Some new reviews of Galactic Civilizations II have come out this week. The first one comes from Gaming Horizon.

Their verdict:

Galactic Civilizations II is the first sleeper hit of 2006. The AI is the best seen thus far in any strategy title and the complexity and depth of the game will keep gamers coming back for just one more turn. With a random galaxy generated every game, coupled with AI that is unpredictable and incredibly intelligent, the game is sure to never play out the same way twice. Gamers looking for a good turn based strategy title will find a lot to like in Galactic Civilizations and the reduced MSRP of $39.99 also makes this game one of the best PC buys of the year.

You can read the full-review here.

The second new review comes from GameShark.com. As the AI developer on GalCiv II, I particularly liked their comments on the computer AI:

Getting back to the AI – this is really what makes GalCiv II stand out from the crowd. This game has some of the best enemy AI around. It's clever, doesn't cheat, makes mistakes, anticipates, and is generally wonderful. Each of the game's ten races behaves as separate entities and will treat you differently depending on the race you are playing. Still, what makes the AI so brilliant isn't that it's hard to beat, but rather that it acts more like a human than any other turn based strategy game around. It's programmed to guess what a human may do – and it'll flat out tell you that it knows what you're up to. It's borderline creepy. On the harder levels of difficulty if you leave the AI an opening it rushes through it, make a blunder and it jumps all over you, try to make a crazy tech trade and it'll laugh at you and tell you why, but it's also prone to making "human" mistakes. It's not perfect nor should it be. It's simply a brilliant AI game model and it ensures that no two games of GalCiv II will ever play the same.

I'll mention this part again but it's very cool when reviewers spend enough time on a game to play it at different levels and see that the computer AI actually plays differently. You can imagine the tedium in writing computer AI that is intentionally "Stupid" at lower levels to represent on-line play.

Much of the AI design came from the Warcraft 3 beta incidentally.  On Battle.net, players are automatically put up against players of a similar skill ranking.  Our goal with the AI was that as players bumped up the intelligence level on opponents, it would feel the same as going up the ladder on a multiplayer game (except where the other guy doesn't drop as soon as things go against him or her <g>).

You can read the GameShark.com review here.

The next one is from GamingTrend.com.  They really liked the game but took some points off for no multiplayer and that the graphics are a bit "static" in some places (which is true as making sure the game ran on lower end hardware took priority and so the budget for more on-screen "stuff" was put into other areas).

Their conclusion:

You can read their full review here.

Those are some of the reviews that came out this week. If there's a review I missed or that you'd like me to post about (good or bad) please feel free to command in this thread and I'll check it out.

Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords, the demo is nearly ready to go out.

It will be available at noon EST on March 30th at Gamespot!

Another note about the demo: A lot of time was put into having the demo size be relatively small.  While the full game is 1.5 GB in size, we managed to bring the demo size down to less than 200MB (I think it's around 150MB).  And the demo allows players to play in randomly generated galaxies.  Obviously there's less music and video and ship parts, but it still gives a good taste of what the game is like.

I remember talking to friends about how many copies they thought some game would sell. Often times, such discussions would include "Oh, it's a great game, it'll sell millions of copies."

You need a very good game to get a million units. But it doesn't mean your game is necessarily better than some game that sold half that or a tenth of that. It just means you had better distribution. 

One of my favorite games, Dominions 2, probably didn't sell very high volumes. Does that mean it wasn't a great game? No. It just means it wasn't massively distributed.  By contrast, when I walk into Best Buy and find literally 40 copies of Oblivion on the shelf on the first day, you know it's going to do some serious sales. Combine with the fact it's a really good game and you have a mega hit.

Quality of game is a major factor in determining how close you'll reach your sales potential. But it is distribution that sets that potential.

For example, below is a sample of the top 10 best selling PC games from February (before GalCiv II shipped):

1. The Sims 2: Open for Business
2. World of Warcraft
3. Star Wars: Empire at War
4. The Sims 2
5. D&D Online
6. Lord of the Rings
7. Age of Empire III
8. Civilization IV
9. Zoo Tycoon 2
10. Battlefield 2

Many of these games are fantastic. However, their quality does not necessarily translate to sales.  To be in that top 10, you have to be in a LOT of channels AND have a good game AND have a game that appeals to a very wide audience.

The first Galactic Civilizations (2003) initially shipped into EB and Gamestop.  That was it.  A couple months later it got into CompUSA and BestBuy and a few other places.  Obviously, that limited the title's potential in sales.  We were happy with the sales, however.  Our expectation wasn't to sell a million copies. We only expected to sell 30,000 copies with the hope it might do 50,000.  It ended up doing around 150,000 total worldwide.

For Galactic Civilizations II, we self-published and put more effort into getting into more channels on the first day. This had terrific results.  Our goal with the sequel was to do around 200,000 total sales with a higher % of those sales being full-price sales (a lot of GalCiv I's 150k sales were deeply discounted sales due to our publisher deciding to discount quickly and heavily in exchange for up front advances).  As I write this, GalCiv II has already exceeded the # of units GalCiv I shipped in North America.

A lot of that difference was distribution. But not all of it.  We've already sold more copies of GalCiv II direct than we did of GalCiv I total. We're still trying to understand why that is.  Is GalCiv II that much better than GalCiv I?  Are more people just willing to buy on-line now than they were in 2006?  Was our marketing just that much better?  It's some combination of factors but how much of each factor we don't know.

At retail, distribution sets your potential. People are buying a box. The more places that have your box, the more sales you can potentially make.  For instance, Galactic Civilizations II has been in the top 5 (or even #1 in some cases) in the stores it's in -- Best Buy, CompUSA, EB, Walmart, GameStop, Amazon.com at various times.  And those are only in the stores that we can access rankings.  If we hadn't sold out, our stats would probably be even more impressive (first time indie publisher not easy to get retail space).

Needless to say, we've been really thrilled with sales.  If a little company like Stardock can be #1 at Walmart or BestBuy or EB or whatever, then anyone can do it -- if you just make a game people want.  It really demonstrated the power of word of mouth.

But we'll never sell a million units or anything like that.  To do that, you have to be in a lot more channels.  We're in Walmart. That's good. But we're not in CostCo, or Sams Club, or Target, or Office Max, or tons of other stores.  I walk into my local comic book store to pick up the latest Ultimate Spider-Man and there's World of Warcraft for sale on the shelf. That's Distribution.

Shelf-Space also matters.  Many people will walk into a store and if there's a huge block of a new game on the shelves, they'll buy it because well, it must be pretty special if it's getting that much shelf space.  So when I walk into a store as a developer I'm thrilled to see 8 units of GalCiv II on the shelf. W00t!   But next to it is Zoo Tycoon with 20 units on the shelf. Regardless of whether you like Zoo Tycoon or not, one must give credit to Microsoft for being able to push that many units into the channel and get the sales they get.

One of the things developers and publishers need to really explore is what role does "marketing" play.  Do ads in magazines matter?  What about webzine ads?  There's a lot of research out there on how people find out about games.  But there's little conclusive proof on that.

All we do know is that Distribution sets the potential and game quality X marketing determines what % of that potential you'll reach. 

Stardock has released SkinStudio 5.01.  SkinStudio is a program used by designers and skin authors to create their own visual styles / skins for Stardock WindowBlinds, Microsoft Media Player, and other programs.

SkinStudio is most popularly used in conjunction with WindowBlinds.  Where WindowBlinds applies skins to change the look and feel of Windows, SkinStudio is what helps people create the skins in the first place.  SkinStudio 5.01 supports all the native features of the new WindowBlinds 5 including per-pixel alpha blended title bars, animations, etc. 

With SkinStudio, skinners can actually select different parts of the Windows GUI (title bars, push buttons, etc.) and then change how they look by selecting a different bitmap (or PNG).  SkinStudio can also import skins create in .msstyles format to be used in WindowBlinds format seamlessly.  SkinStudio also supports creating Boot Skins as well as skins for other programs.

Version 5.01 is a maintenance release over 5.0 which was released last November.  It includes performance enhancements, further support for other languages, and better skin previewing.

Download at http://www.skinstudio.net

Screenshots:

Late last week I talked to Firing Squad's John Callaham on a number of different topics ranging from copy protection issues (GalCiv II contains no CD copy protection) to Society and of course lots of stuff on Galactic Civilizations II.

Check it out.

ObjectBar lives! ObjectBar 1.99G is now available for Object Desktop users.  One of Stardock's most ambitious long-term projects of all time is nearly complete. It's been close for a long while but it has had to evolve with the marketplace. 

So what is ObjectBar?  ObjectBar is truly a one-of-a-kind program that lets people create their own sidebar/wharfs/finders/docks/bars/whatever.  There are plenty of "side bars" out there as well as other programs that lets you have some sort of dock, but what makes ObjectBar special is that it lets you create any kind of bar you want.  Want to make a Finder-like bar ala MacOS? ObjectBar can do it.  Want something that resembles something from OS/2? BeOS? Gnome? KDE? ObjectBar can do it.  ObjectBar can even do the kinds of things that Microsoft is hoping to do with its Windows Sidebar in Vista.  ObjectBar even supports putting widgets and gadgets onto it as a native part of the bar.

ObjectBar 2 has been in beta  long time.  A lot of that has been due to having to increase its feature set as programs from Google, Microsoft, and elsewhere have come onto the scene.  Development has continued even if beta releases were less frequent.  A lot of underlying technology had to be developed in order to make this sort of thing work.  For example, with ObjectBar 2, you can actually develop your own custom bars and then export them as programs for others to use! An actual .EXE!

ObjectBar 2 is also the basis of ControlCenter 2.  If you have Object Desktop, ControlCenter 2 beta should be available to try out.  ControlCenter 2 is a particular ObjectBar creation that was exported. The difference between an exported bar and ObjectBar itself is the simplicity of configuration. 

As you might expect, ObjectBar is a lot more complex than a "specialized" program would be.  This was a problem that has existed since ObjectBar 1 -- power users loved ObjectBar but casual users were intimidated.  But with the ability to export your creations as programs that have their own simplified configuration UI, that problem seems to be solved.  Power Users can continue to use ObjectBar and casual users can use ControlCenter or some other exported creation.  They all use the same skins.

ObjectBar 2 can be set to automatically make use of whatever WindowBlinds skin you are using.  It also has its own skin library.

Here's a summary of what's in in 1.99G:

• Lots of cosmetic fixes. Example: Arrow bitmaps will show up on skins that don't have them (such as on submenus).
• Can drag and drop URLs from web pages onto bars to create short-cuts.
• Can drag and drop nearly anything onto a bar and have it create an object.
• Enhanced plugin support for RSS readers, CPU meters, memory meters, drive meters, etc.
• Bunch of new skinning options
• TONS of other things which can be found here.

As the change log indicates, development on ObjectBar hasn't slowed down. It's just been a matter of getting the pieces together to make something public.

If all goes well on this version, it'll become a release candidate and then a final 2.0. Let us know what you think.  We're way beyond the "wishlist" stage though.  As many reading this probably agree, it's time for 2.0 to be released. So wishlist stuff can go into 2.x. Stability, bugs, etc. are things we're looking to resolve at this stage.

March 282006 -- WindowBlinds has broken the 10 million download mark on CNET's popular Download.com website.  Last week, WindowBlinds 5.01 was released and continued its trend as being the world's most popular way to customize the look and feel of the Windows GUI.

WindowBlinds is a program that enables users to completely change the look and feel of Microsoft Windows. With it, users can apply "skins" that change the existing Windows graphical user interface (GUI) across the entire system. Title bars, push buttons, radio buttons, the Start bar, and nearly every other part of the Windows interface is changed. WindowBlinds 5.01 improves performance on X64 based systems, adds support for wallpaper management, taskbar blurring, IE 7 support, and various tweaks, bug fixes, and performance enhancements.

WindowBlinds is used by companies such as Microsoft, nVidia, ATI, Nintendo, Blizzard, Alienware and many others to create their own custom desktops. The most recent addition to WindowBlinds fans is Xbox 360 Desktop, which uses WindowBlinds to create an xBox themed desktop. Companies also license WindowBlinds-based technology in the form of DirectSkin to make their own applications skinnable. For example, the ATI Catalyst Control Center uses WindowBlinds for its skinning and GE Medical uses it to create skinnable applications.

WindowBlinds has skinning features not thought possible on Windows XP or before. The most popular of which is that WindowBlinds can support alpha blending in skins (glass effects and other visual enhancements in title bars and controls) as well as animation, shadows, sound effects, and more.

In about two days from now, the demo of Galactic Civilizations II will be released over at Gamespot.com.

Demo Details:

• Play as the Terran Alliance
• Play in a randomly generated galaxy
• Play against multiple alien civilizations backed by a sophisticted computer AI.
• Design your own ship or use the ships that come with the game.
• Advanced diplomatic options to plot your domination of the galaxy
• Win through technological, military, political, or cultural means.

Spent yesterday playing Oblivion. Very impressive RPG.

But today I wanted to go back to playing one of my other favorite games.  My desk is a mess and I managed to find the CD and put it in. So I try running the game and I get a "Cannot locate the CD-ROM".

Ack. So I dig up the other CD for it and try that. Same thing. I've played the game a zillion times before, never had a problem.  My Dell has two CD drives (one DVD, one CD). So I tried putting both CDs in the drive, same thing.  Then I tried disabling one of the drives and trying both CDs in turn. Same thing.

I then uninstall the game, reinstall it. Installs fine.  But I can't run it. I get that damn message every time. So what's the issue? There's only two CDs for the game in question. I've tried both. They used to work fine. They've worked fine for months. The only thing I've done new is install Oblivion which I don't see how that could affect anything.

I try logging on as another user, same problem.  I try deleting every other process I can, same problem.  Either the CD somehow got damaged in some subtle way (but had no problem doing a full reinstall of the game) or something on my system has changed that I can't figure out.

Either way, it's incredibly frustrating to be wasting hours on a Sunday trying to figure out why I can't play the game when I know, all the while, that people who warezed it had no problem. 

I've googled and the only other people who had something similar that I could find are people who put the wrong CD in the drive (due to a misprint) but that's not an issue here since I've tried both and played the game successfully for months.

Give me activation or some other mechanism. I just want to play the game without having to mess with some stupid CD ROM, especially if the checking is flakey due to whatever reason (it's probably not even the game's fault, it's probably something that's changed on my system).  All I know is that I can't play the game.

It's exactly the type of reason why I hate CD copy protection though. The game's using 1.5 gigs of hard drive space and I can't play it because the "dongle" doesn't work.  Heck, sadly, I would prefer a real life dongle. Give me a USB dongle I have to use or something. I have a zillion USB ports, I'd happily sacrifice one. I just want to play the game without inconvenience.

First thing we request:

Go into Stardock Central, go into Free Stuff and download and run SmartException.

If the game crashes, it'll create a .CRA file in a ZIP file (SE isn't the friendliest tool out there but it's inside the ZIP it creates).  If you can post the contents of the .CRA file, we'll know what line of code it crashed on.

Also, please post the beginning page of your debug.err and then the last several lines of the debug.err.