by Brad Wardell, Founder, CEO of Stardock
Topics
- Editorial
- 25 years of Stardock
- Kevin Unangst joins Stardock
- Nitrous and Cider
- Handles are killing your PC
- Groupy
- Galactic Civilizations III: Intrigue on April 11
- Star Control returns!
Editorial
I keep saying we’ll get back to doing these every month. I hate getting spam and I want to make sure that when we send these to you guys, they’re worthwhile.
It seems like even the tech sites I visit are full of click-bait or barely disguised hardware ads. It’s a bit of a bummer. This is doubly true because there’s a lot of cool stuff going on out there.
25 years of Stardock
Some of you have been with us since the OS/2 days. Did you know that this year is the 25th anniversary of Stardock? That’s insane. When I started the company, I was living in a dorm and only did it until I could find a real job. I’m still looking. I even have my resume on that fancy paper, you know, the one with that expensive texture?
This October will be the actual 25th anniversary since I incorporated the company. My mom told me I needed to incorporate the company in case my programs “electrocuted” someone or something. Thus far, few people have been electrocuted by our software.
Kevin Unangst joins Stardock
During the OS/2 days, IBM and Microsoft had these OS/2 vs. Windows NT “shoot-outs”. Behind the scenes, Stardock would supply Dave Barnes, the IBM demo-god, with software, wallpapers, etc. On the NT side, there was Kevin Unangst. Windows NT ultimately won and you know what they say - if you can’t beat them, join them. Or in this case, Kevin left Microsoft this past Winter to join Stardock. He is amazing.
After Kevin got done kicking OS/2’s butt on behalf of Microsoft, he went on to be in charge of Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer 4 back when those were the new big thing. More recently, he’s been on the game side of Microsoft being in charge of the Marketing of something called Halo, and Xbox, and Gears of War.
So why would Kevin leave Microsoft after nearly three decades? The answer is: Nitrous. I’ll talk about that next.
Nitrous and Cider
Have you noticed that your PC hasn’t really gotten that much faster in over a decade? If you added a solid state hard drive you probably got a much bigger boost than 10 years of CPU improvements.
Why is that? The answer is related to why we don’t talk about Mhz or Ghz anymore in processor speeds. When they couldn’t make CPUs much faster, they made more of them, put them on the same piece of silicon, and called them cores.
Having lots of CPU cores means your software and games could be much faster. The operative word being could. The problem is that most software only uses 1 CPU core.
Try this: Load up a famous game that is very hardware intensive. Now, hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc to bring up task manager. On the CPU row, right click on the graph and have it show “logical processors”. Now, with that game running, note that only 1 of your various CPU cores is really being touched. That’s a problem.
After Stardock sold Impulse to GameStop, we took some of that money and invested it into a series of start-up companies. One of those companies was Oxide Interactive, whose mission was to create a core-neutral software engine. At the time, there was no such thing as “core-neutral”. The idea was to create an engine that you could just send jobs over to and it would figure out what processor to have handle it.
With Nitrous, we developed Ashes of the Singularity. A game with thousands of light sources and tens of thousands of units, each with its own AI module and a graphics engine that could handle high detail terrain and units in vast quantities.
What made Ashes of the Singularity’s success so relevant was that it was made for 1/10th the budget of Supreme Commander, a similar game in the genre. Using Nitrous allowed us to do amazing things at a much lower cost. This was because every CPU core could talk to the graphics card at the same time (the first - and to this day, only - game I’m aware of that can do this).
Interesting side-note: It’s actually difficult to do video capture of Ashes of the Singularity on DirectX 12 because most video capture programs assume that the rendering will be done on a single thread.
Armed with Nitrous, Stardock then expanded on it by taking its own existing suite of technologies (DirectGUI, the tech that lets even Sorcerer King run at 8K and look spectacular, and Cidermill, the tech that lets us design ships and units in engine) and building Nitrous-friendly features into Cider such as a core-neutral animation engine.
With Cider, Stardock began the most ambitious game project in its 25 year history: Star Control: Origins.
We’ll talk more about Star Control: Origins shortly but Cider, powered by Nitrous, is what makes our development of it possible. There’s a reason why few people try to make massive space RPGs with living universes.
Handles are killing your PC
The handle issue is a pretty big deal and you may never have even heard of them. Let’s fix that.
Right now, hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc. Go to the Performance tab. You will see the word “Handles” over on the right. On Windows 10, you should boot with around 60,000 handles used. This is actually pretty bad but no biggie.
But, many people are starting to run enough programs to get over 100,000. And at around 120,000 handles…bad things start to happen. Your PC will get slow. Graphical elements might not show up. Programs may not launch. Long before you run out of memory you will likely run out of handles -- it’s a problem that Microsoft really needs to fix.
So, what can you do?
Click on the “Details” tab. Now, right click on the name column, choose “Select columns,” and chose “Handles." Now sort the list of processes by handles. Anything using more than 5,000 is not good (unless it’s a game). But, keep an eye on anything using lots of handles and you should be fine.
Groupy
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Groupy is the most significant new program we’ve made since Fences. I’ll double-down and say that how Groupy works is how we’ll eventually use our PCs. I use it more than I have used any other desktop enhancement ever. More than Fences. More than Multiplicity. More than Start8/10 (though barely, holy cow, that was a lifesaver on Windows 8 and I still use it daily on Windows 10).
Here’s why: Groupy lets you combine any window with any other window to create a group. It does for your windows what browser tabs do for web pages. Can you imagine going back to Chrome or Firefox or any other browser without tabs? That’s what Groupy does, system wide, and once you use it, you'll never want to go back.
For example:
Part of my glamorous…glamorous job, is creating stamps for Star Control. It involves constantly going back between a handful of folders because you have graphics, the stamp lists, the stamps themselves, and the materials. Now, when I’m working I have a ton of windows open so just alt-tabbing doesn’t remotely cut it.
So with Groupy, I just move the various explorer windows together and hit a hotkey to switch between the tabs. You can even drag and drop files between them.
Groupy will even do this automatically. So for example, the various stamp files are just a type of XML and when I open them, they open Notepad (yes, I’m a loser, I should be using Notepad ++ for this). With Groupy, every new notepad instance shows up as another tab. So I don’t end up having to sift through, literally, a dozen notepad windows.
Sometimes I mix and match. I have, for instance, Visual Studio and Notepad ++ combined (mainly because I don’t want to load up a bunch of instances of Visual Studio just to work on XML files).
Naturally, Groupy is part of the new direction we've been taking Object Desktop in over the past year. We're moving away from eye candy and towards using our knowledge of how Windows works internally to create apps that…well, even Microsoft would struggle to make.
https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/ - you can download Groupy and try it for yourself.
Galactic Civilizations III: Intrigue this month
Many of you have played at least one version of Galactic Civilizations. It’s been my baby for 25 years. I wasn’t able to participate much on the development of Galactic Civilizations III v1.0 (I was on Ashes of the Singularity), but last year I was able to return to design and work on Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade which I think most people like.
This year, we have Galactic Civilizations III: Intrigue. And its focus is on politics.
When people play strategy games like Civilization, Master of Orion and of course Galactic Civilizations they are creating their own story in their minds of the evolution of their civilization.
If you go back to the original OS/2 version, which I programmed from a dorm room, it had elections and political parties. That should tell you how important it was to the core design. So, when I returned to the Galactic Civilizations universe last year, politics is something I wanted in there. You can’t just start settling planets across the galaxy without it having a major impact on how your society will evolve.
Head over to www.galciv3.com to find out more about it. I think those of you who like strategy games will really like it.
Star Control returns!
Many of our gaming friends probably have fond memories of the classic DOS game series, Star Control. For those of you not familiar, Star Control is a space adventure game in which you are the captain of a ship exploring the galaxy, meeting aliens, fighting battles, and landing on planets. All of this takes place in a carefully crafted universe with its own deep history.
Stardock acquired Star Control in 2013 from Atari and has spent the last 5 years working on rebooting the series with Star Control: Origins. The new game takes place in 2088, well before the humans would meet the Ur-Quan, or Spathi, or any other species that old players might associate with the classic series (and in fact, the new series takes place in its own universe with its own history in order to not touch the canon established in the classic series. It frees us to develop a new history with new aliens as well as, eventually, aliens associated with the classic games).
The April 2018 progress trailer is out here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdCGLVnf904
You can pre-order the game on Steam and get access to the Fleet Battles beta:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/271260
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