I'm feeling pretty cranky today.  This week.  This month.

Part of it has to do with not having had a single day off since Thanksgiving.  I even worked on Christmas day.  Every day. 7 days a week. 

A few weeks ago I pulled a 111 hour week.  The last week or so I did over 80. I'm tired. Very tired.

Last week I had to temporarily take down JoeUser since the site, which is not a business enterprise, eats up around 30% of the database bandwidth of our critical accounts server. 

I want to stress that we would never just take down JoeUser permanently without letting people get their stuff.  We have a moral obligation to all users who have blogs.  And I don't have any plans to take down the site either.  Your blogs are safe.

But boy am I fed up with it right now.  I'm fed up with dealing with ungrateful whiney people.  I get a half dozen emails a day from people who address me as if I'm their technical support person.  I'm not talking simple, polite questions.  I mean rude, condescending nastiness. "Fuck you" is what is what I want to say sometimes when I get some really nasty person who is ticked off that our "service" being down for a week is simply "unacceptable".   You wouldn't believe some of the crap I get.

And then there's the onsite stuff. Just before the site went down, LW's husband had a post on sexuality in the United States.  I actually agree with his opinion 100% in terms of the subject matter.  But it was one of those ignorant "I'm from another country and Americans are stupid sheep" type posts that really gets on my nerves. I found it incredibly arrogant, even by my standards.  Which I said as much in a comment. For him single out the United States as being sexually obtuse when the US is probably more open minded than 90% of the population of the world is silly IMO.

But what presses my buttons is when I get arrogant, disrespectful and dismissive responses like "Why don't you go back to using JoeUser to peddle your latest game".  That sort of crap just irritates me.  And I express my irritation pretty straight forwardly. I repeat the golden rule of JoeUser: Don't piss off the owner.   I debate people all the time and don't end up wanting to ban those people.  But you start to get personal and I'll make you disappear from the site.  Or more to the point, you treat me with contempt and you're history.

In response, I got the ultimate button pushing -- where the guy who I'm allowing to use my blog site for free starts taking the attitude that I should be treating him better because he's a customer of the company (he bought a game) and treats JoeUser as if it's a business enterprise, which it's not. 

Every once in awhile someone will come on and comment to one of my blogs "The CEO of a company shouldn't do X, Y, Z".  How the hell do they know what a CEO should and shouldn't do?  Last time I checked, the job of a CEO is to please the shareholders.  The shareholder of Stardock is pleased.  You need help on a product, I'll bend over backwards to help you.  But don't go telling me how I should behave on my blog site.  If I want to write an article that talks about my fondness of canibalism, that's my damn business.  If people make buying decisions based on my behavior, then sorry that's asanine. You're not hurting me. The distance between a product purchase decision and me is so far removed that such buying decisions could never be connected.  And besides that, it makes the false assumption that I'm driven by money.  If I was, I would have stopped these crazy hours long ago. I'm already "set" so to speak.  I'm driven by the desire to make cool stuff. JoeUser being an example of doing something that we think is cool. There's no financial motivation behind JU. Never has been.

So LW's husgand is gone now. But with him goes his wife, Little Whip who I actually like.  I don't know what she sees in the creep but I'm sure people wonder the same thing about my wife (i.e. how she puts up with me).  Which does irritate me more since I enjoy her stuff but there's on way I'm putting up with someone like that.  But if keeping him around is a condition of her hanging around, then it's a no brainer. 

And as harsh as this is to say, especially of someone leaving whose stuff I really enjoy, it won't affect JU in the bigger scheme of things.  Time marches on and it's amazing how quickly people start to forget people who were daily parts of an online community. And I don't say that as if it's a good thing. It's a bad thing.  My good friend Jark started an art community called deviantART.  It eventually had multiple owners and eventually those owners teamed up and fired him.  He was once "the heart" of deviantART.  It would be the equivalent of me being removed from JoeUser permanently.  A couple months pass and you'd never know he was part of the site.  NEVER (and I say this with painful first hand experience) mistake popularity in a given community as existing apart from that community.

Getting back to JU and the profit motive thing. People need to understand something: Stardock owns this site. I own Stardock. It's not VC funded. It's not a partnership. There are no stock holders to answer to.  I own it. The job of a CEO of any company is to please the shareholders.  That typically means increasing profits -- which I've done.  But in a privately held company, it can mean anything.  And the only place i really get mushy about are the people who work WITH (not for) WITH me.  I'll take guff from a coworker.  I won't take it from a user of a free site that we provide purely because we think having the site is cool.

You order one of our products and you need help on one of our sites and are reasonable about it, I'll bend over backwards to help you.  At our product sites, the customer isn't just king, they're god.   But JoeUser isn't a product.  Bloggers aren't customers here.  If I bought ice cream from LW's husband, that doesn't give me the right to go up to him at a bar and shit on him about a totally unrelated thing.

What will happen in the near future is what happens over and over.  A bunch of people will post melodramatic "Goodbye" blogs and then march off to oblivion. Of course, they are certain that their popularity here will travel with them. I exiled LW's husband and Furry Canary since he decided to pile on.  We "wankers" do that.   And I may clean house further.  Because, like I said, I'm fed up.  I'm tired of taking shit.

And those people who do go, I wish them well.  I really do.  They aren't likely to get the kind of attention they get here, however.

What JoeUser brings to the table, totally free of charge, is powerful auto-syndication so that people's stuff gets out there and read by lots of people and responded to. No one else does it. Not because it's technically impossible but because it's very expensive to build and run such a site and unlike JoeUser, the other big blog sites are for-profit enterprises and so you won't see the kind of system out there any time soon.  So to users who think I'm a jerk or whatever (and I am a jerk sometimes) feel free to go to Blogger or whatever. 

So hopefully those who are reading this and thinking "Oh man, Brad's really being nasty" it's true, hopefully people can also realize that I'm human too and I get tired and I don't like being treated like a servant, especially when I'm giving something out that's very expensive, for free, year after year.  I don't expect a bunch of thank yous or appreciation.  I just ask that people not treat me as if I'm supposed to be their customer service agent.

As some of you know, I hang out on a lot of forums. Yea yea, I know I need to get a life.

I was doing a search on the net of various places talking about the game to see what people thought.

Here are some blogs I found.  If you have a blog and are blogging about GalCIv, post the URL and I will soon be making a news item to point people to your blogs.

Here's some I found:

There goes my free time

Death of Strategy Games exagerated

GalCiv II impressions

As you read these, you can see I'm not filtering out sites that have criticisms.  We don't do NDAs here and definitely want people to feel they can talk openly and honestly about things they like and don't like (as long as it's constructive). 

BTW, if anyone here is feeling frisky, we have a minor beta build up that keeps the framerate from getting ridiculously high to reduce heat/power consumption:

https://www.galciv2.com/beta/gc2test-0227.zip

(just unzip into your GalCiv 2 directory -- note, this beta isn't officially supported).

I recently wrote about Economics in gaming. It talked about the difference between buying direct vs. buying at a retailer.

Retail is a tough nut to crack. Especially these days and especially if you're a smaller developer. Retail has gotten to the point where it's dominated by a relatively small number of suppliers in a given industry.  So when someone else comes along, it's hard to sell a lot of units of its product.

One of the reasons for this has to do with the concept of sell-in. In the PC games industry, a big name title can tell-in over 100,000 copies.  That garauntees its success.  I've seem game developers from big companies say "Well, our game is the #1 selling game this month so it must be great." Nonsense. 

Overall sales of a product is a function of Initial Sell In X Marketing X Game Quality. 

When it's time to reorder games to replace sold units, computer algorithms come into play.  Each retailer has their own system for predicting how many units they will need.  But it roughly boils down to something like this:

The first week's sales of a game = The subsequent month's sales of the game = the Subsequent 3 months sales of the game = The subsequent 6 months sales of the game = The subsequent year's sales of the game.

Therefore, if you blow your first week sales numbers, you're in big trouble.  And that's where sell-in comes into play.  If you can get 100,000 units on the shelf first day then you can assure very high numbers of sales.

Galactic Civilizations II's initial sell in was much higher than the original's -- 3X as much (but still only a fraction of the roll out of a huge title).  And sales have been unexpectedly strong.  But because we're a smaller player, our ability to get units onto the shelves is much less than a larger publisher.  We can TRY to get our title out into all retail chains on Day 1 of release but as we've learned (The hard way along with our customers) our ability to actually get....the...units...in....their hands and up on shelves is more problematic.

Hence, we have cases where some stores -- even in the same retail chain -- have the box on the shelves while others do not.  Which drives us nuts.

What can save a small title is word of mouth. IF the game is good AND people tell their friends about it then it can make up for a lot of this.  This is especially true over time if people continue to do this over time, a title can stay on the store shelves a lot longer than it normally would.

The PC game industry is one of the handful of retail industries in which the user base still holds most of the cards.  Users requesting titles, word of mouth, etc. still can trump marketing, advertising, hype, etc. in the long-term.

So our first week's sell-in number was 27,000 units into retail.  How many the retailers will re-order for the month of March will largely depend on how many units they move this week.  And unfortunately we don't have much control over that because some stores get the product and don't necessarily stock it right away. 

The question will then boil down to how many copies Walmart, EB, Gamestop, Best Buy, CompUSA, Fry's, Jack of All Games, and the others move and then how quickly they can re-order and get replenished so that days of being sold out don't count against us.

Update: Don't want anyone to be discouraged by buying direct.  I am not saying one is better than the other. What we want people to do is buy the game wherever is best for them.  If buying it directly and downloading it is the most convenient way for you, that's great.  The developers make 2X as much when people buy direct.  This article is just explaining how retail works and why it's so important too.

Take 2 has told us that Galactic Civilizations II should be showing up today and the early days of this week at a store near you!

We're getting Galactic Civilizations II T-shirts in.  All the major civilizations get their own shirt.  The first 10 of these shirts are being reserved for the people who can post the best retail sighting of Galactic Civilizations II.

Here's how:

1) Find GalCiv II at a local retailer.

2) Take a picture

3) Post picture up in THIS THREAD.

4) Make sure you include where you were (city and which store).

We'll then pick out 10 of those pictures and send them a free T-shirt of the civilization of their choice.  

And most of all, have fun!

The GalCiv II launch was a much greater success than we ever imagined.

Of course, that also meant it was a much bigger load on the servers so we had to keep JoeUser.com down a little longer than we expected.

But we're back now! Sorry for any inconvenience.

As some have noticed, we've been pretty much living in the forums.  The support team has been keeping statistical track of how many users run into problem X, Y, Z.

In our non-game stuff, any serious problem that affects more than 1% of the user base is considered serious. Anything that affects more than 5% of the user base is considered critical.

One problem that has fit just over the serious but just below the critical has been game crashes.  And the logs have confused us because they don't make sense.  Why would these people have the game crash? Crashing should be reproduceable to some extent.

And yet, here we are with about 2.5% of users running into interittent crashing. 

The update (1.0D1) made the game better for most people because it fixed bugs that were found. But for some people, it actually crashes on them more than 1.0D - digital release).  Why? We had done some performance optimizations but it's really straight forward stuff.

But then..

Hmm...

During development, one of our mantras was to force everyone to run and test on lower end hardware so that we could "know their pain".  Too many games come out these days that require state of the art hardware to run.  So we mostly played and tested on lower end hardware. (not exclusively by any means, I did all my AI testing on a state of the art machine with an ATI X1800 in it).

But we noticed something in the logs -- most of the people who had these random crashing issues had really REALLY good computers.  A statistical anomaly.  A couple of people noted that the game runs their GPU very hot. VERY hot.

This week I've been playing the game and monitored the temperature on my ATI Control Panel applet (which, coincidentally, is built using licensed Stardock technology from the other side of the company <g>).  My GPU's temperature was 85C!  That's really hot!

But it's no biggie for me.  I have a Dell, it's got 50 fans on it. But what would happen on a machine that wasn't as well vented? I know what would happen: The game would start crashing -- randomly.  And it would happen relatively quickly because it reaches that high temperature within 10 minutes give or take.

So why don't other games do this?  That depends on the game of course.  Some games, like Halo, throttle their FPS. Other games simply don't use nearly as many video card features do.

I know strategy games are notorious for crappy graphics, but GalCiv II uses it all. I mean ALL OF IT.  Specular Lighting? Check. Bump Mapping? Check. Zillions of lighting passes? Check. Stuff I don't even begin to understand? Check.

If you read the entry that showed a screenshot of that Bird of Prey in teh game, that should tell you somethign about the engine.  One of my graphics guys told me that model may have over a million polygons.

The art team found a whole bunch of Star Trek models that were designed for video production (i.e. NOT for being displayed in real time).  They literally had 20 different ships in the game, each with an absurd number of polies. They ran.  To put it in perspective, a typical ship in GalCiv II only has around 600 polygons.  So there is a lot of room to grow.

Which brings us back to our heating problem.  What can be done?  The answer it seems to me is frame rate throttling.  So that's what I did:

if(ulElapsedMilliSeconds < 10 && bThrrotleOoption == TRUE)
    Sleep(5);
EnterCriticalSection(&g_csD3DDevice);
Draw3D();
LeaveCriticalSection(&g_csD3DDevice);

By doing this, my temperature stayed at around a more normal 65C.   We could probably be even more stringent.  I mean, if the time between the last frame is less than 10 that means the game's running at >100fps.  Realistically, anything over say 40 to 50fps is probably pointless.

But this way, people's machines will stay cooler.  And there will be another benefit: Laptop users again.  I'd like to put in a thing that lets us REALLY throttle it for low power usage.  I.e. >25fps is throttled (optionally).  This way, I could play the game on my ThinkPad all the way from Michigan to California on a plane trip.

Galactic Civilizations II T-shirts are coming. One for each major civilization!

Evil Drengin. Crafty Humans. Ruthless Yor.

And we're looking to give some of them away.  If you see Galactic Civilizations II at a retail shop, take a picture of it, post it here and we'll pick the 10 best ones in about two weeks and send them T-shirts as soon as they arrive! 

Please make sure that the thumbnail you post is no bigger than 640x480 (actual linked picture can be whatever you want).

I have a confession. I've been cheating on WinCustomize. It was only supposed to be a temporary fling but it's turned into being a full blown affair.  What started out as being a small game project grew and grew until nearly everyone at the company has been on that instead of working over here.  You can see my writings over there on this page. It's like having a double life.  By day, making PC desktop extension software, by night, we make video games. It's crazy.  But things are starting to return to some level of normality.

The whole Galactic Civilizations II thing has been consuming us and on top of that, there's been a lot of internal work on the ThinkDesk programs (those of you in the beta, updates coming soon, we're just trying to test these things out).

I want to stress that Stardock is hiring. As long as you're willing to work in Michigan, send your resume to [email protected].  We're looking for developers, artists, quality assurance people, web developers, ASP.net developers, .NET develoers, support people, and many others. If you think you have a particular talent, put it in with your email and send it to her.  No experience required in many cases. Some of our best developers of all time were right out of high school. Others had 4 year degrees.  We don't care what a piece of paper says. We only care about what you can do. 

Last of people is literally what slows things down the most though.  Especially in QA.  We have builds for everything from LogonStudio 2 to Sound Packager to ObjectBar that end up going to an increasingly long queue of an over burdened QA team.  And it can't be done remotely.  And we can't just release this stuff either because even if people "reported" the problem, who is going to read the reports if there's not enough QA people?

Suffice to say, we're trying to hire as fast as we can.  FYI, Michigan has warm sunny weather all year round. Rumors to the contrary are malicious and false...

A great month in skinning

Meanwhile, proving that my presence on WinCustomize is what could be considered "optional", the great skinners have been quietly kicking butt this month. A few skins I've noticed this month that struck me as particularly cool include:

Aten	Nimbus II	HALO
Lozenge	Glossamer	ArtWork
Wire and Glass	Omega Point	Solaire-dark 2.1b
Mako	Pandora's Box	SD Organizer (2.04)
Camuflaje IP	ArtWork	CYY SkyLine

And this is by no means a complete list. As people have noticed, I've been gone a lot working on that galactic game.  So I don't have every new skin running yet on my machines. But there's been some great stuff.

Meanwhile, those of you who have Object Desktop should definitely check out the latest WindowFX's.  It's a pity we didn't get these betas out earlier. The QA backlog really bit us this time because a lot of the features that seem "Vista-like" were actually in there before they appeared (or that we even knew) they'd be in Vista.  (Some visual effects are simply obvious).  But of course, since there was the beta delay, some people are going to say it was just "copied" from Vista.   Of course, it bears pointing out that we're doing Windows Vista level effects on Windows XP.   In other words, there's some really cool stuff in there.

If I can get some more QA help, we can finally get ObjectBar 2 out the door along with Control Center 2.  QA has been the primary issue there.  If we had more IT resources, we'd set up easier to manage external beta teams but again, without someone to organize the reports, it's hard to act on them.  

The new Windows Vista build came out.  I think people who were all jazzed up for the Sidebar are going to not be so excited.  I don't know Microsoft's ultimate plans with the Sidebar but it is increasingly looking like it may just end up as another accessory.  The problem is the same problem all widget/gadget things have had -- a reason to exist.  Let me give you an example from a program I like -- Yahoo Widgets.  Yahoo has been featuring a 2006 Olympics widget during the olympics. There's a perfect use for a widget right? Something to keep you up to date with what's going on in the Winter olympics.  Total downloads? Less than 20,000 total and they count repeat downloads (WinCustomize does not count repeat downloads in its count). By comparison, Treetog's new skin, Mako, already has over 50,000 downloads. 2,000 of them today and it's just barely afternoon here and that's with no promotion, no front page coverage. Certainly no Yahoo.  

It's not that the widgets aren't a good idea or aren't that popular. It's that they are niche.  For people like me, who love this stuff, and thousands like me, widgets are sweet.  But it's going to be hard to have the Sidebar on by default just to satisfy people like me when they can put it into accessories where, again, people like me will find it, turn it on and run with it.    So we'll see how that works out.

Windows Vista is almost certianly going to usher a new era of skinning.  Right now, skinning is pretty much off limits to the increasing number of 3D artists out there.  But Vista is probably going to open the door to them. Stay tuned on that front.

So anyway, hope you found this informative.  More soon.

Next Level Gaming has the first review of the retal version of Galactic Civilizations (v1.0).

What can be more fun than playing a fantastic strategy game… oh wait I know, what if they throw in funny comments, like when you read technology upgrade descriptions and you find yourself cracking a smile or even laughing out loud.  I can’t stop playing this game, I’m so glad it didn’t come out during the holiday season or there is no way I would have gotten any other games done.  95/100

You can read the whole thing here.

PC Game World has a review up. It's based on the gamma version (the final version is considerably nicer) but it's still a thorough review of what you can expect in the game. 

While the Stardock love is flowing I should also mention that they forgo the usual draconian DRM mechanisms found in most of today's games. Once installed no disc is required to play, and the game can be installed on multiple computers with the developers blessing (provided they are owned by the same person of course). Between my HTPC, My laptop, and my "gaming rig" I have three computers that I regularly play games on, and now I don't have to shuffle the disc around my house to play this game where I want to. Thanks Stardock.  90/100.

You can read that review here.