The next major version of Microsoft Office, (Office 2007 but what I'll affectionately call "Office Vista") is the single biggest change to come to Microsoft Office since, well, as far back as I can remember.  The problem the Microsoft team was coming up against is that Office had gotten so complicated, so "bloated" and so complicated that most new feature requests made by users were for features already part of the package.

The new Office includes a new user interface across all the programs that make up the suite.  The title bar has been altered to have its own unique glass style with buttons that make use of the most common features of the application.  The menu bar has been largely jettisoned and replaced by what are being called "Ribbons". Until I saw the most recent version of the beta, I was skeptical as to whether this was going to work out.  But having seen it in action, I am converted. It really is slick.  Gone are the "we know what you want" type UI behaviors and in its place are interfaces that streamline the entire experience.

The ribbons allow users to do the kinds of things that most people want to do with as little work as they need.  Power users in particular can be happy that there are tons of options that can greatly speed up common tasks.

The next version of Office will run both Windows Vista and Windows XP.  On Windows XP, it looks a bit different (and in my opinion) quite fantastic.

As the above screenshot implies, blog posting (source: Microsoft's Joe Friend - not under NDA) is one of the features of Microsoft Word.  While not good news necessarily to the third party programs that allow people to compose blog posts, it is good news to most users.  When  a user decides to create a blog with Microsoft Word, it takes care of the uploading of images and everything else to make the entire thing relatively painless.

And don't worry about what you upload being a bunch of whacky HTML, the Office team is working to ensure that what gets uploaded is the cleanest possible HTML.

The release date for Microsoft Office 2007 has not been announced officially. But beta 2 is due "soon".  I don't know about you but I'm very excited.  For years, Microsoft has kind of sat on its laurels with Office, adding bloat and complexity to it.  Now, Microsoft seems very serious about going back and reinventing the world's most popular suite of office applications.

Microsoft's Sidebar supports "gadgets" and now Google's sidebar supports plugins that have recently been branded as "gadgets".  Gadgets, widgets, oh my. They are everywhree.

So would you guys like us to put up sections to support Google gadgets and Microsoft gadgets? Let us know.

Windows Vista is Microsoft's first real attempt to polish the gaming experience for PC users.  In 1995, Microsoft introduced DirectX to help make developing games easier, but for users, it remained a a hassle often times to get PC games running at times.

With Windows Vista, the game manager can be used to simplify and clean up the gaming experience.  Here are a few of the things you can expect:

• Microsoft Live Anywhere.  Users of Xbox 360 are already familiar with Microsoft Live.  Microsoft Live Anywhere will start to bring that experience to PC users.
• eCommerce, users will be able to purchase "points" to apply to getting games, expansion packs, etc.
• A unified PlayerID that will allow players to have their records at multiple games tied to it (and a bane to griefers)
• Parental controls where the game's ESRB rating can be used to block kids from playing inappropriate games.
• The ability to play Xbox 360 players at common titles (like Halo).
• DirectX 10 which will allow GPUs to handle more of the physics. This will allow for much MUCH better looking games (we saw some videos and they were incredible).

A lot of the nitty gritty details are covered under NDA but suffice to say that there are some really cool things for gamers with Windows Vista.

Windows Vista Beta 2 is coming pretty soon. Microsoft is tweaking UI, working on performance, improving compatibility. Each build gets better.  The question that many of us have, however, is whether there's enough time for Vista to get everything together in time for a November RTM (January for consumers).

Below are 4 screenshots to help show off the UI (so far).  The UI is probably the most noticeable improvement in Windows Vista.  Take a note of the clean and efficient load and save dialogs in there.

There's also two screenshots of the alpha version of "WindowBlinds Vista".   Windows Vista, as cool as it is, is probably going to be a real boon for skinners. There's a lot of new UI and a lot of opportunities to take it to the next level.

The overall user interface feels light and clean. It's a real improvement over Windows XP.  There are nearly a thousand new icons in Windows Vista.  Beta 2 won't have all the icons in yet, there's still a lot more coming in.  The Aero glass (the new glass look) is not final either but it's pretty close (contrary to rumors, it's not going to become some vector based thing).  The performance continues to improve.  However, it's very memory intensive.  We'll be asking Microsoft a lot of tough questions this week about the significant memory foot print and some remaining performance issues.

Last week I was in south Texas on vacation.  A lot of Spanish speaking people down there.  For years, I've told my wife that for the 3 years I took spanish the only thing I remember is "Donde esta la pluma" (where is the pen).

We were at an ice cream place and the lady behind the counter, having taken someone's credit card said "donde esta la pluma". My moment had come.  My entire life was merely preparation for this one moment.  This was the time for me to shine -- where everything was coming together.

I quickly said to my wife and everyone else in line "She wants to know where the pen is! I KNOW that phrase!"  I finally felt like a big man.

Writing computer AI, on the other hand, is not a fast track to feeling like a big man. I read the AI suggestions people make. And most of them (okay some of them) are well meaning.  But most of the suggestions fall into the "Well duhhh.." category.

The main reason why computer AIs in games tend to suck is that the people programming them aren't good at strategy games and so they can only incorporate their own ideas into it.  Since I'm a strategy game maniac, the limitation has more to do with programming.  I know how to beat the AI at the highest levels in certain circumstances. And it's very hard to get the AI to deal effectively with it when it's playing at the resource level as the human player.

Some people actually believe that the AI should be able to beat an expert player when the AI only has the same resources as the human player.  That's not going to happen any time soon. Not until processors are a LOT faster.  Right now, while the human player is taking their turn, the AI is putting together its strategies. It's adaptive in a given game. But there's only so much that can realistically be done.

One of the most common suggestions is to improve the sensor capability of AI ships.  The problem is, I barely make of sensors on a per tile basis.  Instead, I'll have it scan through ONCE per turn and set various flags on a sector by sector basis.  The reason for that is time.  A given sector has 15x15 tiles.  That's 225 tiles per sector.  That's 73,000 tiles in a huge galaxy.  If a given player has say 300 ships doing their thing and you have 10 players that could be an immense amount of "looking".  That's one reason it's so hard for the AI to get that "first strike" thing.  But there are countless other things like that.

That is why in 1.11 we added a new option (which needs to be renamed) "Intense AI" (that's what I think it should be called later). If that's selected, i'll have the AI make use of new algorithms that do a lot of checking.  I can have the AI do a lot more analysis.  I can have the AI create armadas (groups  of fleets) and other such things that are just too CPU intensive (O^2) for now. Hopefully people have found 1.11 to be somewhat smarter on AI that previously. I will continue to enhance the main AI as well.

The reason why players and reviews praise the GalCiv II AI is that relative to other games, it is quite strong. Compared to some fictious perfect computer player an expert may find it lacking.  But reviewers and players can only compare it to other games to be fair.  And there's a lot there that it can do.

For example, the AI, without having to mod anything, will automatically adapt to user-mad mods. That's one advantage of not scripting it.  You could redo the tech tree, you could replace the units, change galaxy sizes, play on custom maps with custom ships, etc. and the AI will adapt to a varying degree of gaming.  When someone says "The AI is easy when I play on tough on a gigantic galaxy with tight clusters" my inclination is to make tight clusters no so tight rather than putting in weeks of work to try to get the AI to deal with such a specific circumstance.  Realistically, tight clusters on a gigantic map is effectively like saying you want the game to be easier. Which is fine. But if you want more challenge, turn up the difficulty.  Tight clusters allow players to turtle in and build up.    I do have some ideas though for making things more challenging at that specific level.

Still, there's only so much challenge you can have if players are going to hit Ctrl-N until they get some idealized galaxy set up and then complain that the AI wasn't challenging enough when given the same resources when the poor AI got stuck with 1 planet in the corner while the player got set up in a "cluster" with 5 class 15 planets with super-super planet bonuses (yes, we can tell how many times Ctrl-N was pressed in a given saved game).

But I won't get to do AI stuff this week.  I'm currently visiting Microsoft on business in preparation for Windows Vista so my AI coding will have to wait until I get back.

AI programming is my main area.  I wasn't particularly involved on the Diplomacy AI stuff.  I've started getting more involved and will conitnue to start to look more at it.  In the expansion pack, I want to throw in a lot more types of things to diplomacy.  I also plan to change it so that gifts and such give you a set relations bonus that can be limited to stop people from gifting their way to victory (gifts should help but they should be part of an overall package).

So my AI moment will come just like my Spanish moment will come.

When the ice cream lady heard me yipping away she said "Gringo es estupido". I don't know what that means but I assume it means Guy is smart or something like that since I'm sure she was impressed that I knew and announced to everyone that she was looking for a pen.

Very soon Microsoft is scheduled to release Beta 2 of Windows Vista.  Don't let its appearance fool you, it is a radical change under the covers from previous versions.

This week on WinCustomize.com I will be posting a series of impressions and news about the new beta along with a lot of commentary.  You can get info on Vista all over the place, what I hope to do is try to provide insight on problems and benefits Windows Vista is running into at this stage.

Windows Vista won't be generally available until early next year.

As previously mentioned, while most people were happy with 1.1, the performance improvements and other features we added ate up memory that not all users had available which in turn cased out of memory and other problems for those users.

Rather than simply remove the caching and other performance boosts, we re-engineered saved games and did intensive profiling to opimize things. So v1.11 should be faster AND use less memory than 1.1.

We also made some AI tweaks and other gameplay tweaks.

You can view the full change log here.

The next stop is v1.2 which is mostly about making modding easier for both modders and users. If you check the library, there's already a lot of really cool stuff available. The modding support in 1.2 will make it much easier to organize mods/total conversions.

You can get 1.11 either through Stardock Central or as a stand-alone download.  Have fun!

Here is what is new in Galactic Civilizations v1.11 over 1.1:

+ New AI option - allow AI to use more CPU. Not used yet but will be in future builds.

+ Civ homeworlds are set when loading a saved game.

+ AI (some of them) less reactionary to influence concerns (i.e. won't likely build as many embassies)

+ AI pickier about trading weapons techs

+ AI sensitive to player going for tech victory

+ AI designs ships more often (this will be further refined in the future)

+ Some text string changes

+ Double clicking on a a ship in the stacked ships list will now open the planet screen

+ Can no longer steal techs that belong to a different ethical alignment

+ Re-designed the save and load game systems to be much faster and use a lot less memory (only works on NEW games)

+ Strategic view updates better on loading a saved game

+ Players can now sort by social production on Civ manager

+ Confirmation dialog added on retire option

+ Fixed bug where movement points in a fleet get miscalculated after the battle

+ Tweaks to CalcMilitaryMight to be a better judge of what a strong military really is

+ Civ Abilities recalculated quicker so that various trades and such have a more immediate effect.

+ Research screen remembers what sort list you chose

+ Victory Status tells player how many civs they've conquered

+ Lots of small tweaks and performance enhancements.

+ Neutrality Learning Centers will automatically take over (upgrade from) Research Academies

+ Some research oriented techs are more expensive

The main goal of this build is to resolve the memory issues that some people had with 1.1.  The main cause of the memory issue was due to our heavy use of caching which could result in a LOT of memory being used. For people who had enough memory, life was good. But for people who ran out, it was bad. This build should have the performance advantages of 1.1 but use far less memory.

While you can use previously saved games, we recommend starting with new games so that you get the most out of it.  I also made some tweaks to the computer AI.