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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
ObjectDock is the world's most popular dock program for Microsoft Windows. The freeware program allows users to place a dock on any edge of the Windows screen and react to mouse events. Users can choose to display running tasks as well as program short-cuts. A "plus" version adds multiple docks, tabbed docks, system tray support and more.
Right behind WindowBlinds, it is one of the most popular desktop enhancement programs available on Windows. It has almost 3.5 million downloads just on CNET.com.
In the 4 years since it's been released, Stardock has been continually updating and enhancing it. Now, version 1.6 is about to be released and it has some pretty significant improvements for users. So what's new?
ObjectDock 1.6 has a lot of new features which we'll go into briefly here.
A brand-new weather docklet is included:
New feature: A better weather Docklet
Stardock is looking at Docklets as a major avenue for future enhancement. In an age where people are throwing widgets and gadgets onto gigantic side bars and docks -- ones that are of static size at that -- docklets to us make a lot more sense. They can use a lot less space and display more information.
Much of the work on ObjectDock 1.6 was to enhance Windows Vista support. But in the course of doing so, many new techniques and tweaks were made that, as a result, ObjectDock 1.6 should be the fastest dock ever -- on any platform. Users have very precise control over the various kinds of animations supported:
ObjectDock 1.6 sports a much faster, smoother graphics engine
ObjectDock also supports up to 256x256 icons (the Windows Vista native icon size incidentally) so you can have incredibly beautiful looking images.
ObjectDock Plus supports a wide range of additional effects besides just zooming.
ObjectDock 1.6 will include a new Start Menu docklet that will make it easier than ever for users who want to just replace the Start bar with ObjectDock. ObjectDock is designed to work with the Start bar or to replace it entirely. But the key thing is, if users choose to replace the Start bar with ObjectDock, the Start menu needs to be the real Start menu from a compatibility and usability perspective.
When a program is minimized, ObjectDock will show the window with an icon in front of it. On Windows Vista, that thumbnail can update itself in real-time without slowing down the computer.
Live thumbnails on Vista and improved minimized thumbnails on XP
For Windows Vista users, new minimize and restore effects have been created. When a user minimizes a window to the dock, a very smooth but quick effect is made to indicate where the window has gone. When it is restored, the same thing occurs -- without any flicker or stuttering. A lot of effort has been made to make sure this effect scales with the speed of the computer to ensure maximum smoothness on any system.
ObjectDock 1.6 is currently in beta for users who have purchased ObjectDock Plus. ObjectDock 1.6 freeware is expected out in the next couple of weeks. We will give more details and information on new features as we add them in. Other improvements include a new set of icons, further performance and memory use improvements, and much more.
Users can get the currently released version of ObjectDock at www.objectdock.com.
It's not easy being a gamer who also makes games. I wish I didn't love computer games so much. But I do.
What's worse, I like a particular type of computer games that seems to be increasingly ignored even though I am certain there are markets for those games. What that means is that both my desire as a gamer to make a game and my evil capitalistic goal to do something about that desire combine together.
I remember being told by two major publishers back before the first Galactic Civilizations on Windows that the turn based market was dead. Mid last year when Galactic Civilizations II past the 200,000 mark, I felt pretty vindicated. Sure, 200,000 is peanuts compared to say a major console game or a mega popular PC game even. But if a team of a half dozen or so people can make a game that sells 200,000 copies, that's a pretty good thing I'd say. Even if you want to look at it from a pure businesss point of view -- it's not how much you gross, it's how much you net.
For up and coming game designers out there who are full of ideas, the thing to remember is -- time is fleeting.
I love space strategy games. That's pretty obvious. I still play GalCiv II most weekends. For me, I play it in the debugger. If the AI does something I don't like, it gets tuned, fixed, tweaked. I could do that forever. But I don't want to just write space based strategy games. There's so many other games.
The team is working on a fantasy strategy game. The game engine for it is amazing. Beyond anything that's been done before for this type of game. We're talking about a world in which you can zoom in and see individuals walking around in the woods but also be zoomed out to see the entire world in one smooth motion. It's a live world. But it's still 2 years ago. So don't get excited yet. I'll be 37 years old then.
I also want to make an RPG. A Baldur's Gate style RPG. What I mean by that is one that is driven by the story. Sure, players can do a lot of other things too and have plenty of side quests but there's a main plotpoint that players are driven towards and they're playing a specific character that they control in a party of several other people who interact. Ultima IV was one of my favorite games of all time. Baldur's Gate, Planetscape Torment, these are games that I remember very fondly. I'd love to make that kind of game. But will there be time? People will want another GalCiv sequel at some point probably and the fantasy strategy game, assuming it's successful will take up time too.
And let's not forget Society which shares the same main engine as the fantasy strategy game. That's a long term project as well that is largely waiting for us to just get bigger to afford the infrastructure needed for it. It was heart breaking to back off from that but we want to make sure we can do the game the justice and that means being a significantly bigger company than we are today. Can't make Society with a half dozen or even a dozen people. You need 20 people just in IT to do something like that. We're getting there and the game itself continues development.
But you see the problem right? At some point, there's just not enough time to make all these games. I don't want to be a consultant. I want to be in the thick of the game. I like coding on the games too. I like working on them day to day. And even as I work on that, there's Stardock's primary business to be concerned about -- the desktop enhancements part (check out Stardock's home page and games barely get mentioned). And I love that stuff too. Just as much as the games.
So I work out the schedule... Okay, political machine 2008 in 2008, fantasy strategy game in 2009, some other game in 2010, society after that, rpg after that, and so forth. By then, I'll be in my 40s! Good gravy.
Those of you who are reading this that are in your 20s -- woe to you. Your day is coming. I wrote the original GalCiv for OS/2 back in 1993 -- 14 years ago. I was 21. And then, one day in the blink of an eye I was 35 years old. Wife. 3 kids. My oldest son played Counterstrike with me the other day and Company of Heroes on my team. How did that happen? I'm too young to have a son that age! 
If I could just slow down time so that there's enough time to make all these games, that would be great. If anyone knows of any time machines, please let me know.
OS/2, the operating system that did battle with Windows for desktop supremacy turns 20 years old this week.
OS/2 was a land of many innovations. It is also the environment in which Stardock was born into. It is where Object Desktop came from originally with features such as the ability to change all the icons by applying a "package" of icons. It included the ability to change the look and feel of the OS/2 GUI (title bars, buttons, scrollbars, etc. sound familiar?).
OS/2 was incredibly advanced in its day. In 1992, when I started to really get into OS/2, it was a 32-bit, multitasking, multi-threaded operating system with an object oriented environment. By contrast, Windows 3.0 barely could run, was ugly, had a terrible shell (Program Manager), didn't really multitask.
Only through IBM's incredible incompotence and Microsoft's hardball marketing strategy did OS/2 end up blowing its incredible lead.
For those of you who were OS/2 users who are reading this, I toast you as fellow OS warriors in the right. We may have lost, but the battle goes on. 
Later this week we plan to put onto Stardock Central the first betas of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar 1.6. We expect the beta process to take roughly a month. These betas are optional, so don't feel you have to use them. But if you want to try out what we've been working on, these will hopefully do the trick.
Stay tuned!