Anyone have a universal remote control that they like?

My ancient 35 inch standard TV finally gave up the ghost and it was time to go out and find a new TV.  Over the past several years, I've been keeping up with how HDTV has been progressing.

Presently, there's 3 technologies used to create HDTVs worth mentioning:

Plasma screens. DLP. And LCD.

Plasmas generally look the best when fairly large but are also very expensive.  LCDs tend to look the best when smaller but lose out at higher resolutions due to being a fixed resolution (especially if you're considering 1080p).  DLPs start to shine at higher resolutions but older ones tended to give a rainbow effect and have non-optimal contrast.

My living room is fairly large. As a result, I decided to go wtih the largest HDTV I could afford and that was a 71 inch one.  The new Samsung HL-S7178W was the one I decided to go with.

I chose it because of the size, its gaming features, it was a true 1080p (i.e. its inputs accept 1080p inputs) and it could handle 1080i and even standard definition and look fantastic.  It even has a game mode for people who have an XBOX 360 or whatever who want to get the best gaming experience.

The performance has been phenomenal.  I couldn't be happier with the TV.  The newer projectors eliminate for essentially everyone any sort of side effects of having a color wheel (though LED based lights are coming out next year but I doubt they'll show any noticealbe improvement).  Having looked at HDTVs for a few years now, it's amazing how far they've come in just the past 2 years. The quality of the picture is just much better.

Moreover, the TV's have gotten a lot smarter about their displays. Gone are the artifiacts one used to see and other noise elements that people with large screen HDTVs had to deal with. The newer sets such as this eliminate noise on the fly.  This really comes in handy when dealing with standard TV where the images look pretty good.

The feature I didn't know about but have found very useful is the USB connector on the side.  Just plug in your USB key and it'll play music and photos right on screen.  This is a very nice surprise because I can show slides of our new daughter at 1080p which look fantastic and conveniently play music through our surround sound home theater system in the room.

If I have any criticism of the set it is only that I wish it had more outputs on the back. I realize that my receiver should do more work but more outputs is always nice.  My other minor complaint is that it would be nice if more inputs were accessible. It does have some inputs on the side but an HDMI connector that was easily accessible fron the side would have been nice.

Overall, I would give the set a 9 out of 10. I really couldn't be more happy with it. It's obviously a huge step up from the ancient 35 inch TV we had.

Our friends at deviantART have done a full-blown make over.  We're not just talking a cosmetic change here, but a complete re-envisioning of how deviantART should look, feel, and interact with users.

I recently spoke on the phone at length with co-founder Angelo Sotira about some of the plans they have to take deviantART to the next level.

deviantART started out as a skin site much like WinCustomize.com is but branched out into being a general art site. Today, it is one of the largest art sites in the world.  They have some very impressive features in the works.

The new deviantART has been designed to be even faster than before and provide users with more information with less clutter.  The site has always tried to balance community with function and the new deviantART has some innovative features designed to help achieve that balance.

We're currently working on our own re-design in the form of WinCustomize 2K7. It's taking a different direction than deviantART has since we deal with a very different kind of audience.  But the new features on deviantART are impressive combined with, IMO, an excellent overall site design I think will take deviantART to new levels of popularity.

While no longer focused on skinning, the site still contains a lot of good skins and themes and continues to receive good support from the skinning community.

Feel free to share what you like, what you think should be improved and where you think community content sites are going next.

 

The Reluctant

 A Graphic Novel Outline

Brad Wardell, August 2006

Chapter 8: Destinations

See Previous Chapters..

 

 

DL and Agent Gerard sit around a conference table along with 5 other men. In front of the conference table is General Dyson, who is in charge of covert operations for the United States air force.

Dyson: Gentlemen, one of our agents in Beijing has captures one of the henchmen of the Intruders.

As you know, the Intruders abruptly disappeared following the death of their leader at the hands of Mr. Bradley here.

According to the henchmen, the intruders have returned to their home world.

One of the men at the table, Captain Peters, looks up at that.

Captain Peters: How is that possible? Our satellites remain intact. It is one of the few things that we have been able to do while the Intruders have run amok on Earth – launch satellites. They have no ships.

Dyson: They apparently open a portal between our world and their own world.  In fact, this portal remains open at all times and is located in Beijing. During..interrogation, the henchman gave us the location of the portal.

He also told us that the Intruders now consider Earth a threat and will be returning in force soon to ‘sterilize’ the planet.

There are murmurs at the table.

Dyson: DL Bradley, who has somehow managed to kill four of these Intruders, including their leader on this planet, has agreed to help us but a stop to this.

Peters: How can we stop them?

Dyson: We are going to go to Beijing and close the portal, failing that, we will send a team through the portal to discover how they come and go and make them stop one way or the other.

I would like to introduce Colonel Riley, who will be leading the team to Beijing.

A tall man of around 45 years of age stands up. He is in a blue dress uniform and his lapel is full of the trappings of combat experience.  He has brown hair that is just starting to gray at the sides. He is a man of action, a man born to lead.

Colonel Riley: Thank you, General.  I will be leading a small team into Beijing. Myself, Major Anderson, and 4 support members will comprise the military component.  Agent Gerard will act as my intelligence liaison and DL Bradley will be with us…to do what he does.

Captain Peters: Sir, if I may ask, what’s the point? We can’t even hurt them. Only this..man, Mr. Bradley has shown any ability to harm them at all. Why not just send him alone?

Colonel Riley: Because, Captain, Mr. Bradley doesn’t know the area and because it is our world too. If we are going to free it, we should have some hand in that even if our hand is..shell we say, a bit feeble.

Besides, DL has to sleep sometimes right? Someone needs to watch his back. Right?

DL smiles and nods.

Cut to night fall. It’s Beijing and the city is still somewhat chaotic as the vacuum left behind by the Intruders has allowed the domestic government to start reasserting its authority. But the thugs and henchmen of the Intruders are not giving up too easily and there is strife and ivil war looming. 

Beijing is not by day and certainly not by night, especially for Westerners who are conspicuous in their appearance, especially when armed to the teeth as the 6 men who are cautiously walking down the street.

Well, at least, 5 of them are being cautious, the sixth, a blond-haired man with flecks of silver in his hair is not but rather walks as if he is merely part of an audience looking on from safety. Because for DL, very few things represent a threat to his safety.

The six men eventually make it to a large building. Outside the building are two armed guards.

Colonel Riley: (whispering) Okay, here’s what we should do…

DL Bradley: If you don’t mind, I’d like to finish this quickly so let’s take the easy way.

DL looks over at the men, moves his hand slightly and both men fall to the ground unconscious.

Colonel Riley: So what else can you do?

DL: Quite a bit, but I’m out of practice, been trying to not be noticed for the past 15 years.

They enter the building and what they see amazes them.  It’s a hive of activity in a giant hollowed out hall. In the center of the hall is a glowing green ring of energy. Through the energy one can almost make out what looks like a forest.

Agent Gerard: There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism. It’s just there.

Riley: Fan out, let’s see if there is some sort of machine here. Be on the look out for anything..well funky looking.

Major Anderson: Got it, now scanning for funky…

The team breaks up into units of 2 with DL and Gerard together.

As they walk, they enter an area where there is no one around.

Gerard: DL, I have to ask you…did you break my daughter’s leg?

DL: No, the rock she fell on broke her leg.

Gerard: Did you cause her to fall?

DL: You said you would do anything to protect your country? Including harm my only son. Would you do anything to protect your daughter?

Gerard pauses and then responds…

Gerard: I understand. Forget I asked.

They reach a secure looking area with two guards posted outside a door. Above the door is writing in Mandarin.

DL: I don’t suppose you can read Chinese?

Gerard: Well they don’t have me on this trip just because of my charm. The door says ‘Restricted. Command Center.’

DL reaches out and the two men guarding the door fall to the ground.  They walk to the door and it is locked. There is a keycard slot next to the door.  DL pulls the handle of the locked door and the handle breaks off and alarms sound.

DL: Damn, in the movies, that always works, physics has always been out to get me.

Gerard: There’s no way to hide.

DL looks at the door and gives it a solid kick and it bursts in. Behind it are several armed guards who begin shooting.

DL moves in front of Gerard and the bullets bounce harmlessly off of DL.

DL: Those actually do sting a bit so let’s do this.

DL waves and the armed guards fall unconscious one by one.

Gerard: Can’t you go any faster, one of those shots just nicked my shoulder!

DL: That’s my limitation – I have to focus on the people I am doing stuff to. It’s not magic you know.

Gerard: Could have fooled me.

Eventually the last guard goes down leaving only a single unarmed Chinese man in uniform.  He speaks Mandarin.

Gerard: Amongst a lot of profanity, he demands to know why we are here.

DL: Well, ask him how to turn off that portal.

Gerard asks. The man laughs and responds in English.

Intruder Liaison:  You are wasting your time. The portal is powered by the crystal of the lords and is on their world.  They will soon return and when they do, you will all be destroyed.

Gerard: And what about you?

Intruder Liaison: Those of us who have proved themselves useful will be spared and allowed to rule this world in their steed.

Gerard: Can we shut this guy up?

DL: Done and done.

DL moves his hands lightly and the man drops to the floor into sleep like the others.

Gerard: You seem to be a lot less lethal than the Intruders.

DL: Well, these are people.  Vile, wretched people but people nevertheless.

The team reassembles a floor above the portal. The great hall is shaped like an oval with several balconies surrounding the hollowed out center.

Colonel Riley: It looks like we will need to go through the portal, find this crystal and take it out.

DL: Bear in mind, we’ve only dealt with a handful of these Intruders.  When we go over there, we’ll be the Intruders and there will probably be a lot more of them than us.

Riley: I am sure you can protect us.

DL: I don’t know.  The only weapon I have is one of their swords.  I can only fight one at a time.

Riley: Do we have any other choice?

Gerard: Not really. If we don’t stop them, they’ll return here and billions will die.

Gerard looks at DL.

Gerard: What is it?

DL: I’ve now been away from my son 3 days. That’s 3 days I’ll never get back. And it looks like we’ll be gone longer.

Gerard: I know how you feel, I’ve got a daughter back home.

DL: No, you don’t know how I feel. You won’t know how I feel for a long time. But someday you may indeed understand a bit better.  What matters is that we make sure that what we’re doing is worth it.

Major Anderson: Let me check…yep, right here in the “Is it Worth it manual” saving the world is rated very highly.

They laugh and prepare to head down stairs.

Riley: It is time to get lethal.

Riley and their men pull out a series of high explosive grenades. These special grenades were designed to be particularly effective against personnel in a wide area – such as the hollowed area of the main floor.

The men throw their grenades and take cover.

KABLAM! A huge explosion in the center hollowed area clears the area.

Riley: Make for the portal!

The team runs for the portal. There are no shots as those not taken out by the explosion are too stunned to react.

The men enter the portal and emerge into darkness..

 

Next: We’re not in Kansas anymore…

 

It is always at night when the darkness comes..

In case anyone's interested, we put up our first video podcast. So if you want to see myself, Kristin Hatcher (who did the voice over for the GalCiv II tutorials and Derek, head on over to the link below).

I don't know about you guys, but I am looking forward to Supreme Commander.

For those of you not familiar with it, it's a RTS being made by Chris Taylor's Gas Powered Games.  CT made the game Total Annihilation back in the late 90s which IMO is by far the best RTS that has ever been produced.

Rather than relying on a rock-paper-scissors type system, Total Annihilation introduced two pretty innovative concepts -- 1) Damage handled by the physics engine and 2) Pay as you go spending.

By damage handled by the physics engine that means shots can simply miss. Units have speeds and manuevability.  So you will literally see shots miss the target.  Having this extra dimension removes the need for things like "Unit A does 2X damage against Unit B".  It also eliminates the classic "I'll just build 50 of the same unit.." because some units move and fire drastically slower (which means they can get picked off by other means).

By pay as you go, this is my favorite part as it dramatically reduces the click-fest and micro management in RTSs.  In most RTS games, you can't build something until you have enough resources.  In TA, the building orders were decoupled from resources.  They still required X energy and Y metal to build, but different constructor units build at a rate of X energy and Y metal (which also meant that you could build things faster if you threw more units onto the structure). 

As a result, players could plan out their construction strategy at their leisure without even paying attention to how much energy and metal (the two resources in the game) that were stockpiled. The key was rate of resources coming in, not how much you had on-hand.

It also helped that it had terrific unit AI and an incredibly rich and intuitive user interface. 

I loaded up TA today and played with my son and it's amazing how well the game has aged.  This is a game that was probably developed around 1997.  Think back to that time, its competitor was Warcraft 2 and later Starcraft.  It was a 3D engine (software since back then no 3D hardware could support the kind of resolution people wanted) that could play at any resolution. The maps can be huge, there are tons of units, and tons of modding support and map making. Even today, it continues to thrive because players can make their own units and supply them to the game.  Even the AI was moddable (the game's AI was HORRIBLE, even for the time but modders improved that to the point that it's an excellent non-cheating AI).

Which brings us back to Supreme Commander.  How good it will be remains to be seen.  Total Annihilation was a niche game where as with SC, Gas Powered Games is hoping to make a more mainstream title. That worries me a tad. The website shows very few units per side (Total Annihilation had dozens of units per side to choose from which provided a high variety of strategies).  But the videos of it look impressive and with a hardware 3D engine, the zoom in and out looks great (and like TA, it has gigantic maps rather than the tiny maps we see in most RTS's such as Age of Empires 3, Rise of Legends, etc.).

So that's the game I'm looking forward to the most.  What about you?

The first video podcast for PowerUser.TV is coming but it's going to be long -- over an hour.

So you'll definitely want to get it from somewhere that can STREAM the video rather than downloading it as it will be huge.

The Reluctant

 

A Graphic Novel Outline

 

Brad Wardell, August 2006

 

Chapter 7: Legacy

Previously...
Act I

 

 

DL wakes and finds himself laying on a bed.  What should have been a mortal wound has nearly healed and his other cuts and bruises are gone.  It is dark.

 

An unknown voice in the room says into a communicator “He’s awake.”

 

Moments later, Agent Bill Gerard, a second man in a black suit and Mr. Miller enter the room.

 

DL: How long have I been here?

 

Agent Gerard: Two days. You’ve been asleep.

 

DL: Where’s Ethan?

 

Frank Miller: He’s in the guest wing. It’s late at night and he’s sleeping. He’s fine.

 

Agent Gerard: I’d like to introduce you to someone you may recognize, Walter Ableson, President of the United States.

 

DL: Mr. President, I don’t know what to say. Your…presence indicates that this…scuffle with the Intruders has altered things more than I would have thought.

 

President Ableson: More than any of us would have thought. All intruders world wide have disappeared.  In every country, they simply left. We don’t know what that means.

 

DL: Not necessarily a good thing.

 

President Ableson: I agree.  So what are we going to do?

 

DL: We? There is no ‘we’.

 

President Ableson: How can you say that? You have killed 4 of the 12 intruders on this planet. There is obviously something unusual about you. You are not one of them, but you are clearly not human.

 

DL: Oh, I’m human.

 

President Ableson: Then help us.

 

DL: I talked to Frank here, my father-in-law about this just before the Intruders attacked me at home. It isn’t my war.  As long as they leave my family alone, it’s not my concern.

 

President Ableson: But you have the power to do great things. Don’t you feel a moral obligation to help your fellow man?

 

There is a pause in the room as DL considers these words. They are words he himself has wrestled with many times over the years. Choosing the right words to explain to the President required thought.

 

DL: It’s not that simple, Mr. President.  There is no possible way you and I can ever relate to each other.  I am cursed.  I am cursed to live forever. I have lived thousands of years -- many thousands of years. And the thing I’ve learned is that human existence is transient. Fleeting.

 

My family – my son Ethan, they are what matter to me. And while I could spend a human lifetime solving the world’s problems, I would miss out on my son’s life. That’s time I can never get back.

 

And as hard as this is to hear, if you live long enough, problems like these Intruders come up time and time again.

 

Agent Gerard: What do you mean? Human civilization is barely two thousand years old and in that time there’s never been anything like the Intruders here.

 

DL doesn’t answer immediately. Carefully weighing his words DL finally responds:

 

DL: I am human, but I never said I am of your Earth.

 

President Ableson: You’re not from Earth?

 

DL: Sure. I’m from Austin Texas.  But I was born in the year 2188.

 

Agent Gerard: Time travel!

 

DL: No, not exactly. And it’s a long and complicated story. But imagine there being an infinite number of parallel worlds. I believe there’s a theory called “string theory” or at least you’re that far along the path to understanding this sort of thing.  

 

I eventually learned how to travel to these parallel worlds. Each one is in its own time phase.   I have lived many lifetimes in many parallel worlds each with its own problems.

 

On my Earth, there were no “Intruders”.  The United States fought in additional wars after the Korean war but they were against countries like North Vietnam and Iraq, not aliens. 

 

President Ableson: Alternate Earths. That is amazing. Immortality and power. Quite a gift.

 

DL: Not a gift. A curse. Forever is a very long time.  Ask yourself, what would you do with forever? Think about that. We’re really not designed to live forever.

 

I have lived so many lifetimes in different times…which brings me back to the question about why not go out and fight a crusade to make this particular Earth safe from its own peculiar super menace.

 

If you live long enough and travel to enough parallel worlds you will find there’s always some tyrant or demon or dread lord or some other power or horde.

 

And power is alienating. The more you use, the more it controls you and the more people become afraid of you. The nature of my…empowerment is unholy. It is corrupting. I try not to use it. The longer I live, the more empowered I become so my destiny may be futile, but that changes nothing in the present.

 

President Ableson: And so you won’t help us?

 

DL: As long as they don’t try to harm my son, I won’t interfere. He is my priority. In the blink of an eye, you all will be gone and I will be just as you see me now. I don’t want to miss that time with my son.

 

President Ableson: Then what of your son when he passes on?

 

DL: Then I will leave and find another lifetime.

 

President Ableson: Then consider this, DL Bradley – your son will grow old and die for certain. But he will probably also have children. And they will have children. Those descendants are of your flesh and blood.  What of them? What legacy would you give to them? A world dominated by evil and oppression? A world where their children could be taken from them – your grand children and great grand children to be taken to some alien world for who knows what monstrous reasons? Is that the legacy you want to leave?

 

DL, to his surprise, realizes he had never given that a lot of thought.  DL had never had a child who grew up and had their own children. The thought of having grand children hadn’t really crossed his mind in the practical realities the President had just put forward.

 

DL: Very well Mr. President, what do you want me to do?

 

 

Next: Destinations.

Last Friday we were about to deliver the new beta of Galactic Civilizations II v1.3 when I got a call from home about a different delivery that came earlier than expected.

After a nearly 9 month beta cycle, Baby 3.0 (code-named "Ashley") was released on Saturday. 

But we have released beta 2 and today beta 2a (see link below to see what's new in this build).  A couple long-asked for tweaks have been made including diagnol scrolling and a new planetary lights system for the dark side of colonized planets that grows with population (it actually came out a lot neater than we expected so check it out).  The AI also got some new tweaks in terms of handling what it builds on planets so let us know if you notice a difference.

If you have Galactic Civilizations II already and want to try out a beta (Which WILL have bugs in it so don't download it if glitches really are a problem for you) you can get it via Stardock Central.

The final 1.3 should be out later this month or next month. There's no set date since we're just basically putting in new features, tweaks, etc. and putting them up as betas until we get closed to delivering the Dark Avatar expansion.

We hope you like what you see.