The Galactic Civilizations II beta will be closing in the next week or so as we get ready to move into the final stages of testing as well as starting to add in the release level graphics and polish elements.

If you want to join the beta, you still can for the next few days by pre-ordering the game from us here.  By pre-ordering you not only get the final game but the current beta.

We expect to have a new beta for all beta testers this Thursday (tomorrow). This will be a major beta update.

HO HO HO!  WinCustomize has some goodies for you!  Here are some goodies to decorate up your desktop.  You'll want to get DesktopX for a lot of this stuff.

Put this tree object on your desktop. It can point to anything. It's animated.	This desktop object can point to anything you want. You can shake it and watch the show fall.	This snowman will tip his hat on mouse over and can be set to point to anything.	This fireplace is animated and can point to anything you'd like.
[Download]	[Download]	[Download]	[Download]

This Santa WindowBlinds skin I did isn't great but it's jolly!	Adni's Holiday skin not only is in the spirit but is outstanding in its own right.	This Santa Boot Screen can help cheer up your holiday spirit.	Mormegil's Christmas Time boot screen helps get your system in the season.
[Download]	[Download]	[Download]	[Download]

The Little Drummer boy CursorXP cursors look fantastic and make your mouse cursors fit right in.	The Santa mouse cursors for CursorXP are pretty sweet.	Adni strikes again with this splendid wallpaper.	This is one of my favorite Christmas wallpapers.
[Download]	[Download]	[Download]	[Download]

PowerUser.TV Episode 18 has arrived!

Chow down on another show chock full of techy goodness. (This product contains nuts).

• The future of Television
• The chemistry of love
• High definition DVDs and holographic DVDs
• The BlackBerry lawsuit
• PC vs. Console Games
• The ESRB gets an ‘F’ from NIMF
• Tom’s Game Pick of the Week
• WindowBlinds 5 released!

The Christmas holiday is nearly upon us. Stardock is working on an update to Holiday Desktop (announcement coming very soon) that will include a WindowBlinds 5 based Christmas skin.  Last year, Greenreaper made the Realistic Snow DesktopX object which allows users to have snow falling on their desktops in a very realistic manner.  It's highly cool. He's working on a full-blown gadget of it too.

Here are some other cool little wintery/Christmas/holiday type submissions:

• Snowman wallpaper
• A Christmas I remember wallpaper
• Noel Christmas interface WindowBlinds
• Christmas Orbs IconPackager
• Holiday ObjectDock Goodies
• Christmas Lights for your desktop DesktopX

More to come!

eWeek is reporting about a new feature in Windows Vista called Restart Manager.  Users who have notebooks may have a feature called "hibernation". Restart Manager is similar in that when the user restarts their machine due to having installed something new (a driver or whatever) your machine can come back exactly as it was.

Microsoft officials have not talked much publicly about this new feature, but Jim Allchin, the co-president of Microsoft's platform products and services division, recently told eWEEK that this is an example of just how important the reboot issue was to the Redmond-based software giant.

"If you have to reboot, then what happens is that the system, together with the applications, takes a snapshot of the state: the way things are on the screen at that very moment, and then it just updates and restarts the application, or in the case of an operating system update, it will bring the operating system back exactly where it was," Allchin said.

Also over at CNET, a Chicago man, apparently hoping to eliminate any doubt that Americans will sue anyone for anything at the drop of the hat, has sued Microsoft because he claims Microsoft's Xbox 360 is prone to overheating.  Apparently, the Xbox 360 is the first consumer electronics device to have a defect rate greater than 0.0%.

The Chicago man, who did not indicate whether he lives in a cave or not, claims that Microsoft is selling a "defectively designed product".

The lawsuit, filed on Friday in federal court in Illinois, seeks unspecified damages and litigation-related expenses, as well as the replacement or recall of Xbox 360 game consoles.

Do majorities determine facts? How about motivated minorities? Do they determine fact? This is an issue that the popular Wikipedia has had to deal with.

CNET has an op-ed piece about Wikipedia and how its growing popularity -- and growing use as the defacto standard on "what is true"(TM) has highlighted the fact that it's open to abuse, disinformation, and plain old error in ways that "closed" knowledge bases are not.  That's not to say that encyclopedias don't make mistakes -- they certainly do.  Moreover, traditional encyclopedias and other closed mediums often have hidden agendas that the reader may not be aware of.

However, Wikipedia's openness means that anyone can modify any page regardless of merit.  For example, this Fall, a disgrunted WinCustomize user used the WinCustomize Wiki entry to trash moderators and admins they didn't like.  Even now, over half the entry is dedicated to "criticism" of WinCustomize due to forum arguments (where according to logs, less than 1.5% of WC users go).

Read CNET's excellent commentary on the subject.

ScreenScroll is a small program to be used to simulate a scroll of the screen. That is, it moves all visible windows a specified number of pixels or percent of the screen vertically and/or horisontally. It is also possible to move the wallpaper the same length and direction. This is usefull to help you see where you are on the virtual screen. It is also possible to use include lists to only move some windows or exclude list to leave some windows.
 
The program does only change two settings in the registry if you are using the move wallpaper function. If you are not using that, then the program does not add anything to the registry or or any other folder than that where the program it self is in. And because it is not constantly running it does not take up any unnecessary resources.

Hat-Tip to ShellCity.net and Virtual Plastic.

The end of the Galactic Civilizations II beta will be this month.  After that, it goes into strictly private testing.

It is during that point we take the feedback we've received and start incorporating it in as much as possible, polish things up, tweak game play, fix bugs, etc.

If it is anything like the GalCiv I beta, there will be loud posts insisting that the final game is doomed (anyone here remember the last GalCiv I public beta?)  needless to say, the transformation that occurs between the final game and release can be significant.

The area we are weakest on is in the area of compatibility testing. We could really use some feedback from users running on low-end systems or running on Windows 98, ME, or 2000.

There will be another beta -- beta 4D -- this next Thursday along with the posting of the draft user manual for the game.  At that point, it will be important for people to turn in their two cents on what they think needs to be tweaked, fixed, etc.

Stay tuned.

As I get older or at least busier, I have a lot less toleration for micro management.  I just don't find it fun.  I know lots of people do but I personally hate it.  When I play Civilization IV, for instance, those workers go on A (auto improve) right away.  And I think it works fine.  I'm sure the workers aren't optimal but they're well into the "good enough for me" area.

That said, I've always resisted having any micro management issues resolved by computer AI.  That is, I don't like the idea of having some sort of "governor" that is actually an AI doing the work for you.  I've never seen a governor AI that can remotely match a good human player.

Instead, we've focused on trying to have cleaner interfaces that allow players to automate what they would do.  The most famous example of this (which was considered very innovative back in the original OS/2 version) was the ship and social governors -- tell all planets building X to start building Y. 

We've got that in GalCiv II but...I want more.  I just don't know yet where to draw the line.  One governor going in that's new is the rally point governor.  I never used rally points in GalCiv I. Didn't see the "big deal".  But now I do.  Oh boy do I.

But now that I'm starting to use rally points I find them a pain.  What if I want to change which rally point my ships are going to?  So we added a "All planets sending ships to rally point X should go to rally point Y".  Similarly, we set up one for ships -- all shps currently traveling to rally point X go to rally point Y." (where Y can be a rally point or back home or to stop entirely).

We also finalized on how upgrading ships is going to be done and we basically caved in to simplicity:

You want to upgrade a ship? Fine, it's money and time.  There will be a base cost + a cost based on the difference in cost between the original ship and the new one.  And there will be a small time penalty between 1 and 4 turns based on how far from your home planet the ship is.  You will be able to upgrade individual ships or entire classes of sihps at once.

We were supposed to get Beta 4D out this past week.  Unfortunately since this may be one of the last public betas, we wanted to wait until we got the compressed textures in so we could do further compatibility testing.