I have little patience for racists.  Most racists I encounter fall into two groups:

Group 1: People who are indoctrinated to be racists.  They grow up around racist people and become racist themselves. These are the people who will go to ridiculous lengths to "prove" that one race is "better" than another.

Group 2: People who confuse race with culture.  They'll say "Look at all those <insert racial group here> doing that? They're natural born <insert insult here>."  No. Not true. Not natural born. Perhaps a product of their culture but not of their genetic code.

To use an analogy, ones race is like the hardware of a person.  And while there are certainly minute differences between one race and another due to the pressures of natural selection over the past 100,000 years, those differences are not very significant.  Simply put, humans are remarkably similar genetically.

But culture is a whole different thing. Culture is like the operating system.  For example, if you take two identical personal computers and install two different operating systems on them, they will behave remarkably different. And on that point, I won't cower to political correctness and try to say all cultures are equal. They are not.

I don't even think it's a value judgment.  A culture's ability to produce happy, well adjusted people who live a long productive life has some subjectivity to it but not a lot.  If someone reading this wants to say "Well maybe misery and suffering is 'good' to some people? Who is to say that happiness, joy, physical health, and longevity are 'better'?"  To those people I say, go away and get a life. Let's be real.

Operating system debates are pretty common. MacOS vs Windows vs. AmigaOS vs. OS/2 vs. Linux and so forth.  And indeed, it gets hard to say that one is "better" in all ways than another. Few are.  But in the case of human culture, I don't think it's a MacOS vs. Windows XP type debate.  It's more like a MacOS vs. some machine whose running an OS that requires people to flip switches and put in punch cards.  The differences between some human cultures is so vast that it's pretty obvious that it's not geography or bad luck that caused the discrepancies. It's that their culture is holding them back.

Some cultures simply fail,  utterly, to produce happy, healthy, prosperous, productive people. 

When I see the behavior of the Islamic world, I don't think "Damn Arabs." I don't think there's any significant genetic difference. But I think at this point we can say that the Islamic culture, as a whole, has some serious problems.  It is not as good as other cultures. I mean that.  It's the Vic-20 of cultures. And I'm not just comparing them to the west.

There are several different major cultures on our planet:

• American liberalism
• European socialism
• Japanese
• Chinese
• Indian
• Russian Orthodox
• Latin American
• Islamic

These are just the largest ones that come to mind that have a specific identity. There are sub-cultures as well. African-Americanism, Latin American Socialism, Sub-Sahara African cultures, Eastern Europe Orthodoxy/Slavic which is quite different than European Socialism, Australian liberalism.  And even within these various groups, there are different modest differences.  I'm just pointing this out before someone jumps in with semantics and wants to list off the ones I mised.

Most of the major cultures have their pros and cons to them.  Just as we might debate whether MacOS is better than Windows XP, we can debate whether American liberalism, with its consumerism is better than European socialism with its economic stagnation.  Each has its problems.  So for the most part, debating the various major cultures is like trying to debate Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac and so forth.

But it seems to me that the Islamic culture stands out amongst them all as being the most problematic.  It has been this way for my entire life.  I can't remember a time in my 34 years of life where the Islamic World wasn't blowing up something, murdering innocencts, or lashing out at something.  And over what?  There are lots of theories as to why there are Muslim extremists who have a pattern of doing this kind of thing.  I can't think of any other cultures that so routinely and consistently use their people as ordinance. Muslims can't even claim to have suffered particularly harshly compared to other cultures.

My personal theory is that at some level, Muslims know that there is something wrong with their culture. That it fails to produce happy, healthy, prosperous people at anywhere near the rate of other cultures. And rather than trying to adapt (borrow features from) other cultures, it simply blames other cultures and lashes out.

The Muslim riots over the pictures of their prophet being in a Danish newspaper come across as more than just violent. They come across as infantile. A big temper tantrum from a culture that routinely cuts the heads off people, sets fire to the religious and national symbols of other cultures and nations, and intentionally murders women and children whose crime is that they are from a different culture.  If the Muslim world were an individual person, it would be a slow-witted spoiled brat child with psychotic tendancies.

I personally think the world would be better off if Islamic culture were to disappear -- entirely.  I definitely think that the human beings who inhabit the places that are dominated by that culture would be better off (the women definitely would be).  I can't think of a single contribution to the world that the Islamic world has provided in the past 500 years.  You have to go all the way back to the middle ages to find anything and how much of that was due to geography -- the Islamic world is centered around the fertile crescent where much of Indoeuropean civilization started from.

But as a practical matter, people won't stand up and say the obvious: Some cultures are not as good as others. They won't say it because you'll have unscrupulous politicians and opportunists tag those who say it as "Racist" even though race and culture are unrelated.  And because people won't say the obvious, they cannot move people to action.  A worldwide movement to put pressure on the Islamic world to knock it off and grow up would probably do some good.

While the other cultures continue to evolve and improve themselves, the Islamic culture stagnates and revels in hatred and violence.   So yea, you could say I'm a culturalist.  I think some cultures are more worthy than others.  I define "Better" in terms that I think are pretty universal for human kind. Happiness. Health. Longevity. Prosperity. Productivity. 

According to the universal code of PC game launches game developers must ensure:

All games, products, and or services that are distributed or rely on a digital/on-line component (e.g. the "Internet") must have a disastrous first few days of availability to ensure that the entire release is tainted.

The level of disaster and general failure of said service must be inversely proportional to the amount of time, effort, and testing that went in to trying to avoid the mandatory fate.

However, the rules do not specify WHEN this disaster must occur.  So there's some wiggle room.  So rather than having the "disaster" and "nightmare" be on Galactic Civilizations II's release date we would like to move it back to be a week BEFORE the release.

Specifically, what we want to do is allow users who pre-ordered it to be able to download the bulk of the game (everything basically but the EXEs and key DLLs).  That way, it'll be the same effect as you'd get on release date -- thousands and thousands of people trying to get the same files at the same time from around the world but still allowing us to keep the retailers from being upset at actually releasing the game before it's available there.

And in this way, all the horrible problems that seem to always happen on these kinds of things can be dealt with before the actual release.  In theory, it should work fine.  But my friends at other game companies have told me the same thing -- they were sure they had made sure everything would be fine and then it was still a cluster..

Stardock will provide the appropriate threads to respond in. We will title them with names like:

"Stardock sucks!"

"Where's my *^%& game?"

"MORE server woes! Hello, Stardock?!"

"Why I will never buy another product from this lame company again"

"Didn't they test this thing?"

By fulfilling the letter of the on-line release policy even if not the spirit, we can hopefully make February 21st much easier.

 IGN has put up their final preview of Galactic Civilizations II.  The game will be out in another 9 days.  The preview goes over the play mechanics of the game and other details. It also has a lot of unique screenshots that make use of the color skinning system.

There has been an ongoing debate on another blog over whether the bible has contradictions on it.  On the one hand you have the skeptics. In the middle the realists. And on the other side, for lack of a better word, you have the dogmatics.

There are countless perceived contradictions in the bible. But whether they are truly a contradiction depends on how far you are willing to read between the lines. 

One of the most blatant contradictions in my opinion is the account of how Judas (the betrayer of Jesus) died.  In the book fo Matthew, Judas feels remorse for what he has done, throws his silver coins down and goes off and hangs himself.

But in the book of Acts, Judas keeps the money, acquires a field and falls headling and bursts open his body.

So how do you reconcile these differences?  In my opinion, a reasonable person would say "Oops. one of them is in error."  But to those who obsess over the literal accuracy of every word in the bible then nothing is beyond interpretting or extending to support your fanatical belief.

For example, with regarsd to Judas, the Christian Apologetics Ministry argues:

"There is no contradiction here at all because both are true.  A contradiction occurs when one statement excludes the possibility of another.  In fact, what happened here is that Judas went and hung himself and then his body later fell down and split open.  In other words, the rope or branch of the tree probably broke due to the weight and his body fell down and his bowels spilled out.
     Also, notice that Matt. 27:3-8 tells us specifically how Judas died, by hanging.  Acts 1:16-19 merely tells us that he fell headlong and his bowels gushed out.  Acts does not tell us that this is the means of his death where Matthew does."

But that requires the reader to suspend belief beyond the point where any reasonable person could accept. Here's why:

1) Matthew states explicitly that Judas threw away the money and that the priests then took the money bought a field to bury strangers.  By contrast, Acts says that Judas bought the field and feel "headlong" and his bowels came out.

2) Some argue "well, he didn't die from hanging, that he may have fallen down and that's how he died."  This is really silly because it doesn't say he attempted to hang himself. He hanged himself. Period. If you're going to take the bible literally, you can't start adding your own spin on it.  And if you hang yourself, you don't fall head long. 

3) Another argument I've seen is that well, acts doesn't actually say he died. It just says his bowels gushed out. He may not have died from this.  Please.  At that point, it becomes meaningless.  You fall and your bowels come out, you die.

Common sense says that in one passage, Judas felt guilt, thew away the money, and hung himself.  And the other passage takes the irony path -- Judas the villain keeps the money, buys  a field and ironically dies horribly getting his just deserts.  One is a suicide, the other implies an accident which is a pretty important difference.

This is an age-old debate that pretty much boils down to seperating the zealots from the non-zealots.  After debating the issue myself, I decided to also look to see if others had debated this issue on-line.  In turns out, yep, this particular blatant contradiction has been argued many tiems before.

One writer who looked at it put it like this:

How do these verses contradict each other?

1. In Matthew, Judas threw away the money to the priests before dying, then he went to hang himself. After that, the priests bought a field. In Acts, Judas used the money himself to buy a field.
   
2. In Matthew, Judas threw away the money before dying, and then a field was bought. In Acts, the field was bought before Judas died.
   
3. In Matthew, he died by hanging himself, whilst in Acts he fell headlong and his bowels gushed out.

How could an inerrantist Christian respond to these three points? Let me speculate on some possible counter-arguments.

As for point 1, one could infer that when Acts says that Judas bought the field, what is meant is that the priests bought the field on his behalf. This, however, is not permissible, since if one is allowed to change the meaning of the language, no significant discussion about the actual meaning of anything can be conducted. In ordinary language, we do not say that "this man purchased a field for $100" if someone else purchased it for their own usage with money thrown away by its original owner. Clearly, from Matthew, Judas did not give any order for the priests to buy a field for his money, and even if he did, why would they obey him, who they despised?

As for point 2, it seems hard to come up with a counter-argument, since the past tense is used in Matthew ("went and hanged himself"), implying that the execution of the deed had taken place before the purchase of the field. Meanwhile, Acts clearly presents the case where the field is bought prior to his dying (indeed, since he is said to have bought it himself!).

As for point 3, it is logically possible that the story in Acts is consistent with Matthew in terms of the method of dying, but it seems highly unlikely, from how his death is described. If one is to find consistency, one must include many things not in the text. Amongst other things, one wonders how the bowels could gush out simply from his having died by hanging, and one also wonders how he could fall headlong in a field, and where the tree came from (normally, there are no trees in the middle of a field).

Note that it suffices for only one of the three stated contradictions to hold for there to be a contradiction.

In other words, this isn't a new issue.  The handful of people who dogmatically cling to the belief that the Christian bible contains no contradictions have to be, in themselves, willing to essentially add new passages in the bible to fill in the missing gaps.  At which point, the whole argument becomes meaningless.

And this is just one of the more blatant ones. There are plenty of others.  Contradictions in the bible only are a problem if you take the bible literally rather than as a general guide.  Sadly, there are people who cling to the literal words as being infallible.  I personally think that those who do have much less faith than they let on.  If one truly has faith, then such contradictions would be easier to admit to and they'd be able to move on.

Stardock has released 3 wallpapers for Galactic Civilizations II.  They feature 3 of the robots in high resolution that you may not have seen before. 

It's in the download section here.  We hope you like them. Incidentally, the screenshot you see here is in-game (zoom in on the colony ship) not a wallpaper.

Patrick Joynt of 1Up.com has put up a preview of Galactic Civilizations II.

Read the whole thing.  Only 11 days left...

Ever buy games where the developer pretends a given problem with their game doesn't exist?

Wish they'd just admit to a problem and fix it? Well here's our list of problems that we've encountered and some of them are going to sound pretty obscure but if they affect you, better to know.  We plan to address these by release:

Item #1: Windows 2000 on Non-English versions.  There is texture corruption on non-English versions of Windows 2000.  It works fine on Windows XP and Windows 98 all languages, just Windows 2000.  We expect to have this updated by release.  If anyone here has a non-english version of Windows 2000 as their main machine let us know.

Item #2: The video tutorials stutter. Click the "view full screen" option. This option isn't in the retail release but is in the digital release and subsequent updates.

Item #3: If you're running in 16-bit color, you need to switch to 32-bit color in some cases or the game will simply fail to launch (or launch with an error and die).

Item #4: On Some nVidia cards, if the game isn't running on your primary monitor, the mouse cursor may get flakey.

Item #5: It takes a LONNNG time to get back into the game after alt-tabbing away. This has to do with a trick we used to keep memory use down. The game isn't crashed but it can take awhile to get back. If you're going to be switchign around, run the game in a window (see the video options screen).

Item #4: TNT and Geforce 1/2 users (technically not supported but they do work) will not get lighting on planets.

Item #5: On Windows 98, if the system has less than 20% resources left, there may be problems with late game performance (frame rate).

Item #6: If you are using an older nVidia card and running your system in 16bit color, the game may not launch. You will need to set your desktop color depth to 32bit. Nothing we can do on this, some older cards don't support DirectX 9 video depth switching.

Item #7. You need to be running your system at 1024x768 or better. That means 1280x600 won't work both X and Y needs to be equal or better.  1600x1200 is fine. 1280x1024 is fine.  4000x3000 is fine.  This should only affect certain older laptops.

Item #8. Certain CRT older (non PnP) monitors may need to tweak the brightest and contrast settings of the game to their liking. The defaults were set to PNP CRT / LCD norms.

Item #9. You can run the game in a window from the options are or by running the game from a command prompt galciv2 w

Item #10. You can turn on cheat mode by running the game with a "cheat" parameter (i.e. galciv2 cheat)

Item #11. We have not tested the game on non-Indo European languages yet.  That means we don't know how it runs in Mandarin, Hebrew, or other languages.  We plan to look at those OSes in the future but our access to those kinds of systems is limited. It might work fine, we just haven't been able to try it.

Item #12. One of the weapons thumbnails in the ship design screen is missing if you run at a very high resolution on certian versions of ATI video drivers.  We have fixed this internally already.  Most people will likely never see it anyway since it is a very very high tech (we were able to find it through cheat codes).

That's all for now.  We'll keep updating this.  Hopefully we haven't scared anyone off.  We have found from our non-game software that the best policy is to treat customers as partners. 

Most of these issues won't affect anyone (they certainly didn't come up during the beta and there were thousands of people in that).  But they will likely affect someone and we want to make sure they're taken care of.

UGO has put together a very cool preview on Galactic Civilizations II.  Check it out!

Lots of new screenshots.

Most of the team took the rest of the week off to recover. It's been quite a time.  Now I have to start catching up.  I wrote up an article for IGN today for their feature on the GalCiv races. So you'll soon get to see the first public shots of the Dread Lords in action.  Their ships look quite a bit different from the other ones.

I've taken a couple days away from playing the game so that I can get a fresh perspective to decide what to focus on for the Bonus Pack.  Basically, when you get the game, you should come here and make sure you get the free Bonus Pack.  If you pre-ordered, you get even more stuff but the Bonus Pack has a bunch of other neato stuff in it.  Better explosions, more extras to put on your ship. Gameplay updates. etc.

Of course, my thing is the computer AI.  One of the things I definitely want to put in are more difficulty levels.  I'd almost like a slider or something rather than picking a set intelligence level.  Right now the AI intelligence is set between 1 and 128 with "Intelligent" being set to 80 (there's nothing special about the numbers, the 80 is simply where the exponential equations worked out to provide an even resource match with the human player).

Right now, I can beat the AI in most starting conditions at 80.  But at 96 I can beaten nearly every time.  So I'd like to see what it's like at say 85 or 90.  So that's one thing for release day I'd like to have ready. The tough thing AI's have going against them is that unless you script it, they rely on generalized analysis.  As a human player, I have a "build order".  The AI does not.  That was one of the things we wanted to get away from.  Instead it's all analysis based.  Which is much better than GalCiv I IMO (which had scripts for how it researched).  I know it's more fun for me since I don't know what the AI is going to do.  I had the screenshot here show up and it was quite a set back because the Drengin then proceeded to wipe out 7 transports which took some effort to put together.  I still beat them but it set me back.  I really got to get better at escorting MY escorts (maybe I need a brain upgrade).  The AI generally tries to escort its ships unless it determines it can sneak one by.

What's the best ship?

One thing that goes back and forth is what is the best ship?  Am I better off putting on massive defenses with only a bit of attack?  Or should I go the other way around?  The answer I'm rapidly coming to is that massive defenses work out decently at the easy levels but not so well at the higher level -- the AI adapts its ships pretty quickly.

That said, I have some ideas for how the AI can design better ships.  But it's going to take some time.  Right now, I feel it's not as efficient as the human player at stuffing things on. Man, this would have been a nice area to have the AI cheat too -- not have to obey the size restrictions. LOL.  A human player will sit there and make sure every unit of space is used up.  You can have a computer do that too but the trick is to make sure it puts the right stuff on.  The generalized algorithm for "Best fit" is nothing new and is in use here.  It's a matter of making sure it's very fast and fits a whole series of criteria. 

Downloading

So the plan is for next Tuesday or so to start letting people download most (but not all) the game.  That way, when the game goes live on February 21, people who bought the download option (or bought the CD from us) will be able to just download a 2 or 3 meg file and be up ready to play without having to download some mega sized files.  Plus it clears the bandwidth.  Things went pretty smoothly with GalCiv I and this time we're going to have even more bandwidth available. But I don't want to take chances and I'm sure that there will still be horror stories -- it's all in the percents: 1% of people having download problems with 10,000 first day downloads is still 100 people and 100 people posting on a forum will look like a legion. And there may be more than 10,000 people based on the upsurge we've seen.

Starting to work on the demo

The demo version obviously needs to get done.  A lot of people won't buy a game without at least trying out the demo.  The demo won't show up before release though.  We want all our development effort put first to the people who are buying the game sight unseen.  Those people have put faith that we'll treat them well and I want to make sure we do what we can to  make sure they feel like they aren't let down. 

So once the game's released, we can put together a demo pretty quickly.  Even though the game requires 2 CDs to install, I really am hoping we can put together a demo that is less than a 200 meg download.  Maybe even less than 100 megs.  The tough part will be deciding what's in the demo.

GalCiv as MOO 4?

No.  The comparisons have always been there.  Even back at the start when Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 was released.  GalCiv for OS/2 came out in beta before MOO (Master of Orion) shipped but 1.0 came out after MOO.  So there's always been some question as to who influenced whom. 

I mentioned on a few occasions that with GalCiv II that we wanted to make sure we opened our minds and tried to put in features that appealed to a larger audience.  And that meant looking at MOO and many other games.  But it's not our intent to be like Master of Orion and as I saw someone else write in the forums, someone thinking GalCiv II is the heir to MOO is likely to be bummed out as it's quite different in gameplay.  The ship design and fleets are obviously similar and watching your ships battle is pretty similar in some ways to watching ships fight it out in MOO if you turned on auto.  But in MOO, you controlled those ships whereas here you're just (optionally) watching them to check out how your designs worked out.  We've talked elsewhere -- at length -- why we chose not to do tactical combat which boiled down to wanting the game to focus on the strategic game.  You're leader of a civilization, not a squadron commander.  It would be like Civilization IV turning into Battlefield 2 when your forces entered a city (though I'm sure there's people who would love that! <g>).

If we were to do a MOO 4 we would go back to MOO 2, expand on THAT to make sure we remained faithful to the Master of Orion legacy.  I think MOO fans, and they really are legion, deserve a MOO game that respects the original design.  Of course, then again, I think Star Control 2 fans deserve a SC 4 that does that.  What is it about version 3 of classic games? Maybe we should skip GalCiv III and go to GalCiv IV!

The GalCiv Backstory

I must admit, I borrowed some concepts from Star Control 2.  The Precursors were not lifted from Babylon 5 or Stargate or whatever.  They were inspired from Star Control 2.  I always dreamed that there'd be a SC3 that would expand on who these Precursors and the extra-dimensional beings.  I have no idea what they had in mind but I thought it was a very cool concept.

But the actual back story itself came from a series of stories I had been writing since the mid 80s.  The Arnor and the Dread Lords were both present in the back story that would eventually be put into GalCiv on OS/2.  The same story where the Drengin and Arceans and the rest came from.  At the time, I thought it was pretty unique.  The Torians having been once enslaved by the Drengin. 

In the back story (the main one being called "Corruption of the Shard"), the Arnor didn't disappear but had instead become isolationist after seeing the destructive power if the Dread Lords and their minions who they had finally defeated though at a terrible cost for them.  The stories tended to focus on a set of key characters who don't really show up here due to the strategic nature of the game.

When designing the game though, Star Control 2's precursor mythology was just so cool and so the Arnor disappeared and became the Precursors.  It fit much better in terms of being a strategy game than having a super powerful race just hanging around.

Sci-Fi does have a lot of parallels though. Arnor ships were supposed to basically look like squids. Very organic.  The final result looked to me to be like Vorlons. Which is ironic because the guys who modeled the ships never watched Babylon 5.  The Arnor and Dread Lord are fairly similar to the Vorlons and Shadow really.  Though then again, Sci-Fi seems to have a reoccurring theme of ancient super races.  Stargate has the "Ancients" and now the Orai (evil ancients).  I think there's a lot of appeal in having some very very bad guys out there. 

The Drengin Empire as bad guys

The Drengin are pretty standard bad guys on the surface. They're the Klingons (classic Trek version). They're the Goul'd. The Orcs. Etc.  But we wanted them to be a bit scarier than they they first appear.  They're methodical. They are pure evil. There is no reasoning with them. There are no alliances of convenience options for the humans.  If the replicators were coming to destroy the galaxy and the Drengin's only option was to team up with the humans to defeat them or die, they'd choose death because clearly the galaxy didn't deserve saving in the first place.  They really hate the humans though in sandbox mode, you can control that quite a bit by taking the path of evil.  But in the backstory, they see the humans as threats.

After all, the Drengin have been a technological society for a hundred thousand years.  The humans are a real threat to them. They pop up out of nowhere and start organizing their prey. The humans have to go down.  

The humans in the GalCiv universe aren't the Federation. Not by a long shot.  Humans are the blood thirsty warriors who are wearing suits.  We really want to be nice guys. Really.  We want to get along. We're all ready to hug and live in harmony. But you mess with us and you'll discover we've been killing each other for thousands of years and we're pretty good at it. As one dialog message to the Korx recently said "Look buddy, we're TRYING to be nice here. But we've been doing war against ourselves for a long time, do you really want to join our party?"

It's something the Drengin fear. The humans are better at tactics than any primitive civilization that poses as diplomats should be.  They think we're frauds.  Maybe they're right.

Anyway, if anyone's interested in this stuff I can go into more detail.  I just don't want to bore people with the back story stuff if it's not something they care about.

 Gamespot is running a preview of Galactic Civilizations II which is due to come out at the end of this month. 

Why are we mentioning this? Because GalCiv II is what me, T-man, MikeB, Mormegil, and many others have been working on feverishly these past few months.  It's about to hit stores world wide. Then you can expect us to be back more active here on WinCustomize.

A couple interesting notes on the game:

• User Interface was created using DesktopX
• All the UI graphics were done by Mormegil
• www.galciv.com was designed by MikeB. www.galciv1.com was made by Pixtudio and www.galciv2.com was made by the same team that made WinCustomize
• I wrote the computer AI.
• Cordellia from PowerUser.TV did the tutorial videos.

So check out the preview and here are some screenshots to give you an idea of what the game is like.  It's a turn-based strategy game set in the 23rd century.