If you don't know Kam VedBrat, you should. To a large extent, he is the one who helping make sure that Windows Vista is going to be customizable by users in a real way.  At Microsoft, Kam is responsible for a lot of the UI work on Windows Vista.  And he is constantly under pressure from well-meaning users who argue that Microsoft should "build in" advanced "customization" features. 

The problem that those users don't realize is that if Microsoft were to put in too many customization features it would essentially kill off third-party customization and Microsoft is never going to put in the kind of customization that third parties would dedicate themselves to as long as there's a market. Put too much in the OS and the amount of work third parties have to put in to reach the threshold in which a user would pay for it would become too high and those developers would find something else to do.

But let's explore it though for a moment. Let's put aside the branding issues (the more Microsoft supports customization as part of the OS, the weaker the Windows brand becomes) and let's put aside all the support issues that would rise as users downloaded third party "skins" that weren't compatible with this or that app and called up Microsoft.  Ignoring those two issues (which in themselves are show stoppers), the problem is that the really cool customization apps we've seen over the past few years would never have come out if something even half as good were part of the OS.

The vast - VAST majority of users are happy with Windows as is.  95% of users of Windows XP are using the plain blue "Luna" UI and most of them are probably using whatever wallpaper came with the computer.  Of that remaining 5% all but a small percent are content with changing to the silver or green (okay silver) Luna.  That leaves about 1% of the user base who wants more.  How much should the other 99% be charged so that the 1% can be made happy with customization when there's a proven market of third party developers who are able and willing to devote resources to create something far more advanced than what Microsoft could ever justify? 

Whether you use a feature of the OS or not, you're paying for it.  And if only 1% of the userbase would use a feature, why should the other 99% be charged for it?  Sure, in absolute numbers, 1% is huge. But in terms of percentages it's trivial.

But let's say Microsoft bowed in and put in say skinning and custom shells and super-duper icon tweaking and countless other things. What would happen? The third party developers would go off and do something else. Anyone who thinks that developers would roll up their sleaves and come up with something super fancy still is kidding themselves. Anything really sophisticated takes a lot of time and that eventually means the developer needs to be compensated. If the "low hanging" fruit features are all part of the OS, then those developers will find some other niche (some other type of utility, another OS - the MacOS market is getting interesting after all <g>), etc.  The net result is that you just wouldn't have the kinds of customization options. You'd end up with fewer choices rather than more.

There'd be no market left other than maybe some freeware developers tweaking on the outer edges. And would the vocal minority who demanded these features in the first place be satisfied? Probably not. Because they would then be joined by the much larger group of people who didn't see a big deal paying 10 or 20 bucks for a utility that did a bunch of really cool things that aren't being updated or made anymore.  Microsoft would be stuck with the "responsibility" of supporting and placating those users. And for what? What's the business case? Would those vocal users not have bought Windows? Not have upgraded? Of course they would. 

From Microsoft's perspective, going around adding tons of tweaking features or skinning features to the OS is a lose-lose proposition. They weaken their brand. Increase their support costs. Kill off the ISV market where a lot of innovation on Windows comes from. And they don't sell a single copy more than they would have anyway.

So all users who like customizing the way Windows looks and feels in interesting ways should be glad that Kam VedBrat is the Lead Program Manager for the Windows Client Platform Team.

How much spam do you get?  A lot? Let me give you an idea of how much my email account ([email protected]) gets.

Now, you may say, what the hell are you thinking? Why are you putting your email address out there? Am I an idiot? Well yes but that's a different issue entirely. I don't do the [email protected] type thing because as Darth Vader said in Return of the Jedi -- "It's too late for me..."

Long before spam became a real problem, I was on Usenet and zillions of other sites. I used my email address in the clear (like lots of other people).  This year marks the 10th year of my email address.  In that time, I've gotten on every spam list known to mankind. I've had people purposely sign me up for stuff (flamers - don't bother, I'm already signed up to receive it). 

To give you a statistic, yesterday I received 3,914 emails. A typical day.  Previously the spam catchers on our server would get about 90% of the spam. Pretty good right? But I'm still stuck with about 400 email per day.  Of that 400 email per day, about half of it is spam. Of the remaining 200, about half of it is not spam but are lists and notifications or promotions that are legitimate (i.e. junk mail but not spam).   So of the nearly 4000 emails I get, about 100 of it is from people who want a response, presumably that day.  Since I've only got about an hour or two per day to dedicate to checking email, that means I don't get to a lot of people. And I apologize.

But that's getting a little better.  We just purchased the Barracuda. It's a hardware device that sits in front of your mail server to weed out spam. So far, the results are pretty satisfying.  I still get spam, but far far less.  Same with everyone else.  It's about 3pm today so we're about half way done.  So far, our server has received 10,449 emails total. That's everyone.  Barracuda has blocked 8,419 of them because they're spam. 1,378 were blocked because they contain virii. 217 were allowed in but were tagged as probably being spam but it wasn't sure.  That leaves 418 that it thinks are legitimate (and about 25% of them are still probably spam).

For you numbers fans, that means 96% of the email we get is either spam or virii that is can tell is spam or virii. The remaining 4% still has some spam in it, but it's still more effective (so far) than anything I've used before.

Most people into customizing their PCs are also gadget freaks. Okay, maybe not you but I am.

CNET has a story about the way TV is changing now that HD DVDs are starting to come out, BluRay is on the horizon and PVRs are taking over.

With Tuesday's launch of two HD DVD players from Toshiba, the public got its chance to decide whether that format or its rival, Blu-ray, is the rightful heir to the DVD. In the public-relations battle between the warring technologies, HD DVD scored a victory by getting to market first. Toshiba's HD-A1 ($500) and higher-end HD-XA1 ($800) players hit store shelves this week, two months before the first Blu-ray player is scheduled to go on sale.

Meanwhile, to combat the rise of PVRs, Philips has patented a technology that would allow TV stations to prevent remote controls from working during a commercial. I'm serious. When a commercial runs, your fast forward or channel changing buttons would be disabled during the duration of the commercial.

And you thought banner ads were bad.

A new episode of PowerUser.TV is now up and available.  This week, we discuss the Webby Awards (no WinCustomize on there). Along with free Internet TV, and much more.

Check it out!

I don't know how many people here read the Journals section but that's where we put up most of our day to day development stuff.  Though by "We" I mean the entire GalCiv II team though it seems like I'm the only one with enough free time to blog about it (under my Draginol account from JoeUser.com).

Next week we put out 1.1. We've been releasing beta builds like crazy since the end of last month.  Future updates won't be quite so extravagant. We just wanted to make sure people knew how serious we were about adding user-requested features even after release.

More reviews have been coming in. We've been very pleased with most of them.  The G4 XPlay review was a real shocker. 5 out of 5. I've never seen a game get a 5 out of 5 on there so we were pretty jazzed about that.  Our friends at NeoTechGaming had a nice review up of the game as well.  Computer Games Magazine gave us a 4.5 out of 5.  The CGW review should be out soon too, they aren't currently doing ratings though so we'll just use this made up quote of editor in chief Jeff Green "6 out of 5, greatest achievement in human history."

Meanwhile, our developers have been coding away on these updates. But what about the art team? Most of them are on Society. But what about our other artists? One idea we've been toying around with is a "Ship Pack".  Basically a bunch of hulls and components for ships that would allow people to create a bunch of new ships that we would sell for $9 or something.  We'd be curious on people's thoughts on that.  Art is expensive and we'd rather do it as a one time thing as opposed to a bunch of smaller groups at $2 or something each.

After next week, the team will start working on 1.2.  We have a list already of tweaks and additions.  We probably won't have a long public beta test of it like we did with 1.1. New users come to our forums, see a ton of "crash" reports and think "Oh man, this game must be buggy" not realizing they're reading beta reports.

Speaking of forums, we realize that our forums are like the devil. We are looking at a redesign soon. But we are listening to people's ideas.  Our forum system works across all our sites and allows for a lot of customization - which we'll be using to make it easier and faster to use in the coming weeks).

That's all for now.

Is multiplayer a required feature in a strategy game? Galactic Civilizations II does not have multiplayer.  And while it has averaged 4.5 stars out of 5 (or better) on the major game sites/magazines, most of the reviews have lamented the lack of multiplayer.

I talked to Bruce Geryk at length on this issue. Bruce reviewed the game for both 1up and Computer Gaming World.  He and I have talked about multiplayer for a long time and in fact he and I played head to head The Political Machine. He was, by far, the toughest opponent I played -- better than anyone internal at Stardock even.

Bruce and I have come full circle on the issue.  When he was younger, he was primarily interested in single player games. But as he's gotten older and busier, he wants his game experiences to be social.  By contrast, when I was younger, I would play multiplayer games like crazy. I would buy games and not even bother to play them single player.

From Warcraft to Total Annihilation to Rise of Nations to HOMM3, I was a junkie for multiplayer. In Total Annihilation I'd spend my days hanging out on TEN looking for people to play. I was even in PGL.  But as I've gotten older, I've become less patient with having hours wasted because my anonymous opponent would disconnect or do something incredibly lame to wreck the game.

My multiplayer experiences over the years could be summarized as follows:

• 40% of games end in the first 20 minutes due to the player doing some formula early game tactic (like rush). If their tactic failed, they'd disconnect. If they succeeded, the game was over. Either way, very unsatisfying.
• 30% of the games would end randomly due to a disconnect, crash, or the player having to leave.
• 20% of the games would end with the player leaving way early simply because they recognized that they would eventually lose. In most strategy games, if you're pretty good, you know you're going to win or lose long before it happens. So those players would simply drop out if the win wasn't almost a certainty. No attempt to even try to make a comeback. Not very satisfying.
• 10% of the games would actually play to their conclusion and be very fun.

And for that 10%, I would stick it out.  But now I'm older, I don't have time to waste a Sunday afternoon playing people on-line all day in order to find ONE game that wasn't a disaster.

Some on-line advocates, such as Bruce, have friends that they play these games with. I envy him for that.  My friends who play games are either playing totally different games from me or if they are playing a game I might like are at a totally different skill level.  As much as I might like playing a 3 on 1 Rise of Nations game or Warcraft 3 game, I'd rather have a 2 on 2 game or a 1 on 1 game where both sides are reasonably equal. (Battle.net does a decent job of matching people but the percents I mention above are still about the same).

On Bruce's blog he writes:

Brad makes the comment in his post-mortem that he wants GalCiv2 to be the kind of game the you could buy and play two years from now. But I can tell you one thing: without m/p, there is no way I'll be playing GalCiv2 in two years. Frankly, I won't be playing it in two weeks. Without m/p, my interest in playing it past the review period is nearly zero.

I asked him why challenging computer players wouldn't solve this.  His response, to paraphrase, was that when he's on the computer he wants to be interacting with other people, not playing a computer game alone.  I can respect that.  But it's totally the opposite from me.  I spend all day interacting with people on the computer, I absolutely love playing Civilization 4 and other strategy games single player.  I don't want to play a total stranger at a turn based strategy game and I don't know enough people who are good at turn based strategy games who have enough time to dedicate to playing one to the finish.

Troy Goodfellow, who wrote the 4.5 star Computer Games Magazine review writes:

Galactic Civilization II doesn't have MP, Civilization IV does. Both are great games, but guess which one will have a longer life on my hard drive? (And not just mine.) I've been a single player gamer for almost my entire life, but I have finally come to the point where a lot of gamers were a couple of years ago, seeking out multiplayer in every game. Good MP experiences have also made me hungry for real world human contact in gaming. Board gaming, DnD...anything to keep the rush of shared competition going between computer game cycles.

By contrast, Bad MP experiences have made me hungrier for good single player experiences.  I think if we sat down and did an inventory of strategy games that have come out in the past 5 years that the multiplayer fanbase has gotten served quite well.  By contrast, people like me who want to sit down and play against computer players have gotten, in my opinion, the shaft.  When I see my friends in person, I generally play board games with them if we're going to play a game. Ticket to Ride, Twilight Imperium, etc. 

If I had a ready set of friends willing to spend 8 hours straight on the computer playing a turn based strategy game, I could see the temptation.  But that's not the norm.  If I want to play Civilization IV multiplayer, I'm stuck hanging out on GameSpy's multiplayer system looking for total strangers and then we're back to the %'s.  And even if I could solve the problem for myself, I know I'm not alone in this problem. And that's the point - multiplayer people have got tons of games to choose from.  How many strategy games in the past 5 years have made a serious effort to have a strong single player experience? 

The irony is, I am not against multiplayer.  Every other game I've developed for Windows has had multiplayer. GalCiv's the only one that doesn't.  But every time we do it, we come away disappointed.  Disappointed at how few people are using is and disappointed at how many features and changes has to be made to implement it.  I suspect in some future expansion (though not in an expansion for 2006) we'll add in multiplayer.  But if we do, it's not going to be done in the traditional way.  I'd like to do something that creates persistent games -- your games exist on a server that you can come and go back to as you please with your friends over minutes, hours, days, weeks, months. But that's for another discussion.

What got this discussion going was that the game had gotten punished by some (not Bruce though he laments no multiplayer) reviewers.  I had commented on Quarter To Three that no one was taking points off of Oblivion for not having multiplayer -- an RPG after all. Bruce's response to that was that RPG players who want multiplayer have lots of choices.  Turn based strategy gamers don't have as many good options for multiplayer.  But it's not our responsibility to be all things to all people. And besides, Civ 4 has the best multiplayer of any strategy game I've ever seen.

Does that mean that some future GalCiv III won't have multiplayer?  Odds are, it'll have multiplayer. But we won't make sacrifices for it.  The single player experience will always take precedence.  The reason we didn't have multiplayer in GalCiv II is because as a first-time publisher we had to have a price point of $39.95 to get decent shelf space and that meant not having something as expensive as multiplayer (make no mistake, you're paying for multiplayer in that $50 game regardless of whether you use it or not).  A GalCiv III will probably be a >$40 program.  But that's for a looong time into the future. 

Like many people who play strategy games, we have a lot of ideas for cool features to have in a strategy game.  They come up all the time.

Space mines, orbital bombardment, tactical combat, heroes, special agents, asteroid fields, special powers for races, and dozens I won't mention right now.

It's not that these aren't good ideas -- they are.  I want many of those features too (except orbital bombardment <g>).  For me, PC strategy games revolve around having good opponents.

A good opponent means either another human being who is decent at the game or a computer controlled opponent.  For most of us, another human being who is at our skill level who is readily available to play a game that is going to last many hours is not a realistic option. That's the drawback on turn based strategy games (which isn't to say that we should shun having a multiplayer feature someday, only that it's not at the same priority as computer players).

The features I describe above could be added to the game in a month or two. Features are easy. Computer players who use them effectively are not.  On paper, having a computer player who "uses" a feature effectively seems easy. But in practice, there's a lot involved.  One mans genius strategy is another man's doom when played on a different map or in different circumstances. 

So like I said, adding features is easy. You can create a bullet list of great features but in my opinion, if the computer players don't use them effectively, then it's largely a waste unless you have a really solid multiplayer component and then it's fine -- for the people who play multiplayer. 

When we do the expansion pack, the features we choose to put it in will have to budget not just the time to implement those features but the time to write a computer AI that does the same thing and does it well.  And that can be tricky. 

And so next time someone wonders why "Feature X" isn't in the game, the answer may be as simple as "Because the time to have the AI use it well was longer than we could budget."  If the response is "Game Y had that feature" then ask yourself - how well did game Y make use of that feature for its computer opponents?

Paul Thurott takes a look at the latest Windows Vista (and has some screenshots) beta and has some criticisms.

We've been playing around with it as well and our initial excitement over Windows Vista is starting to turn into concern as we remember where Windows XP was at this stage of development -- it was in better shape.

The issue isn't just the bugs (which there are more than one would expect) but significant compatibility issues combined with Microsoft not making it clear whether they're going to live up to their performance expectations.  For instance, the new Aero glass UI isn't fully hardware accelerated from what we can tell.  Resizing windows or doing anything particularly intensive on the screen eats up a lot of CPU.  CPU? It's supposed to be using the video card (WindowBlinds 5's performance gains don't eat up all your CPU on XP because it's using the GPU instead of the CPU for instance).

The state of some of the new goodies is problematic.  The Sidebar, which we're excited about as a concept, needs better content if it's going to be on by default.  Microsoft has broken the LogonUI elements which many programs, including many of ours, finger print readers, etc. made use of in order to do their magic and has provided no work around, no new API, nothing to resolve it despite developers asking for a resolution.

Bugs get filed and then marked closed seemingly arbitrarily. And many existing programs, which should work fine on Vista, just don't work. Right now, even DesktopX is not working on Vista.  Why? We don't know.  We'll find a way to resolve it long before release but it's these seemingly arbitrary compatibility issues that give us pause (let me put it like this -- WindowBlinds works on Windows Vista which you'd think would be a much tougher thing than DesktopX to get working).

It's too early to say that Vista is having serious problems. But time is running out for Microsoft to provide a build that looks like it's remotely ready for prime time.  We'll be traveling to Redmond next month to talk to Microsoft on these issues and more.

On the good news side...

G4's Xplay gave GalCiv II a 5 out of 5. That almost never happens.

On the bad side, PC Zone UK gave the game a 60%.  It's a paper magazine so I have no idea what the review says.  But anything under a 4 star review I think at this point means that they must have run into some problem.  Anyway have access to a PC Zone UK and can give the gist of why they disliked it?

G4's popular game TV show, XPlay, has given Galactic Civilizations II a 5 out of 5!