By now some of you have probably realize just how much power you have in the beta process. That this isn't some late stage marketing excercise. We (you guys and us) are helping make a game together.

So let's talk about battle mechanics in space.  How do we make them more fun? What do we have to work with that will be intuitive from a strategic point of view and enjoyable to make use of?

Let's start with ships (in no order):

ASSUMPTION #1: Swarming is bad, combined arms is good.

In my opinion, we need more ships in the game. I also think that the FLEET should be the key building block of your strategy. That is, the player who utilizes "combined arms" with their fleets should be able to do vastly better than the player who is just swarming.

ASSUMPTION #2: Fleets should work together as a single combined arms fighting force

In most RTSs I play, I select several units, hit Ctrl-# and the units are grouped. I then right-click wherever and they scatter.  If I hold down the right keys, I can get them to move as a single force.

I think in Sins, it should be the opposite. A fleet should move together as a single formation by default. I should be able to put together the right mixture of ships to counter my opponent's strategy and be able to right click on the other fleet and let them fight it out while I go work on another battle elsewhere if I want (sure, I *can* micro manage the battle but I shouldn't get much, if any, advantage to doing it IMO).

ASSUMPTION #3: The fleet mechanics should be logical and require no explaining

What I mean is that I shouldn't have to look at the manual or some strategy site to figure out how to put together a good fleet or counter to an enemy fleet. 

This means we have to work with things that are obvious on screen when it comes to ships.  So what can differentiate different ships:

1. How fast they move.  A battleship might pack a powerful punch but move and turn very slowly for instance.
2. Rate of fire.  Some ships might shoot lots of wimpy but constant shots. Others might shoot less often but more devastating shots.
3. Range. Some ships might have long range shot capability while others can only shoot short-range.
4. Accuracy. How often the ship hits its target can be based on the accuracy of the ship.

Based on thes 4 simple game mechanics, one can imagine how one could put together various kinds of ships that counter someone else's fleet.

For example, you could have a Targeting Frigate which improves the accuracy of ships in a given fleet (as long as it's relatively close).  You could have a ECM Frigate which decreases the accuracy of ships in a given fleet.  Ships that have a long range may be more depenedent on accuracy than shorter range (for obvious reasons). 

Another example, a fleet that is heavy with big slow but powerful ships might be more vulnerable to an attack by a fleet of more nimble ships and fighters.  But that fleet might be countered by putting in a few anti-fighter frigates in with the fleet.

What I'm referring to here isn't rock-paper-scissors per se since one doesn't completely counter the other. It's reduction or maginfication of effectiveness that we're talking about. 

IMO, the true tactical skill in the game is the person who relies on combined arms.  The guy who just cranks out tons of heavy frigates and tosses them at their enemy should get mowed down by the player with a more thoughtful strategy.

The key thing though is that I really think that the strategies in this game should be straight-forward and intuitive.  In one of my favorite recent games, Company of Heroes, the replayability comes from having so many strategic options. And the game only has a handful of units. 

What's your view?

Every so often some journalist somewhere feels the need to do one of those "Why the United States should be more like <country X>" articles. This year it was US News & World Report. Entitled, "What the US can learn from the rest of the world" the article implies we're in decline or, at best falling behind with the rest of the world. 

In my experience, most countries with democratically elected governments that have reasonably free markets end up with the environment that its citizens want. I would no more tell a Canadian what's best for them than I would tell a Frenchman.  One assumes that they have their reasons for the choices they've made. 

So with that in mind, I'm going to take apart Susan Headden's interesting but useless article "How they do it better".  It's interesting in that we should always be aware of what other countries are up to. Humans tend to be myopic. Articles like this tend to be a refreshing look at what humans elsewhere are trying.  But is there really much to learn from the examples Ms. Headden gives? Let's find out.

We have the biggest GDP, the finest universities, the highest ownership of color TVs, and the greatest number of Nobel Prize winners.

So how come the Danes are the happiest people in the world? Living in the dark, no less.

Define happiness. I assume she refers to the Leicester study on the subject. Denmark, incidentally has the second highest suicide rate in Europe -- far above the United States.  If Denmark is such a happy place, why are so many people trying to leave by any means necessary?

 Schoolchildren in New Zealand are cleaning our clocks in math and science. Teachers are better paid and more respected in Japan.

Ok. This is interesting. The US always scores low on these tests.  Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that our incredibly unionized public schools have no competition whereas I believe New Zealand parents can send their children to any school they choose (like much of Europe). I agree we do have something to learn from that.  And yet when school vouchers come up, US News, Newsweek and Time seem to be either silent or hostile on the idea in editorial.  Teachers are paid very well here but then again, the best teachers are paid about the same as poor teachers. Whenever you demand a system that caters to the lowest common denominator, you get what you ask for.

Our highways are choked with traffic, but we can't manage to build a train that goes more than 150 mph.

Why would we build a 150mph train? Our population density isn't anywhere near what it would take to justify such a train.  That is why our highways are choked with traffic. Because it's not practical to build a high speed train system thousands of miles apart.  Moreover, most Americans live in suburbs which is a stark contrast to Europeans and the Japanese who are very urbanized.  How exactly would the average American use a 150mph train? Where would these train stations be?  Like I said, it's about population density.  I'd love to be able to commute by train. But I wouldn't bet that most American middle class citizens would be willing to give up their 100x100 lot and their 2,500 square foot house and relocate to a densely populated urban area to justify it.

Our eating habits? Please. Just compare our average portion with a meal in Japan, and you'll understand why our adult obesity rate is 32 percent, compared with only 3.6 percent for the Japanese. The French, likewise, are slim and well fed-and they offer world-class dinner conversation to boot. Their secret: They don't want to know what you did yesterday; they want to engage you in a lively discussion of ideas.

Right...Yes, those slobbenly Americans and their knuckle dragging ways.  The gun-toting, pickup driving, McDonalds eating suburbanite isn't nearly as charming, sophisticated, and "lively" as those Europeans -- or at least the Europeans that Ms. Headden visits anyway.  I don't even know where to begin. How about this -- the typical French or Japanese household now has, at best, 3 people in it. Adult male. Adult female. And one child. Maybe. And I suspect that they do indeed, on average, come home and discuss interesting things more often than the typical American household with an adult male. Adult female and 2 to 3 children in it all jammed to the max going to soccer and dance and whatever else.  And I'm sure the obesity rate has nothing to do with the fact that our restaurants give huge portions, fast food is everywhere, and food is cheap here.

But our shortcomings are bigger than dining and discourse. Remarkably, the United States is nowhere to be found on the Economist's global index of lowest infant mortality. At the other end, our average life expectancy, at 77.9, puts us 40th in the world- after Costa Rica and Cuba.

Could it be that the United States, with a huge population of illegal immigration and very large ethnic minority population that tends to be at a significantly lower standard of living than say the average person living in Brussels might affect infant mortality and life expectancy? Tell me Ms. Headden, do you know anyone personally who has had a child die as an infant? I know I haven't. Infant mortality rates in modern countries are like the Olympics -- they're getting so close to perfect that even one in a 100,000 can affect the statistics.  So the inner city child that dies of fetal alcohol syndrome or the illegal immigrant who skips pre-natal care and tries to have the baby at home and has a complication can really affect those statistics.  The same is true of life expectancy where we have significant chunks of the population that have very low life expectancy.  But in the United States, it's not politically correct to point out that the life expectancy of African Americans is 70 years (while whites live nearly 80).  Since they're 12% of the population, the affect on our average is significant.  So what exactly can be really learned from say Belgium or France or Japan on that issue?

As for our treatment of the planet, we're down at No. 28 on the global index of environmental performance, a value based on six measurements of environmental health. Meanwhile, Denmark manages to get 20 percent of its energy from the wind. And in Singapore, tossing a candy wrapper on the sidewalk will set you back a thousand bucks.

Okay, I'm game. Let's be like Denmark, a tiny, urbanized peninsula country that gets 20% of its energy on wind.  Please, explain how you envision the United States building enough wind farms to get 20% of its energy from wind. Denmark, a country that is nearly all coastline (it's technically a peninsula but it's practically an island) has the luxury of having most of its inhabitants living on the coast and huge wind farms that literally surround the country. Would you suggest we abandon the rest of the United States and live in say Florida so that we can do the same? Even then, we'd be at a disadvantage.  How do you picture wind farms working in say Austin Texas? How much of our natural land area would you be willing to cut down or reserve for wind farms?  Remember ANWR? Liberals hate ANWR even though it involves only touching a couple hundred acres.  Would you support millions of acres being reserved for wind farms so that we too could be like Denmark? 

And as for Singapore, so the streets are clean. And if you do anything wrong, you can be caned or heavily fined. Are you seriously suggesting you'd support this in the United States?  Ever been to a major inner city in the United States? Full of litter. Let's fine them $1000 for doing it and see how that would fly.

On a grimmer index, America has more people in prison-2,135,900-than any other country in the world. And the highest rate of gun-related homicides of all industrialized nations. If we followed Europe's example of treating drug addicts rather than jailing them, would the numbers go down? It's a complex and controversial question. But Holland's experience shows that treatment of drug abuse is at least vastly cheaper than the alternative.

This gets back into that politically incorrect discussion. The elephant that is in the room. That is, if we even observe that there are statistically significant differences in prison populations and gun-related homicide rates based on ethnicity in the United States we can expect to be called racists.  We're not allowed to even talk about race here -- we're that gun shy.  Sure, the Japanese can publicly slur Koreans and the Germans will openly slur Turks.  But in the US, we aren't even allowed to quietly and meekly say "But..but...if you take Ethnic Europeans living in the United States and compare them with Europeans in Europe, the rates are basically identical.." So what really is to learn here? In Michigan, 12% of the population is African American. But 60% of the Michigan prison population is African American. In our nation's capital, it's 97%! I don't think looking at Holland is the solution.

In the following pages, we offer 30 lessons we can learn from other countries. The list is admittedly unscientific and decidedly incomplete. We're not even saying that all of these practices would work here; if Americans wanted free day care and government-funded maternity leave, after all, they'd have to pay Norway-size taxes. What follow are simply practices that intrigued us: the Germans retraining prostitutes to care for the elderly, the Brazilian buses that are so clean and efficient that even the rich people ride them, and the Japanese toilets that deodorize the room and put the seat down when you're done.
 

Perhaps for starters we American recognize that it isn't "free" and it's not "government funded". It's paid for by other Americans and we have a cultural attitude that people should take care of their own.  It's personal responsibility that has made the United States the success it is. The US isn't perfect by any means.  I have my own long laundry list of complaints.  In many ways, I think the United States sucks. It just happens to suck less than other countries.  I like living in a country in which the government doesn't limit my potential or my opportunities in order to support "fairness". I like living in a country that has nearly every type of environment in it.  I can be in a tropical paradise one day and on the frozen tundra the next without leaving the country (and it is this vastness and diversity that makes these statistical comparison to other country games so obnoxious).  But most of all, I like that in the United States we are still free to succeed or fail on our own terms.

Until the Great Depression, minimum wage laws were consistently struck down by the Supreme Court.  Using the 14th amendment as their basis, the supreme court's position was that the government did not have the power to regulate contracts between employer and employee.

The Great Depression caused them to take a fresh look at this and the result were state minimum wage laws.

Over time, the federal government itself got into the act and now we have national minimum wage laws and state ones as well.

The constutionality of these is murky.  I personally don't agree with minimum wage laws.  I don't think the government has any business telling me how much I should be paid or how much I should pay someone else.  But I do think that it is within the power of the states to pass such laws by their duly elected representatives.

On the other hand, I don't see how the federal government has the authority to establish national minimum wage laws. That seems to me to be blatantly unconstitutional.  The Supreme Court "found" this sweeping power in the Constiution in the clause on the federal government having the power to regulate interstate commerce.  But that's really a cop-op in my opinion.

The problem with minimum wage laws is that they're arbitrary and pointless feel-good measures. In today's global economy, minimum wage laws might as well be called outsourcing laws or automation laws.  If you're making minimum wage, that means that the value of your talent and skills is so low that you need the government to step in and artifically inflate it. 

I remember some years ago having a debate on Usenet about minimum wage laws around the time they had last raised it and I said "I predict that in 10 years, you'll see a lot of these jobs being automated or sent overseas. So if you find yourself checking yourself out at the grocery store in a self service line, remember this."  Of course, back in the early 90s, I got flamed and patronized on the reasons why grocery store check out lines couldn't be automated (impossible to stop shop lifting was the basic argument). 

But sure enough, we have seem automation and outsourcing take their toll and the very same people who argue for minimum wage laws are the ones who complain about the results -- as if there is no connection between the two.

That said, I do believe states have the right to enact minimum wage laws. I don't see anything in the constitution that says (or implies) that the government can't do it.  I just think it's a bad idea.

For the holiday weekend, as you can imagine, our IT team is on vacation so they're not real keen on me throwing up betas onto Stardock Central.

So I've uploaded the files to the link below in a ZIP file for those who want to try it out.

You will need to unzip the files to your \galciv2\darkavatar directory replacing gc2darkavatar.exe and lib3d.dll.

Requires that you already have GalCiv II:DA 1.5X installed.

We've been trying to get the beta of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar 1.6 for users to try out over the holiday but IT has expressed concerns about putting out an official beta right before the Easter break.

So we may end up making the beta available as a seperate download informally.  We should have an update on this shortly.

the obvious question is, how long have you been skinning? But also, what did your first works look like?

My first ones were pretty painful looking. Though, on the other hand, I wish more skinners would do things a little more out of the box than what we have nowadays.

Here's some of my first skins:

I did this one nearly 9 years ago.  Note the title bar buttons are on the left border.

This is a WindowBlinds skin I did a very long time ago. It had rollup buttons on the title bar and on the left side I had short-cuts to various parts of CNET.com

This Solaris skin is probably one I used more than any other skin. For many years, I used it as my main desktop.  I did this one back in 1999.

How about you? When did you get started and have you tried to do anything you felt was particularly innovative and interesting?

The first beta of 1.6 is purely fixes and performance improvements.  The new features and game balance tweaks will come in subsequent betas.

That said, these changes are pretty significant. 

First off, the defense handling has been changed which should have far-reaching consequences to how the game is played.

Secondly, the new ship stacking handling should increase performance as there's now much smarter drawing routines for ships which should greatly improve performance for players. This build should be faster than any version of GalCiv ever.

Here's what's new:

+ NEW: Stacked ships will only show one ship in the tile
 
  + The ship that is displayed is chosen like so:
 
     + If a ship is the galaxy’s selected ship it is always shown
 
     + Otherwise, the toughest selected ship is shown
 
     + If no ship in the stack is selected, the toughest ship is shown
 
    + An icon appears next to ships that are in a stack
 
    + when you move a ship off of a stack, it will show the next ship in that stack
 
    + This significantly increases performance in our tests.  We had a stack of about 50 ships and no major hit to frame rate.
 
+ FIX: Fixed bug where non-optimal defenses were never decreased as the defenses absorbed damage during a battle round
 
+ FIX: Fixed end of turn crash that happened if you had the Force AI to use Max CPU option ON.
 
+ FIX:  Made Build Menu update after a project is decomissioned. 1 per planet improvements like Orbital Terraformers will now show up in the build list again if you remove them from the queue or destroy an existing one.  1 per civ and 1 per galaxy improvements may not be destroyed and rebuilt - this is by design.
 
+ FIX: Fixed bug where if you changed the settings for a custom opponent's Natural Abilities and/or Financial Resources, the values would not remain the same after leaving the tab.
 
+ FIX: Fixed error where invalid information was being returned by the activation code in Win98 and Windows ME by adding alternate code if the first instance failed.
 
+ FIX: Fixed bug where save game was not saving the campaign file name and added code to fix save games currently exhibiting this bug (should fix problem with people continuing their campaigns)
 
+ FIX: Fixed crash bug where if the random event that creates a new minor race happened mulitple times, the minor races would end up with the same name and then delete each other's ship designs, causing a crash on the end of a turn
 
+ FIX: Fixed bug where the turn a ship was created was not saved/restored when loading a save game, which could cause a ship design to be deleted too early
 
+ FIX: Fixed bug with loading height maps for planet surfaces
 
+ FIX: Fixed bug where ending the game from the planet screen resulted in a crash because the planet screen was not hidden before the end game screen was unhidden
 
+ FIX: Added strings that were not being saved to scenario save game code
 
+ TWEAK : Turned off some debug strings to try and improve loading time

This beta will be up this week. Stay tuned.

 IconPackager is a program that allows users to change all the icons on Windows at once by applying "packages" of icons.  There are thousands of icon packages already available for free download to do this.

What's new is that IconPackager 3.2 is now in beta for Object Desktop users with an expected release date of next week. This new version supports changing icons on Windows Vista including live folders.

Check out the linked article below to see some of the new features and challenges involved in supporting icon changing on Windows Vista.

IconPackager is a program that allows users to change all (or nearly all) the icons in Windows by applying "packages" of icons.  Way back long ago, it was the very first program designed to do this on Windows. 

Over the years, the demands of icon artists have grown.  When IconPackager was first released in early 1999, icons came in two basic sizes -- 32x32 with 16 colors and 16x16 with 16 colors.  With the release of Windows Vista, icons support 256x256 true color, alpha blended icons down to 16x16 and everything in between.  Consider how large 256x256 is -- that's about the resolution of a DOS game 10 years ago.

IconPackager has continued to evolve.  The IconPackager format remains the defacto standard for distributing sets of icons to be used to change all the icons at once on a Windows system.  With IconPackager 3.2, Windows Vista's new icon features gain explicit support.

Giving Windows Vista a new iconic look

Windows Vista has lots of icons. And many of those icons are quickly seen by users.  For instance, the User Folder is a new folder in Windows Vista that users are likely to see.

User Folder in Windows Vista

In Windows XP, users noticed desktop icons and the Start menu icons.  In Windows Vista, the Start menu has fewer icons but there are a lot more icons elsewhere such as the new user folder.

The Challenges of Windows Vista

Of all the OSes IconPackager has supported, Windows Vista has proven the hardest to tame so far.  That's because Microsoft seemingly went out of their way to make Vista less friendly to icon changing.  Besides there being more icons to change, Windows Vista actually only uses 4 sizes of icons -- 256x256 (which is a new size), 48x48, 32x32, and 16x16.  When sizing icons, if a 256x256 icon isn't  available, it will use the 48x48 icon -- even if a 128x128 icon is available.

Moreover, Windows Vista will not scale up icons. It only scales down.  That means that if a 256x256 icon isn't available and you want to have your icons be say 128x128 in size, too bad, it'll just use the 48x48 and keep it in a tile:

Classic icon packages like Copperdeck won't size above 48x48 even though larger sized icons exist within the icon resource

For IconPackager 3.2, Stardock went ahead and refreshed the new included icon packages to support 256x256 (and unfortunately, Stardock IconDeveloper doesn't yet support Vista 256x256 icons).  But we are hoping to add support to on-the fly up-conversion so that icons which have at least 128x128 icons in them will be scaled to 256x256. A 2 to 1 ratio results in almost no difference in quality and would allow most of the popular icon packages to be used on Windows Vista without needing to be updated.

Folders on Windows Vista

The other challenge on Windows Vista are folder icons.  Historically, icon artists would simply create a generic folder and IconPackager would then replace the Windows default folder icon with the one created by the icon artist.

But on Windows Vista, it's a whole new world. Windows Vista has "live" folder icons. The folders on Vista show little thumbnails of what's inside. Cool eh?

Oh isn't that cool? The folder opens up and shows what's inside! Great right? Right???

But how do you change that? Well, it turns out you can if you look at that folder icon as two icons -- the foreground and the background. Of course, under the covers, it's a lot more complicated than that of course but to make folder icon changing accessible to icon authors, we were able to break it down into two images for the folder that the icon artist would have to make.

Changing the folder icons on Windows Vista involves a little more work -- the default folder icon is broken into two images.

An updated look

Since Windows Vista looks prettier, we figured it was time to update the look of IconPackager.  As much as we know people enjoyed the Windows NT 4.0 look and feel of IconPackager, we decided to update it with a new look.

Not just good for Windows Vista users

Windows XP users gain from the various tweaks we've made. They're relatively minor (at this stage, we have changing icons on Windows XP pretty nailed down).  But still, any change at this stage on XP is still good.

And for Windows Vista users, as good as the Windows Vista icons look, now you can personalize them to your own preference.

There are thousands of icon packages available and now Windows Vista users have options

Vitals

IconPackager is a free download from Stardock.  You can purchase it on its own or purchase it as part of Object Desktop which includes not just IconPackager but WindowBlinds, DesktopX, RightClick, Theme Manager, etc.

Visit: IconPackager home page

 ObjectDock is a freeware program that lets Windows users add a dock to their desktop. It can display tasks and short-cuts on the dock as well as run mini-applets called (Docklets) (think Widgets/gadgets but better). 

Stardock has put the first beta of ObjectDock 1.6 onto Stardock Central for users who have purchased ObjectDock Plus.  ObjectDock itself is freeware (the plus version adds multiple docks, system tray support, tabbed docks and some other features).

See the link below to get a preview of what's in ObjectDock 1.6.