This week we're starting to work on the Civilization Manager.  Galactic Civilizations I didn't have a Civilization manager and some people thought that was definitely something we should have.  And we agree.  BTW, the screenshot doesn't have anything to do with it, just wanted to have something pretty to go along with this blog entry.

So what does the Civilization Manager have on it?  Four things:

Civilization Summary

This is a screen that displays in brief information about your civilization. What your form of government is, what your ethical alignment is, what your political party is along with what advantages/disadvantages those things give you. It should also provide you with some basic information on how well your civilization is doing in various categories (basically duplicating what's on the stats screen on domestic policy).

Planet Summary

The second tab displays the planets in your civilization. While there is a button that lists ships and planets, the point of this is to provide much more details summary information in a full screen way. You can change what you're building on these planets and see your approval and production all in a nice big table.

Time Line

The third tab displays a full screen view of all the available line graphs on all the civilizations. This is similar to what is available in the mini-context area at the bottom if you click on empty space except this is a full screen window with some configuration options.

Victory

This fourth tab displays what your victory status is. That is, how close you are to achieving victory in the various available paths.  This gets to the heart of this discussion -- the real heart of GalCiv IMO is that it truly has multiple paths to victory. More play testing is put into balancing this than any other part of the game.  Strategy games typically include multiple ways to win but as a practical matter, there is an "easiest" way that everyone always ends up either choosing to use or feeling forced to use as the difficulty increases.  In Galactic Civilizations there are 4 paths to victory:

• Military Conquest. This is the tried and true wipe them all out strategy.  Conquer everyone else and you win.
• Technology Domination. In GalCiv II, there is a technology path that takes you down to a technology victory.  You can take this path though it is incredibly expensive to do and requires that you sacrifice many other areas of research. But if you can hold off your enemies long enough, it's achievable.
• Influence Victory. This is where your civilization's influence has spread over nearly the entire galaxy.  Influence can best be described as your culture.  You can extend your influence in a multitude of ways but the most obvious is through cultural starbases.
• Diplomatic Victory. This is where you build an alliance with all the remaining players.

The technology tree in Galactic Civilizations is designed to allow people to pursue very distinct strategies. Each path is supposed to be equally challenging to achieve.  Depending on the player, some paths will seem easier than others. But the goal is for all the paths to be objectively equally challenging to achieve.

With Halloween over and Christmas on its way, November always seems like a month that doesn't know quite what to do with itself.  With Thanksgiving day tucked in there, things seem to go into a kind of limbo state.  The week after Thanksgiving marks the hurried Christmas rush in the United States.

Somewhere in this time frame is the impending release of WindowBlinds 5.  Feedback from the beta group has been very positive and the newest build seems to have cleaned up most of the last remaining known issues. 

We're also working on the desktop pet which we're trying to get out before Christmas.  The pet is incredibly cool. Developed by Green Reaper and Stardock Media on the art side, the pet is far more sophisticated than I had expected.  It has a "virtual brain" in which it lives out its life - eating, sleeping, pooping, playing and just interacting with your desktop in interesting ways.  It's not just the pet, it's a whole slew of things that exist on your desktop.  Depending on how well it does, we have a whole bunch of different additions we'd like to make to it.  Remember to empty your recycle bin as the pet will play in the garbage and get sick if you forget to feed him.  The little screenshot can't do it justice though, it's the animation that I think really makes it rock, definitely the most advanced desktop "thing" ever made IMO.

There's also beta of WindowFX 3 in the works, the beta release of KeepSafe, the release of the Stardock Virtual Desktops, the release of Control Center, a new build of ObjectBar.

As some probably can imagine, the labs at Stardock have some pretty cool stuff in them.  What typically comes out the door is the result of literally years of work.  Even as we get ready to release a whole slew of products for Christmas, there's stuff in the pipeline for 2006 and beyond.  With Windows Vista coming, a whole new set of opportunities arise.  We've been dissecting the betas and playing with the latest tools.  I discussed a bit of some of the stuff that Microsoft is working on here.  We've got some killer stuff scheduled for Christmas next year assuming Windows Vista stays on target.

Going through WinCustomize's galleries and you can see it's an interesting time in skinning.  The # of new icon packages coming out lately has been a bit disappointing. The quality has been good at least.  A good icon package typically has over 50 icons.  But I think some appeal needs to be made to icon artists to start packaging their icons more.  I skim the web and I see icon collections, typically only 15 to 20 icons thrown together in ZIPs. Those would still make decent icon packages.

One of the sites I frequent is called Aqua-Soft.  It's a site dedicated to helping make Windows look and feel more like MacOS X.  One of the things they do, that we don't do, that I wish we did do, is provide nearly daily updates to what's going on on the site.  Though for some reason, they almost never link to WinCustomize for downloads. I'm not sure why since there's a lot of content here and we link back automatically.  For example, if someone links to this Quicktime PNG image then in the referrals area under it it will automatically link back.  This way, people who link to us automatically get a link back to them.

Speaking of  Mac emulation, with WindowBlinds 5 now supporting per-pixel alpha blended titlebars and borders with buttons on the left, one wonders how long it'll be until someone makes a more authentic MacOS X like skin in which inactive title bars are semi-transparent and the edges are alpha blended with a shadow. 

Meanwhile, Paul Boyer is hoping to finish his newest premium icon package -- Apogee! This will finish his first trilogy of premium icon packages -- Orion and Utopia.  The new icons look fantastic and they're being designed to work both on existing versions of Windows and on Windows Vista.  They support up to 256x256 but still look great all the way down to 16x16.

We are also working on an update to the Logika Suite.  Originally created by Pixtudio, this time Voo and MikeB are teaming up with the original Pixtudio content to bring it up to 2006 level which means WindowBlinds 5 features, an icon package, and some other enhancements.  We hope to have that out by Christmas too.  It's going to be an incredibly busy month and a half.

As for myself, I will be busy trying to get Galactic Civilizations II beta 5 out by Christmas and our team there is just going crazy trying to get everything in there.  I'm also working on the 2006 version of the Skin Primer.  Every time I update it, someone screams "Hey! You work fer Stardock!!!11! You're biased" To which I say "Well, duh."  But it's not like others have stepped forward.  I actually didn't update it last year to see if someone else was going to do some comprehensive guide to all of the skinning world and nobody did.  So I'm working on a pretty heavy revamp of it.  A lot has happened in the past couple of years.

 

What year is it again? Oh yea, 2005 I think.  I've been coding a lot lately on Galactic Civilizations II.  I work mostly on the computer AI.  So if it seems like I haven't been around a lot, the main reason for that is that I haven't.  Lots of coding. 

For GalCiv, we are using DesktopX as our way of designing the user interface.  Using DesktopX is kind of like our secret weapon. Next time you play a game, any game, notice how primitive the user interfaces, dialogs, and other non "action" areas of the game are. Even on huge mega-budget titles like Battlefield 2 or Age of Empires III or on console games, the parts of the game that have buttons, text, and other information/UI elements are typically very primitive.  By contrast, in Galactic Civilizations II, they look really nice.  And the kicker is, it probably takes less time for us to create a screen and hook it up than it does in those games with the more primitive UIs.  That's because, as any DesktopX user can tell you, when you're designing your creation in DesktopX, it's live all the time.  Literally.  For GalCiv, we wrote a DirectX 9 UI engine that takes .DXPacks (DesktopX packages) and runs them in 3D.  For instance, here's the Alert dialog as a DXPack.

To save this is the wave of the future is probably a cliché but it's true.  Microsoft certainly believes it.  For Windows Vista, Microsoft is delivering a new suite of software development tools called Expression.  One of these tools is called "Sparkle".  The idea is to split the GUI development part away from the coding part.  Anyone who has made an advanced Winamp skin or Windows Media Player skin or a DesktopX widget knows that there are plenty of cases where the artist and coder are two different people because it takes two very different types of expertise to get that down pat.  That's what Sparkle is to do. 

In some respects, one might argue that Sparkle is a DesktopX killer.  And if DesktopX doesn't evolve, then in the long term, Sparkle will kill DesktopX.  Here's why:  When you create something with DesktopX you save it as either a gadget/widget (.exe), a .dxpack, or a desktop (.desktop).  In realty, it's all pretty much the same with the file extension being there more to tell the system how to launch the thing.  Inside the given file is typically an XML file that describes visually the object, a VB Script (of Javascript) for the code and PNG files for the images.  The idea with Sparkle is that a user creates their UI and exports it as XAML (XML for applications).  XAML can be used to describe virtually anything visually. It's resolution independent and can handle 3D formats (3D Studio, Maya, etc.).  Then someone would use Visual Studio 2005 to create the C# or VB.net for the coding make use of the XAML as a resource.  It's very similar to what DesktopX does. 

So what does DesktopX need to do? It will (and should) evolve.  Vista marks a new generation for software development.  Sparkle and Visual Studio 2005 are way over-kill for the kinds of things people currently use DesktopX for.  I'm skeptical of how many people really are going to want to have to use those programs to create gadgets and such.  But DesktopX will need to embrace XAML in a big way IMO.  When you export your creations, they should be XAML inside.  That will mean they'll only work on XP and Vista but I think by end of 2006, Win2K/98Frogboy will be so legacy as to not be much of a factor.

For users and skinners, it'll be a glorious day.  For 3D artists it'll be a golden age.  And for developers it will mean being able to bring their visions to fruition.  One can imagine websites like WinCustomize.com having huge sections for people to upload XAML creations. In some respects, XAML could become a universal skinning format for applications.  In a sense, that's what it's designed for.  At that point you'll have two different kinds of skinning formats: WindowBlinds for the Windows GUI and XAML for everything else (only reason not to use XAML on the Windows GUI is because the GUI of the OS and its native UI apps is preset).

Stay tuned to WinCustomize.com as Sparkle gets closer to release.  And be prepared for a ton of software (both from companies like Stardock to many other third parties) to make use of this.  With a universal skinning format, the customization communities will likely become more unified and applications won't be starved for content.

WinCustomize has a FRAPPR community. It's a place where you simply enter in your zip code and can see if there's other WinCustomize users near you. It's really cool!

WindowBlinds 5 Beta 3 is now out.  WindowBlinds is a program designed to enable users to completely customize their Windows GUI.  It loads special "skins" called "Visual styles" that can change your title bars, push buttons, Start bar, scrollbars, and virtually every other part of the Windows GUI.

WindowBlinds 5 has a ton of new features and changes but probably the most obvious new feature is the ability to do per-pixel alpha-blended title bars, borders, and menus which enable users to have "glass" effects or borders that are very smoothed out.  Other features include the elimination of wbload.exe (there is no longer a resident program required to run WindowBlinds, it behaves as part of the OS).  WindowBlinds 5 also takes far more advantage of hardware acceleration by default (anyone with a recent nVidia or ATI card should immediately notice the difference. For instance, no screen repaints when users move windows in front of other windows).

BETA 3 of WindowBlinds 5 is a major step forward and if all goes well, it will move to release candidate status.

• Added .JPG wallpaper support
• Per Pixel Alpha Blended skins support left aligned buttons for Mac-style
• Per Pixel Alpha Blended skins now support text backgrounds for title bar text
• Added support for constant alpha blending on taskbar
• New trouble-shooting advisors
• Fixed issue with Norton Protection recycle pin and hopefully the weird problem with some Lexmark printer drivers
• Better support for drawing custom controls in MS Access, OnFolio, Corel Painter
• Fixed user icon changing
• Fixed Run-As issue
• Re-enabled RMB on title bar override options (yay!)
• Reflection maps can now be clipped to avoid shadows
• Apps with custom menus should work fine with custom per pixel WB menus
• Fixed remaining installer issues for X64 users. 

Right now WindowBlinds 5 is only available to Object Desktop users.  When completed, it'll be available on its own for $19.95.  Anyone who has purchased WindowBlinds 4 after September 1 will receive WindowBlinds 5 for free.

This email is floating around. While it's totally unfair in comparing Texas and Louisiana in terms of their handling of hurricans (after Katrina, people were taking these things more seriously) but the general reality is still pretty accurate IMO.

 

Where are WinCustomize members? This terrific and fun (and free) website uses Google Maps to display where we all are in the "real world"! 

Try it out and let's see how big of a community we can create!

DesktopGadgets.com continues to see its library of high quality gadgets grow.  This week,  MikeB has added a new Arrow Windows Media Player gadget.  Gadgets, unlike widgets, do not require any additional software to run, they're stand-alone programs but with all the advantages of widgets.  The most popular way to create gadgets currently is with DesktopX Pro.

Apolyton.net has a new series of screenshots of Galactic Civilizations II up.  Check 'em out!

Recently, Sony was discovered to have been installing software on people's computers without the user knowing it.  When a user inserted a Sony CD into their computer CD-ROM drive, a "root kit" was installed that enabled the music giant to install "copy protection" without the user knowing.

Some spyware developers and trojan horse virus makers have already begun to make use of Sony's root kit to hide their presence on the user's machine.

Some users of argued that this plays right into the hands of pirates.  This issue was discussed last week on PowerUser.TV at length.  Why be legitimate in acquiring music if you're going to be treated like a criminal when it's so much easier to simply warez it was what many have said on-line.

CNET has an excellent follow-up on the situation.  Check it out.