PowerUser.TV has become one of the most popular podcasts on the net.  Head over and check it out.

This week we talk about dual booting Mac and Windows, MyDeadSpace, Microsoft buying LionHead, and how Kristin is able to put up with me for an hour straight!

Ubi Soft announced yesterday that Heroes of Might and Magic V would not be using Starforce copy protection.

For users who don't like very stringent CD copy protection, this is a huge victory.

T-man and his team have been updating the backend of WinCustomize.com a lot recently.  The site is now using ASP.NET 2.0 with the goal being to make WinCustomize able to handle more users at the same time.

What inevitably has happened throughout WinCustomize's history is that the site will get fast, more people will come, which will overwhelm the system, and then the site will seem slow and buggy and such.

In late 2004, we went up with "WC2K5" which dramatically increased the # of daily visitors.  But as a result, rather than the site being slow, you'd get "server too busy" or other errors.  We've been struggling along with this for quite a long time because WinCustomize just couldn't afford the servers/personnel to deal with it.

However, much of that changed this year with the release of Galactic Civilizations II. Stardock, the company that owns WinCustomize.com also makes that game (along with Object Desktop and a lot of other good stuff). The game has been a huge hit and has allowed us to buy a bunch of high end servers.

In early March, we did some server upgrades to deal with the serious problems we were running into due to the overall Stardock.net traffic increase from the release of GalCiv II.  We even had to take WinCustomize down for several hours over the course of a few days.  But with the revenue from GalCiv II, we can finally do a serious overhaul of our back end.

As of today, the major backend coding changes are largely completed.  This weekend we're installing over half a dozen new high end servers to help power WinCustomize's growth. 

Why? Because there's BIG things coming for the skinning world.  It may not have seemed that way lately right? Been a little quiet? That's because a lot of things are being worked on that you will see start to show up over the next year.  Windows Vista is coming, the Vista sidebar is coming, some really interesting new...things are coming, and WinCustomize will be supporting them all.  It's going to get very exciting very soon.

But rather have all this cool stuff happen and then have the site grind to a halt with flakey behavior, we're trying to get everything in place before hand.  By the end of next week, the full upgrades both to the server backend and the code should be in place.  At that point, the team will start to work on WC2K7 which will be a new overhaul to the front end of the site (what the site looks like, interface, features, etc.).  Good times!

JoeUser may be a neat site but it hasn't been IMO a very reliable site. Down times, slow speeds, flakey behavior, bugs, etc.  On the one hand, it's free, so how can we complain? But on the other hand, it's still been down, slow, flakey, and buggy and that just because you're free doesn't mean that you're above criticism.

But in the past few days, we've finally started the full upgrade process on our entire server farm.  Shortly after GalCiv II shipped, we did some emergency updates that were designed to keep sites marginally running.  This week, we began the full stage upgrade. 

Hopefully, even though we're only half-way done, you can tell that the site is much faster. Less flakey. More reliable.  Traffic has already started increasing dramatically as a result. More readers for your blogs, more freedom to surf the site, etc.

So for all of you who have been through the rough times as well as the good times, thanks for sticking it through. 

It's time to wrap up 1.1 so that everyone else can use it.

At this point, only SEVERE issues (i.e. like a game crash or something that really affects game play) should be mentioned unless it's something NEW.  That means suggestions, pet peeves, etc. should wait until future updates.

 Please download from Stardock Central (in the "free stuff" area) a program called Smart Exception.  When you have it installed, run it and then run the game. IF the game crashes, it will create a file that can be emailed to [email protected] that will tell us literaly what line of code it crashed on. It's even possible that just one solid smartexception report could resolve this completely.

Debug.err reports will NOT tell us where a crash occurs. We need the SmartException.

Beta 4 has passed Stardock's internal QA at this point so as far as they're concerned, it's ready for release.  But we want to run it by you guys as well.

Stardock is expanding its advertising in game magazines and elsewhere.  We have at Gamespot, Penny-Arcade and many other websites.  We've also been taking out full page ads in many game magazines as well.  Now we're expending into two-page spreads.

I don't know about you guys, but when I read magazines, I almost never notice 2 page ads. My eyes are trained to skip past "non editorial".  So when we decided to make a 2 page spread, we wanted to make something that was like the game play examples. To let people see what they could expect in the game. That meant using in-game graphics, describing what was happening.  So the result is an ad that is somewhat unlike anything we've seen before.  We're not marketing geniuses here so maybe there's a good reason why game publishers don't tend to make full page spreads like what you see below.  But we like it and wanted to share it with you.  These ads will start showing up in Computer Gaming World, Computer Games Magazine, and PC Gamer.

The 2-page spread:

Below is the full page ad that should start showing up in the new issues of the various game magazines:

Feel free to let us know what you think.

In beta 3 and beta3A, one of the new features was that the AI would no longer trade or just give out starbases to players to help them.

The net result of my AI change was that instead of it trading a starbase or giving it to you to help you, the game would just crash instead.

The important point was that the change log was correct -- the AI WOULD NOT trade those starbases with you or give them to you.

Beta 4 should be up shortly...

This version basically fixes bugs that were introduced in the 1.1 betas to prepare for the final 1.1 release:

Note, your saved games may not work with this version.

+ Saved games now load MUCH MUCH faster on new saves

+ Fixed bug in Ship Designer where auto-place would not create a slot icon for modules such as colony, trade, troop, etc

+ Fixed bug in Ship Designer where auto-placed modules could not be removed from the ship

+ Fixed crash when trying to buy AI ships from trade screen (ahem)

+ Fixed bug where Diplomacy history would have no data

+ Fixed bug where large galaxies might save planet data before it the data had been initialized, making the saved game crash in unexpected places

+ Changed saved game version because saved games no longer save influence data - speeds up saved game load time

+ Added support for loading older saved games that still have influence data

+ Fixed bug where you could not select a ship that had been upgraded in the Quick Build list

+ Fixed crash in ship move calculation because the ship had no ship type

+ Fixed crash related to ship/improvement built icons

+ Fixed crash related to failure to load and create fonts

+ Implemented Cari's change to prevent AutoSave crashing

+ Improved stability in various places by checking process pointers before appending them to other processes

+ Added debug messages when memory allocation fails

+ Influence updates immediately after loading a game (No need to wait a turn for the influence to correct itself)

+ Fixed a bug where saved games from older versions that had orbital fleet managers in them did not allow the player to attack ships in a planet

+ Ship Design Screen deletes an old design if the new design has the same name

+ Fixed bug where if you pressed ESC in election window, you would never get any more elections from then on

This version should be available by 8pm EST.

Have some fun with your Windows desktop with teh Desktop Pet.  The Desktop Pet is a virtual pet that actually lives out its life on your desktop. Users can feed it, play with it, watch it walk around your desktop interacting with your trashcan, and other desktop objects that come with it. 

The pet isn't just randomly walking around, it has a sophisticated artificial intelligence engine that gives it moods and desires and based on them will perform various actions.

Version 1.01 of the virtual pet updates the graphics to give it a more "teddy bear" look and smooths out some animations, updates the AI a bit and more.

The desktop pet is only $9.95 ($8.95 if you have Object Desktop) and is a great diversion or simply something that can run in the background (it uses virtually no CPU when it's covered up).