ever made. Check out these screenshots below:

Pirate Suite in action 

Pirate CursorXP cursors

Get the Pirate Suite now! 

 NOTE: Requires Theme Manager 2.5 (Object Desktop users use Stardock Central to update).

Tom Francis at PC Gamer has just completed a 20-day game of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar. Started back in April, Tom chronicles the rise of his interstellar empire and how he interacted with the often hostile aliens of the galaxy controlled by the GalCiv artificial intelligence engine.

It's an absolute must read.

[View PC Gamer Blog]

So beta 4 of the upcoming new version (v1.6) of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar has resulted in massively improved performance for most users. Yay.  I can't really explain why we decided to go and do it other than the fact that we have learned so much new stuff in the past several months working on the unnamed fantasy strategy game that we wanted to incorporate some of the techniques into Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar.

On the downside, a small % of users have found no speed increase and a few have had weird graphics glitches. Which is a bummer.  Down the line we hope to resolve it but since we need to get this show on the road, we're going to have to put in an option to let people choose between the existing engine and the new Enhanced Graphics Engine.  On my somewhat wimpier home machine, when I'm playing in a large galaxy with lots of ships I was getting around 20 frames per second when enough ships were on the screen. Now, I get 60 (it's capped at 60) on the same screen. 

A couple people have emailed asking what Stardock's building looks like. Here's where we work:

The game team is on the top floor.  The web team is on the main floor.  The bottom floor is empty right now as we prepare for expanion in the next year or two (we're always hiring).

On the West side of the property we're located on

When I was a kid I lived next to a wetland and always thought it was a great place to grow up by.  As the company grew and became more successful, I saved up and bought this property with a wetland and fields for the company. I just like critters (My main handle is "Frogboy" after all <g>).

Controversies

One controversy in the forums has to do with a "bug" in how turns are handled.  Right now, turns go like this (where 0 is the AI and 1 is the human player):

0101010101010

So when I load a game, the AI plans his moves, then turns it over to the human player. The human player then takes his or her turn and then the AI takes their turn and so on.

But you may understand the issue: If I save a game where the AI has already taken their turn, load up the game and the AI gets to take another turn, you've got a slight disavantage for the human.  I use the word slight here.  The AI doesn't get to actually move ships or get additional production. What they do get is the ability to pick planetary social and military projects. It's a slight advantage but an advantage nevertheless. Of course, compared to the fact that human players get to save and restore games, I'd say humans still end up with the better deal. How many times has someone loaded a saved game because they got a random event they didn't like or an engagement went poorly? The AI doesn't get to do it.

But still, it's a bug and it's in the database now.  It's actually been this way since the original beta of GalCiv 1 back in 2002. That's one of the reasons why nobody wants to touch it. It's ancient code. 

Getting 1.6 done and moving to 1.7

There's been a lot of very good tweaks and changes in 1.6 that I think will make the game even more fun.  For 1.7, there's a number of new features that we're looking to add. I want to tackle some of the constructor management and starbase handling.

Cranky people and private companies

One thing that I've noticed recently is that as our games get more popular, we get a higher incidence of cranky people.  I sometimes think it's one guy who has many different names and goes on all forums because they seem to have the same background.

Cranky person post goes like this:

• Game is buggy
• Product should never have been released
• I have been a programmer/IT manager/developer for 20 years (and it's always 20 years -- not 5, not 10, not 25, but 20)
• Vague description of problem and little to no information on system.
• Expect prompt and courteous support

Now, a few things about that.  Stardock isn't a store.  If someone wants to be cranky to someone, they should probably go to the store and yell about it there.  I'm not a clerk.  I make games because I enjoy it. I enjoy hanging out with people like you guys.  It's fun. It's rewarding. 

But someone buying our game doesn't give them the right to be rude and nasty and condescending. It's an equal proposition -- someone wants a product or service and is willing to exchange money for it.  No one has leverage over the others. It's an equal trade.  Someone insulting me personally or being obnoxious on the forum is not going to be put up with. I have no incentive to put up with it.  We'll absolutely jump through hoops and bend over backwards to help people. But we don't expect to be treated with utter disrepect or have our work insulted. It's one of the reasons why so many game companies don't have forums, they don't want to put up with nasty users.

Luckily, our forums are full of helpful gamers who are really part of our team. We are all in it together making cool stuff.  We put out extra updates because we like to. Privately held companies can do that -- do things simply because they want to.  And we like doing it because we like interacting with the players as much as we can.  It's something I hope we can expand on.

But any users who thinks that they have the right to insult us should think twice.  We don't want those people playing our games and I'd prefer they never bought anything from us ever again. I hope that doesn't sound elitist. But I just don't want to deal with people who think it's okay to be nasty to other people simply because they bought a product.

Future Community Features

I suspect that down the line that we'll make a system in which only active people in the community can participate in post-release betas.  Right now, some people download these betas and I guess I don't know what they're expecting but apparently they expect them to be the same as releases.  Beta 4 of 1.6 introduces a new graphics engine for instance.  I'd like to see people thorugh their stardock.net account be able to go to a page to get private beta builds. It probably won't happen for GalCiv II but maybe for Sins and definitely for the fantasy strategy game.

I am not officially a beekeeper. Thanks to pointers from SEMBA and the folks at Turtlebee Farms, I am now up and running with two hives.

While I have purchased some equipment and supplies on-line, Turtlebee Farms, which is located near Byron Michigan was able to provide me with basically everything I'd need from queen excluders, to frames, to basically everything else. I'll be writing a series of blogs on my beekeeping experiences.

Beekeeping for Beginners

The first thing to understand about bee hives is the basic layout of a modern beehive. Beekeepers have got this down to a science. Here's a diagram of a typical modern beehive:

Typical fully configured beehive

When you start out, like me, in the Spring, you have just the hive stand (for the hive to sit on on the grass), the bottom board, and a hive body.  Inside my hive body I have 10 frames. These frames are what the bees use to build the foundation from which the queen will lay eggs into.  So at this point, there's no honey talk. The main goal is to provide an area for the queen to lay eggs in.  This hive body is typically called the "brood chamber".  When around 6 to 7 of these frames are covered with bees, I'll add a second hive body on top of it with another 10 frames in it in order to get them to expand.  And when that takes off, I'll probably add a third hive body for another brood chamber.  Then I'll put a queen excluder on top of that to keep the queen from laying eggs above that and start putting on hive bodies with 10 frames that will be used for honey production. But that won't be until July at the earliest.

Brad's Bees: May 21, 2007

So specifically what I have done so far is go to SEMBA, which is a local beekeeping club. While there, a nice lady pointed me to Turtlebee Farms which has classes on beekeeping and sells beginner hives, supplies, etc.  Everyone I've met so far has been incredibly nice and helpful. And admittedly, a big part of the reason I wanted to get into beekeeping was the opportunity to meet new people.

For my two hives, I've placed them at the back corner of the property I own that Stardock is on.  They are near some trees and facing south.  There's a ton of wild flowers nearby. Here are some pictures:

The two hives and their surroundings

Another angle

The land next door to Stardock isn't developed so it's a nice big empty area full of various wild flowers for them to go out onto.  For those interested in what Stardock's building looks like:

My office is the top right corner office.  The bee hives are essentially behind me as I take this picture

Also on our property is a nice turtle pond.

Inside the beehives looks like this:

Front of bee hives

Inside the bee hives

Right now, 3 of the 10 frames are covered with bees. The same is true with the other one. I'm feeding them some sugar syrup right now to help get them going.  The goal is that within the next 2 or 3 weeks that 5 of the 10 frames will be covered in bees.

Interesting observations

One of the things I've been surprised at so far is how docile honey bees are.  While I have protective head gear, clothing, and a smoker (smokers are used to calm bees by blowing smoke on them), I have not yet needed to use them. I simply go up to the bee hive, open it up and observe.  My son and I have the odd genetic thing of having no local reaction to bee stings (my son doesn't even react to the venom).  I haven't been stung in awhile so I can't say for sure if I will swell up or not when I get stung.  I haven't been stung yet but I expect to get stung quite a bit before the end of the summer.

But you can really get right up close to these guys and they won't bother you.  Even standing right in front of the hive is no problem.  So those who worry about neighbors keeping bees or whatever have nothing to fear. You could have a beehive 20 feet away and probably not notice any issue with bees.  Yellow jackets are a much bigger pain than bees (I hate yellow jackets, they're aggressive and buzz in your face but that's another story).

Some interesting bee facts

80% of our food supply is dependent on honey bees in one form or other. A lot (if not most) beekeepers who make a living on beekeeping make their money through pollination services. In California, you can make $140 to $160 per leased bee hive.  So if you have a couple thousand beehives you could definitely make a good living. 

What's next

This year I'll probably stick with the 2. I'd love to get up to 4 hives this year but I don't see any likelihood of that.  I'd love to catch some swarms but those are few and far between around here I suspect.  We'll check back in with the bees in week or two to see how they're doing.

Before I leave you all forever to start my new career as a beekeeper, I thought I should get back to writing the occasional skinning blog again that many people seemed to have liked.  There's been so much going on lately that it's hard to keep track of it all.

Probably the biggest piece of news this week has been the fact that WindowBlinds 6 is going to support titlebar/border glass blurring on Windows XP (see the screenshot up there).  That's obviously a pretty huge thing. I wish we could have done that  a year ago but then again, the video card drivers weren't up to par then. 

Users of Object Desktop have no doubt started to see things really starting to move again. With the preview of Object Desktop 2008 out, the tip of the iceberg of new cool stuff becomes available.  Of course, the challenge now is that about 15% of our users are using Windows Vista and another 85% are using Windows XP.  How many of those Windows XP users are going to be migrating to Vista soon? That's anyone's guess.

I've been having a lot of fun with the new ObjectDock Plus.  The weather docklet that comes with ObjectDock (free and Plus) is actually pretty useful.  It also was a huge pain in the rear end because we're actually hosting the weather data ourselves. That's right, Stardock's actually a weather data provider now! Ack. So we've had to quickly learn how to handle a lot of weather data requests.

For those of you running Windows Vista Ultimate, make sure you have DeskScapes (and Windows DreamScenes) installed.  There's been some really neat stuff lately in the animated wallpaper world.    Even now, 5 of the top 30 most popular downloads this month have been animated wallpapers (though 16 of the top 30 are WindowBlinds). 

This week, Stardock Design released two Dreams.  One was an animated shark pool and the other one was released as a Master skin and took considerable work but is a photo collage in which images from your computer are taken and placed on your desktop background in real-time in a very visually pleasing way to form a living wallpaper.

There's a lot of really cool stuff in development on that end including an incredibly cool one in which the user selects a reflection map and a ground background and then their desktop looks like a little pool or pond or something.  It's a dynamic dream so it's all done on your video card and hence uses little CPU.

One thing I'm getting very anxious for is the DesktopX 3.5 beta.  I just want that out the door so that we can get to DesktopX 4.0 which is going to be such a huge change (I'm looking forward to a new Photoshop like layer editor for DesktopX).  So what's the hold up? DesktopX 3.5 can export content to the Windows Sidebar.  And given how powerful DesktopX widgets/gadgets can be, you can imagine why this is a pretty big deal.

Well that's all for now.  I have go now and pick up my bees!

Scott Brodie, who helped develop the weapons effects systems for Galactic Civilizations II while working here as a summer Intern is at Microsoft these days and his first game project has been released.

Here's the official press release.

You can go to the official page here.

I have a saved game in which there are so many ships and other objects that on my Quad-SLI nVidia 7950 I only get 3 frames per second using 1.6 beta 2.

But in the current internal build, scheduled to go up later this week we hope, we're seeing 30+ frames per second. A 10X performance improvement.

How? Even though 1.6 is a "point release", we have back ported part of the new graphics engine from the upcoming fantasy strategy game that is in development. Mind you, only a piece of it, but enough to make a huge performance improvement.

I am just incredibly excited to find out how people react to the speed difference here. It should make a massive difference for players playing on all sizes of galaxy. 

1.6 has slowly turned into the performance tuning release.  1.6 beta 1,2,3 included new features but they've seen things such as the mini map and graphs rewritten in Direct3D to help performance on Windows Vista (which also helped all users too since it is faster). 

We will definitely be looking to find out how much of a change people notice with this next beta.  Hopefully beta 2 and 3 that are up (1.59.095) have shown significant improvements. The next update will be the biggest yet.

Stardock has released the first BETA of TweakVista.  In a team-up with popular tweaking site TweakVista.com, this new utility is designed to let users maximize their control of Microsoft's new operating system.

TweakVista has dozens of useful features for maximizing performance and productivity including:

• Ability to control Microsoft's UAC handling
• Integrated control of not just what programs and services are running on start-up but a community-driven system for describing what those processes are.
• Pre-installed profiles for getting the most performance out of Windows Vista -- i.e. tell if what you want and TweakVista knows which services can be turned off (by default, there are a ton of things being run on start-up that most users will never use).
• Detailed system benchmarking and analysis
• Tweaks for Internet performance, visual performance, and hard disk performance.
• Analysis of running programs along with information about what they are doing.

This first beta is only available for users of Stardock Object Desktop. The final version will be available as a stand-alone program as well.  To learn more go to www.tweakvista.net.

TweakVista Home Page

Most of you may only know Stardock as the PC game developer and publisher.  But we are also the world's leading desktop enhancement software company.

One of our most popular programs, WindowBlinds, is about to go into beta for its 6.0 version. WindowBlinds is a program that lets users apply "skins" that change the look and feel of the Windows GUI.  One of the new features in WindowBlinds 6.0 is the ability to blur title bars.

Check out this article that includes a screenshot and how to get it early.