Boomtown has an excellent preview of Galactic Civilizations II.  Check it out.

The relations system in GalCiv 1 was dynamic but hard to understand.  The AI would look at where it currently was in terms of how it felt about you, go through a load of calculations, and then adjust its relations.  The problem was that it was often hard to understand.

So this time, I've started making it so that the AI calculates its relations with you from scratch each turn rather than adjusting up and down.

Different situations given different points for and against you.  Ironically, a system similar to this is in Civ IV so at least there's others that feel a system like this makes more sense.  Here's what I've got so far:

 

 

1	You are militarily more powerful
2 to 3	You are significantly more powerful.
4 to 5	You are massively more powerful militarily
1	You are trading with them
2	Trade with you represents a substantial part of their economy
3	Trade with you represents a major part of their economy
1	You are ethically evil and so are they
2	You are ethically neutral and so are they
3	You are ethically good and so are they
1	You have helped them in the past.
2 to 3	You have provided significant help to them.
1	You have recently paid tribute
1	You are natural friends (humans & Altarians)
1 to 3	You are diplomatically more sophisticated
1	They have planets in your influence sphere
1 to 2	They are pacifistic
1 to 4	You are a historic friend (after 2228 + galaxy size) players friendly players become friendlier with 1 point per year)
-2	You are evil and they are neutral
-4	You are evil and they are good
-3	You are  good and they are evil
-2	You are good and they are neutral
-1	You are neutral and they are evil
-2	You are neutral and they are good
-1	They are more powerful than you are.
-2 to -3	They are significantly more powerful than you are.
-4 to -5	They are massively more powerful than you are.
-1 to -2	They are militaristic
-1	You are natural enemies (Drengin and Torians)
-1	You are the Yor (or you’re not the Yor)
-1 to -4	You are a historic adversary
-1 to -3	You are diplomatically less sophisticated
-1 to -4	“Unlucky” event affects you (assassination for instance)

Stardock has released Aquarium Desktop 2006. Aquarium Desktop isn't a screensaver. The fish actually "live" on your Windows desktop happily swimming within the borders of your screen. The fish, rendered with exquisite detail in 3D, swim, turn, and simply look amazing.

Aquarium Desktop 2006 comes with several fish to start with. User can choose which fish to display on their desktop and even have multiple fish of the same underlying model. As a result, user can have as many or few fish as they want swimming. It also comes with a host of different plants that, like the fish, have been rendered from 3D models for very lifelike animation and detail. It also comes with multiple wallpapers, aquatic sound effects, and more.

The program is highly configurable. Plants can be sized. Sound effects added or disabled. And it is designed to be intelligent in its CPU usage. If the fish are covered (and when people are working, they tend to have windows on their desktops) the rendering goes into idle mode so that the fish don't slow down your computer. The graphics are also compressed in memory to minimize how much memory it's using.

Aquarium Desktop 2006 is a great fun way to liven up your desktop. For user who had the original Aquarium Desktop, they can upgrade to Aquarium Desktop 2006 at a reduced price and get access to additional fish. Additional "fish packs" will be made available as Christmas nears.

Aquarium Desktop Home Page

Aquarium Desktop at DesktopGadgets.com

Wired has a really interesting article on History's Worst Software Bugs.  These bugs aren't where you would normally expect them (i.e. in PC's) but rather in serious real-world applications such as space probes, gas pipelines, etc. 

1Up has a terrific article comparing the similarities and differences of Microsoft's upcoming Xbox 360 game console. Definitely worth the read!

Let's have a common sense excercise:

Wilson, a civilian, is sent over to African to find out about the yellow cake claims.

He comes back and not only reports that that the story was unfounded but writes op-eds to the New York Times blasting the Bush administration.

Either:

a) Wilson was stupid for not thinking that people would want to find out how the hell he got the job to go to Africa.

His wife was stupid for pulling strings to get him the assignment since inevitably, questions would be raised as to how in the world this guy got this assignment.

c) The CIA was stupid for sending a Bush critic over to Africa on this assignment without thinking that people would ask how he got the job in the first place.

As soon as he started slamming Bush publicly, his wife's career was over.  Not as some sort of revenge but basic investigative reporting -- HOW did a Bush critic get such an important assignment in the first place? Answer: His wife, who works at the CIA, set it up.

George W. Bush is on the brink of having his presidency remembered as a failure.  His poll numbers are very low -- less than 40%.  That's worse that Reagan's at the height of Iran-Contra and Clinton's during impeachment.  How did it come to this?

Simply put, Bush's character flaws and poor judgment finally passed an unspoken threshold in which people, even those inclined to support his policies, have concluded that Bush is a lost cause.

The straw that broke the camel's back was Hariet Miers. His nomination of her to the supreme court might as well have been a confession that Bush's detractors were right on some of their points: Bush is a shallow, unintelligent, old rich boy who is so far removed from ordinary people that he has few of their values.  That nomination demonstrated croneyism at its worse and given how much under the microscope modern presidents are, it revealed a mind boggling arrogance.

Sure, Miers is no longer in the running. But it doesn't matter. The damage is done.  We no longer know whether Bush is driven by what is best for the country instead of doing favors for his friends.  The reason things like Halliburton never stuck the the President (other than in the minds of the whacko left) is because it was unimaginable that the administration would be so stupid and corrupt to send deals to their friends so brazenly.  There's so many other reasonable and more likely explanations about Halliburton that the charges of excess make no sense.  But yet...now...there's that tingling of doubt.  Anyone who would appoint their own personal attorney to the supreme court...you never know... 

Then there's the botching of fiscal policy.  Conservates like tax cuts because A) the government is too inept to really help people effectively (Katrina kind of sent that message home) and hence people are better off having as much of their money as possible to spend more wisely. And In theory, tax cuts force the government to become smaller.

But look out, here comes Bush. He'll cut taxes and have party.  With Republican control of both houses and the Presidency, the conservatives should be able to institute their long-claimed desire of smaller government and effective fiscal policy.  Instead, we have deficits that bordering on insulting in that congress and the President want to throw money at everything. 

Then there's the war in Iraq.  I supported the invasion.  I am glad we went in there.  I am still glad we toppled Saddam.  The idea in a post 9/11 world that we'd allow a guy like Saddam to stay in power in a strategically vital region is nuts.  He had to go.  But he's gone now.  And over two years have passed and it's still a mess over there.  Yes yes, we're still over in Korea, Japan, and Germany and pretty much everywhere else we've ever fought a war.  But we're not having to keep 150,000 combat troops those places.  We're not having to suck down the National guard in those places.  At some point, Iraq is going to have to sink or swim on its own.  If their people don't care enough about freedom and keeping themselves from becoming a terrorist state, then there's nothing we can do about that.  Not to make too fine a point on it but it was relativley cheap to deal with Afghanistan and Iraq the first time.  The rehabilitation of Iraq is proving to be far more costly. 

Until recently, I had hoped that the administration had quietly let the Iraqi's know that they have until say next May to get their act together because at that point we would declare victory and start to bring troops back (not all of course, 10,000 here, 10,000 there).  I just don't have the confidence that Bush's team knows what they're doing over there. 

If there's any "anti-war" people reading this, don't get your hopes up that I'm coming on your side.  My complaint is that we're not being tougher.  I would have the "glass surface nation" policy if I were emperor. Deterrence may not work on terrorists but you can bet your ass that it would motivate the host countries of these terrorists to weed them out.

But on this and many other policies Bush wants to have it both ways.  Sometimes you have to make a tough decision and go all the way.  Half-way usually fails and satisfies neither contingent.

It's not so much that any of these things on its own is enough to cause me to lose faith in Bush.  It's the combination.  When put together (particularly the Miers nomination) it gives credence to the belief that Bush really is just a pampered good old boy of sub-normal intelligence who really has no business being President but is only President because the left-wing of American politics took a sanity vacation (which they're still on) and gave us no viable alternative (I mean what the hell were you left wingers thinking? Michael Moore sitting next to Carter at the DNC?? Hello! Goddam nutballs need to take your noses out of Cindy Sheehan's rear end and get your act together and realize how pathetic your party is when you can't beat someone like Bush). 

American politics has to be near the bottom it's ever been.  You have the Republicans in full corruption croney-loving mode.  And the Democrats are taking pride in their new status of being the party of victims and losers (as if that's a good thing). 

We need a viable third-party.

Last night we updated to beta 4A.

Here's what's new:

1) Added some new music -- different races start with their own sound track.

2) Initial race theme music lasts first year, then changes to a broader sound track.

3) Clicking on an uncolonized planet to look at the planet closer won't crash anymore.

4) The technology rate slider at the start of the game has been hooked up, balanced and tested. At "Very fast" techs are a little more than half as much as normal.  At very  long they are over twice as long to get.

5) Fixed a low level math function that a lot of things counted on that will likely cause things to work more like they were designed.

6) Tweaked the habitable planet slider.  Too many good planets in all settings before, now more varied.  No more class 1, 2, 3, 4 planets (they're just useless other than as outposts and that's what starbases are for -- the micro management involved in dealing with them wasn't worth their value as outposts.  Class 1 planets may return later.).

On the Stardock Central front:

Installation is still a pain.  SDC is a great technology for delivering final product.s But it is less well suited to very large things that are being updated regularly.  Last night we switched it to sending the finals individulaly rather than sending single large compressed SDC files.  The old SDC client is a bit slow downloading the individual files, the new client that we hope to release next week is much MUCH faster.  But this way, downloading should become a lot more reliable and doing updates a lot less painful.

Stardock has released WindowBlinds 5 beta 2 this week.  WindowBlinds 5 is designed to customize the look & feel of the Windows GUI.  The new version has been completely re-architected to be significantly faster, have more features, and provide new effects for skinners. 

Beta 2 includes a host of bug fixes, performance optimizations, and more. Here are some highlights:

• 64-bit Windows support
• Per-Pixel frame and title bar animation support (skinners can create some really cool animated title bars and borders now).
• New WindowBlinds config can switch back to Windows XP style
• Updated WindowBlinds config makes new options easier to see.
• Adobe CS2 support enhanced
• Fixed AdMuncher issue
• Toolbar skin installation improved
• Full screen background per pixel support for shutdown dialog.
• Lots of bugs fixed.
• New performance optimizations

The beta is currently only available for Object Desktop users (www.objectdesktop.com).  WindowBlinds 5 should be publicly available before the end of the year.

Galactic Civilizations II: BETA 4 has arrived to beta testers.  User who pre-ordered after Beta 3 was released should be able to get it tomorrow.  Which should work out as we will be releasing Beta 3A tomorrow which will have some fixes based on whatever gets reported tonight.

There are so many new features in Beta 4 that it's hard to itemize them. There's a post in the forum that does it to a very weak degree. Beta 4 is the first beta that could be described as letting players actually play a "game".

Here are some of my personal opinions on what's the "big" stuff in beta 4:

• Fleets.  Players can now build fleets based on their logistics ability.
• Detailed ship battles.  If users choose, they can watch their ships battle it out in a pretty cool (we think) battle screen.  This way, players can see how their different weapons and defenses interact together. 
• The Metaverse.  The metaverse is starting to go in.  Unlike GalCiv 1 where players had to pick between modding the game and playing on the metaverse, this time the Metaverse uses its own game data.  It's also integrated much more so in the game.  This part of the game is still fairly rough at this point.
• Starbases. These are now much further along.
• Rally Points.  It's hard to believe that GalCiv I shipped without this.  Expect to see this feature expanded further so that they're easily accessible in more places.
• Hot keys are in (will post them in the forum).
• Culture Conquest.  You can now carry on a war through cultural domination. It's much cooler IMO than it was in GalCiv I and works much more straight forward.  You click on a given planet and can see alien influence on it.  If that alien influence > 4.0 then that planet is at risk of rebelling.
• The Alien Negotiation Screen is in (barely).  It's still at the start of things but the new engine supports vastly more sophisticated discussions with the AI than was possible in GalCiv I. It also supports real-time commenting on your trade.  This is still quite rough though.
• AI can build fleets (poorly).
• There are a LOT LOT more technologies in the game.
• There are a lot more planetary improvements, super projects, and galactic achievements in the game that we think are a lot more interesting than what was in GalCiv I.
• There are governors in the game that will automatically upgrade your buildings to the best of its kind.  This eliminates a lot of micro management.  We will have the ship governor in soon (i.e. tell planets building X to build Y).
• The end-game summary screen is in.
• A host of new screens are in.
• Tons of tweaks, UI improvements, and polish in.

Now, all that said, the game is still no where near done. There are a lot of unimplemented features.  We have until the end of November to get all the basic features in.  Then after that it's two months of polishing, playtesting, bug fixing and tweaking.  Then it's off to manufacturing and translation into German, French, etc. to go for a late February retail release at your local store.