This week we expect to release the first beta of Galactic Civilizations II v1.3.  If you already have Galactic Civilizations II, there's a lot of cool stuff for this summer coming up.  If you don't have Galactic Civilizations II or you know someone you think would like it, it's available in quantity at stores such as Best Buy, Circuit City, Walmart, EB Games, Gamestop, and elsewhere.

The 1.3 series of updates are not so much about features but rather adding in the tweaks, AI adjustments, and other things that helps keep strategy games fresh and new.  Meanwhile, the team is hard at work on the upcoming expansion pack, Dark Avatar.

Keep an eye out on the Journals section. Stay tuned.

The Reluctant

A Graphic Novel Outline

Brad Wardell, July 2006

Prologue

I don’t know when they came. They’ve been here as long as I have. They came to our world and toppled regimes and overthrew governments.  Some fought back while others capitulated.

What they want, what they truly want, remains a mystery. Power. Control. Obedience. These seem to be means to some dark end. 

They are powerful. But their strength lies not in numbers for they are few. Individually mighty beyond the imagination of most, they seem to some as gods. They look like humans but they are not. They are alien. Where they are from we can only suspect.

Introduction

China capitulated to them. It only took 3 of them to subdue the entire country. They fought hard but numbers, mass waves of soldiers, meant nothing. The intruders, as they are called, simply washed them away like one would wash down a sidewalk with a hose. China was brought into line. The Chinese were pragmatic.

In the United States, the government was less…pragmatic. They fought, taking obscene levels of casualties and still continued. It is believed they even managed to kill one – by dropping a 50 megaton nuclear bomb on them on US soil.  Americans don’t like to lose.

The intruders put the American slogan “Give me liberty or give me death” to the test. So far, the official government policy seems to be death. New York is gone. Washington D.C. is gone. Los Angeles is gone, though the difference is not as noticeable as one might expect.

The American government still operates, sort of. Its doctrine has been designed to make the most of the enemy’s limited numbers.  6 Intruders are apparently are responsible for North America.

The federal government operates in secret locations, always on the move, but America goes on.  The intruders, while lacking formal control, have defacto control over any population they go amongst.

There are rumors of course. One rumor in particular concerns me but only at a distance. It is that they come for the children. They come for them and take them away never to be seen again.  My son is all I have left on this world. He is the only part of Amanda I have left.  But the Intruders are far away. Living in a small town has its advantages.  No one cares about Plainwell PA…My name is DL Bradley.

Chapter 1: They’re coming for you Ha Ha.

TV: US air force units operating from a secret base in the Pacific performed a lightning strike on two Intruders today. The planes were carrying a new kind of explosive according to onlookers.  Neither intruder appeared to be harmed while several civilians near by were seriously injured as the Intruders left a local school in Tampa Bay Florida.  This is the third attack by the reconstituted US military this month.

In retaliation, an Intruder wiped out what was left of Edwards Airforce base which included.

DL: Come on Ethan, you’re going to be late for school. We are scheduled to talk to your teacher at 9:30.

Ethan: I know Dad, I’m coming. Do you have to go into the school? All my friends will see you.

DL: Am I that scary?

Ethan: No, but you’re my dad. It is so not cool being seen with your dad.

DL: Sigh, making a note, 11 years old is when it is no longer ‘cool’ to be seen with ones dad.

They get into DL’s truck. They go into town first to pick some things up and it becomes clear that they live in a very small, rural community.

Cut to school. It is an auditorium where Ethan and other children are gathered together for pictures.  DL is speaking to Ethan's teacher when there is a commotion at the entrance to the auditorium.

A US soldier is thrown across the auditorium. You can hear his bones snap as he hits the wall.  Another soldier is backing into the auditorium firing his MP-4 at something and continuing to back away.

A tall, dark-haired man walks in. He is dressed simply. Slacks, of some kind, with a plain gray shirt with no buttons or other distinguishing elements. It could be a T-shirt except it’s too loose fitting. He has a sword sheathed, slung behind his back.

The soldier continues to fire at him but the bullets have no effect. The dark haired man merely reaches his hand out and one can almost see the force that reaches between the man’s hand and the soldier, a sort of shimmering as the man disintegrates. 

A third soldier yells in rage from behind and runs into the auditorium with a knife, jumps to stab the dark haired man only to be cut in half in a completely fluid motion by the Intruder. The Intruder puts his sword back in a sheath that is slung on his back.

The Intruder – the dark haired man – walks towards the children that were already together and now huddled even closer together in abject terror.

Intruder: Ah good, they are already gathered together.  I will be taking them all with me.

Parent #1:  You will not take my daughter!

The man, unarmed but quite large, runs full-forced at the Intruder.  The man bounces right off the Intruder who picks him up with one arm and flings him across the gym. 

DL uses this distraction to slowly move his away in front of his son. 

The Intruder motions to the door and three men in black suits walk in. They are lackeys of the Intruder. No matter how vile, the powerful will always find servants to do their more grotesque deeds.  The lackeys approach the group to begin rounding them up.

DL motions to the first lackey.

DL: I need to speak to him.

Lackey #1: No one talks to the lords.

DL: He will want to talk to me. I must speak to him.

Lackey #1: Well, it’s your funeral.  (turning to the Intruder), My Lord, this..man wishes to speak to you.

Intruder: I do not speak to the cattle.

DL: Please, this is something you must hear. 

DL makes a submission pose and walks slowly to the Intruder who has a look that is a cross of annoyance and amusement.

Intruder: Your request may cost you your life so I hope it has been worth it.

DL: My..lord, I do not..wish to become involved in (sweeping his hand) this.  I only wish to be left alone to raise my only son here. 

Intruder: What? You waste my time on frivolous groveling.

DL: Please, my lord. I don’t want to be part of any of this. But I cannot allow you to take my son. I don’t care what you do elsewhere, I just…cannot have my son taken from me. 

Intruder: You make demands of me, human? I take what I want. I do what I want. We own this world and everything on it.

DL: I understand, but I beg of you, do not take my son. I have no desire to get involved but I can’t let you take him.

Intruder: Bah. You are beneath me, you do not even deserve to die by my hand…

The intruder turns to a henchmen and orders him to take DL out and shoot him.  With the Intruders back turned, DL reaches and takes out the Intruder’s sword, which looks like a sort of Katana.  The Intruder turns with super-human speed but it is already too late, DL has taken the sword and with a quick thrust it goes right through the Intruder.

There is an audible gasp in the gymnasium as the Intruder falls to the ground…dead.  The henchmen, stunned and hearing sounds of more soldiers arriving flee.

Next: Chapter 2: We’re from the government…

This past week the EU put another $357 million fine on Microsoft over anti-trust issues. This is on top of the previous $300+ million fine and the on-going $2+ million per day ongoing fine.  When it comes to dealing with the global threat posed by American software giant, Microsoft, the EU is quite brave.

Meanwhile, Europe heads towards year 4 of completely unproductive negotiations with Iran, a country that has made it clear that they are pushing to have nuclear weapons.  Iran, as you may recall, has publicly promised to annihilate Israel in a ball of fire and whose missiles are likely able to reach Europe.

Luckily for Iran, they are not bundling a media player with their nuclear program or else the EU might then finally take the threat seriously.

Neelie Kroes, the "competition" commissioner for the European Union, apparently earned her nickname "Nickel Neelie" because she's tough in the same way as the "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher -- at least that's what pundits are saying.  Really? REALLY?

No, I don't see the similarity. One was a leader in the war against terrorist forces, tyranny, and oppression around the world even when it was unpopular.  The other is a beareucrat who is sticking it to a foreign software company for reasons I doubt she fully grasps in a move that is very popular with "the people".

Kroes claims that what Microsoft has to do to comply with the ruling is "crystal clear".  Microsoft disagrees.  I would be interested in the "crystal clear" camp to come forward and demonstrate that clarity. As a software developer, I find the EU's demands to be vague in the extreme. You can read the official document here.

For example, the ruling demands that Microsoft "disclose complete and accurate interface documentation" so that their cmopetitors can achieve "full interoperability" with Windows PCs and servers.  What the hell is "interface documentation"? What exactly is the official excuse of its competitors in not being able to work with Windows PCs and servers? 

Tiny software developer Stardock, where I work, has managed to create software that seamlessly extends the feature set of Windows as if it's part of the OS.  Heck, we have software that actually can alter the Windows GUI -- a pretty low level part of the OS -- to look like whatever we want. And we did that without "interface documentation" let alone source code or any other special help. 

The only aspect of the ruling that seems clear is that Microsoft has to provide OEMs a version of Windows without Windows Media Player.  But even that is vague if you're a software developer. Does that just mean the player app or the underlying codecs and libraries that are relied on by thousands of programs?

My point isn't to make Microsoft out to be an angel. They're not. They've been quite ruthless over the years.  But it strikes me as absurd to see the court jump on Microsoft with massive fines while playing footsie with nations like Iran.  Heck, the EU had a lot more patience with Saddam Hussein -- a decade of UN security counsel resolutions -- and still didn't want to do anything particularly strong.

From an outsider's point of view, it just strikes me as ludicrious to see how quick the EU can muster significant sanctions against a computer software company but demand "patience" if the threat against them is actually, you know, real.

Kroes writes:

I must say that I find it difficult to imagine that a company like Microsoft does not understand the principles of how to document protocols in order to achieve interoperability.

Spoken like a true non-technical person. It takes two to, ahem, interoperate. I suspect that there are plenty of people at Microsoft scratching their heads wondering "What more do these people want? Do we have to actually code up the software used by our competitors for them, hand it to them and provide a developer to sit there and answer CS 101 questions?"

How about answer this question: What specifically is the problem that these unnamed competitors are having? What specifically do they need in order to interoperate?  If the answer includes "source code" then they need to start hiring software developers who have training in...software development.

Lest someone think I'm some sort of Microsoft fanboy, I spent the first several years of my career as an OS/2 developer. I saw some pretty unsavory tactics used by Microsoft to win the OS market. If the EU (or US courts for that matter) had gotten involved then, they could have made specific requirements that would have made sense not just to lay people but software developers as well (such as "You can't charge an OEM $6 to bundle Windows for Workgroups but then charge IBM $20.50 for every WinOS2 license used in OS/2."). 

But the EU isn't doing that. They are basically asking Microsoft, after the fact, to magically make its competitors more effective and at some point, the competitors have to step up and...start competing.  And by levying such massive sanctions, it only brings into stark relief how weak the EU is on real tyranny, oppression, and danger in the world.  The whole situation would appear a little less ridiculous if, for instance, the EU could muster up some sanctions against say Iran.  The Iron lady would certainly support that. 

Writing strategy games is a lot like playing strategy games. Lots of choices on where to put scarce resources.

As the primary developer of the computer AI for Galactic Civilizations II, I have to make a lot of tough decisions on who to focus effort on.

And by "who" I really mean the general population (95% of gamers) or the hard core 5% who are the most vocal but small as a percentage of buyers.

During development, we focused on mainstream gamers mostly.  We wanted to make a game that strategy gamers would enjoy and to do that, we had to be careful where we spent a lot of time on. 

For example, we put a lot of time on having really cool ship design. Players can literally create any kind of ship they want both functionally and visually. There's Babylon5 ships out there, Star destroyers, etc.  But at the same time, we didn't put in multiplayer because the cost of doing it would have meant the game would have to list for $50 instead of $40 and that was something we wanted to avoid.

Getting back to computer AI -- how tough the computer players are -- one of the game's claims to fames is that the AI provides a challenge to players without having to resort to cheating. The computer players play the same game as the human players do.  In most strategy games, the computer players have to be given very significant resource advantages to provide a challenge.  In many strategy games, the computer players aren't even playing the same game.  One popular RTS I've been playing has its computer opponents able to essentially conjure buildings and units out of thin air in order to provide a real challenge.

But a challenging AI isn't the same as an unbeatable AI.  So the result is that some of the hard core players -- as well as top level strategy gamers -- are able to defeat the game not at the highest levels but at the levels where the AI isn't cheating.  As a result, they demand ever increasing amounts of time to be spent on making the computer players smarter as opposed to just bumping up the difficulty higher to where the computer players do get some extra resources.

Those players are able to list a myriad of "dumb moves" that the computer players made during a game in question.  The problem is that all computer players will make "dumb" moves.  Sometimes dumb moves are the result in a logic flaw, other times it's merely a difference in opinion on what is a "good" move, but most of the time it has to do with large-scale, multi-turn coordination which humans are much better at doing than computer AIs.

Right now I'm working on v1.3 of Galactic Civilizations II.  In terms of computer AI work, I'm trying to provide something to both groups. I want casual users to be able to have more tools to beat the AI with if they are clever but want hard core players to see smarter AI.  I'm also going to put in some additional difficulty levels so that players have more graduated difficulties (the game has several already but more is good IMO).

The issue the developers of GalCiv II are running into is no different than other games.  Players of World of Warcraft have long seen Blizzard have to juggle time between the hard core players with their level 60 characters and massive guilds vs. casual gamers who just want to see more missions and more solo-oriented content.

So that's the conumdrum that developers regularly run into when deciding where to put updates.

TotalGaming.net is Stardock's digital distribution network that Galactic Civilizations II uses as well as dozens of other games ranging from Take 2, Ubi Soft, Strategy First, and other developers.

Nival's popular titles including Etherlords, Etherlords II, and Evil Islands: Curse of the Lost Soul, will now be available on TotalGaming.net for only $10 (or 1 token if you are a TotalGaming.net subscriber).

"We are excited about our partnership with Stardock Corporation to deliver our products through their digital distribution channels," stated Anthony Jacobson, VP Marketing and Business Development of Nival Interactive. "As broadband internet connectivity proliferates, digital distribution will grow significantly, and finally our consumers can buy our games without leaving their homes."

Stardock recently launched it's Stardock Entertainment retail publishing unit with the intent to help bring a handful of promising independent games to retail. 

Moreover, Stardock's TotalGaming.net has been increasingly picking up new titles which can be downloaded conveniently and reliably through Stardock Central which does not require any DRM-style copy protection ensuring players can play their games when they want, where they want, how they want.

The new forum system has been spread over to Galactic Civilizations II's website.  The new forums support a lot of new features both visually and functionally. They are also much much lighter weight in terms of HTML size making them much faster to navigate.

Check them out for yourself.  They'll be here on WC relatively soon.

I hang out on a lot of different websites and one of the things I have seen repeatedly come up is how people loathe the GalCiv2.com forums. They were very different in design from other forum systems.

In an attempt to try to improve that experience, we have re-written the underlying forum technology and re-designed the look to take some of the good points from other forums and our own technology and put them together.

Hope you like what you see.

I've shown friends my beta of Windows Vista and they love the clean look, the glass UI, the dark Start bar.

But I wonder how they'll feel about it say a month after they've been using it.  As I've begun to mess around with the betas more and more, the sexiness starts to wear off and my desire to personalize my experience for my own preferences returns.

What looks like glass at first starts to just be a bitmap that's at 20% opacity with a blur effect on it.  Sure, I can change the opacity or the color but essentially, from a customization point of view, Windows Vista is actually a step back from Windows XP in some ways in my opinion.  Even XP users could hack uxtheme.dll and apply hacked msstyles to their system.  This time, the story isn't quite the same. Now, at best, you'll have someone hacking bitmaps to replace the border and button PNGs/BMPs with another and even then, what do you do about things like Office 2007 which are literally hard-coded.

My prediction is that skinning, which has been steadily growing in popularity to the point of being mainstream (which has not been completely good news for skin sites -- as skinning becomes mainstream, cottage sites become less needed), will take a new turn with the demand increasing even further.

I think WindowBlinds and other Stardock programs will likely see real competitors because the demand for customization will grow much higher.

And I haven't even touched on Microsoft's gadgets which are definitely going to need third party help to be viable IMO.  As it stands now, the Microsoft gadget platform is in desperate need of third party attention to expand what developers can do easily so that worthwhile content can be made.  DesktopX 4 will likely step up to the plate when it's released but I think you'll see a whole cottage industry for that.

But what do you think? Do you think Vista will be good for skinning or do you think the cool, clean look of Vista will be enough?

Those of you with Object Desktop have probably noticed that there's been a lot of new updates to programs on Object Desktop.

So what's going on?  Object Desktop 2007 is the answer.  Stardock is about to release a new CD compilation of it's flagship product and in preparation for that, the individual programs of it are getting tweaked, updated, and in some cases overhauled.

After Object Desktop 2007 is released, public shareware versions will also be announced/released as well so that non-Object Desktop users can get a taste of what it can do.

Here are some of the highlights of what's being updated:

• Theme Manager 2.3 will be coming out with Object Desktop 2007
• IconDeveloper 1.3
• IconPackager 3.11 was just released on ODNT.
• DesktopX 3.2
• Keyboard LaunchPad 1.5
• Stardock Virtual Desktops 2.0

In addition, ObjectBar 2.0 will finally get its release in the next month or so now that more resources are available to finalizing the last bits of it.

Some of the updates are just tweaks and user-requests implemented. Others are more significant.  For instance, Keyboard LaunchPad 1.5 will allow users to set hot keys from the context menu of the program icon (which makes setting up programs much easier). 

The target release date for Object Desktop 2007 is later this month. Stay tuned.