The new episode of PowerUser.TV is now up! Listen to WinCustomize.com's official podcast.  It's free and fun! This week Kristin and her rowdy gang discuss the Cogent issue that some of you guys ran into last week along with Best Buy's upcoming policy on selling used games and more! Check it out!

Bonus: The gang also takes aim at attorney Jack Thompson who last week claimed he would pay $10,000 to charity if someone made a video game that allowed the player to kill game designers.

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 News source: PowerUser.TV Home Page

Improvements in Galactic Civilizations II are done completely different than the first one.  It's probably the most radical change to the game-play and probably the most risky since one of the things that has always helped GalCiv was the lack of micro-management.  So we've had to really think about how we want to handle planets.

In GalCiv I, most players (myself included) would just go to the governor and have every planet build everything.  This time around, we wanted to limit how many things you could build on a given planet.  We also wanted planets to be somewhat unique.

We did this by turning the planet class into a limiting factor.  The planet class determines how many useable tiles there are on the planet.  A class 10 planet has 10 tiles on it.  The number of tiles can be increased by researching Soil Enhancement, Habitat Improvement and Terraforming.

Moreover, some tiles are "special".  They are rare but they have major effects.  Special tiles include:

• Artifacts. These increase research production of any improvement on that tile by 200%. (uncommon).
• Fertile Soil. These increase the food production of any improvement on that tile by 200%. (uncommon).
• Mineral Rich. These increase the industrial production of any improvement on that tile by 200%. (uncommon)
• Mystic Spring. These increase the Morale improvement of any improvement on that tile by 200%. (uncommon)
• Ruins. These increase the Cultural improvement of any improvement on that tile by 200%. (uncommon).
• Precursor Artifacts. These increase research production of any improvement on that tile by 400%. (rare).
• Splendid Soil. Food by 400% (rare).
• Rare Elements. Industry up by 400% (rare).
• Precursor Library. Research by 800% (legendary).
• Precursor Mine. Industry by 800% (legendary).

Uncommon = 1/50 chance of it appearing on a given tile. Rare = 1/200 chance of it appearing on a given tile.  Legendary = 1/500 chance of it appearing on a given tile.

In Galactic Civilizations I there were lots of improvements.  In Galactic Civilizations II, we are trying to have fewer improvements and those improvements go in a direct upgradeable line.  That is, you can set the planetary governor to automatically upgrade a given improvement as soon better version is available.  For instance, an Entertainment Network is upgraded to a Multimedia Center which is upgraded to an Extreme Stadium which is upgraded to a Zero-G Stadium.  Once you place your initial improvements, you can set this and walk away and you have effectively "zoned" the planet.

However, this time around, we're trying to create more super projects and galactic achievements that do special things.  A super project is a planetary improvement that can only be built one time in your civilization.  A galactic achievement can be constructed only once by any player.  There are also trade goods which can be built on a given planet that provide special abilities that can be traded with other players.

Here are some of the super projects we have in mind:

• Spin Control Center.  Diplomacy-based super project that causes ships in orbit to be counted at five times their military might strength. The idea is that players who want to take on a diplomatic/culture victory won't have time to build up huge militaries. This way, players can inflate their military strength without having to build the ships.  For that matter, the way the diplomacy ability is being handled is that it is going to magnify your actual military might rating as far as your opponents are concerned.  This way, players can focus on their cultural domination strategy without having to also build up a huge army.
• Tur-Quan Training.  This is a galactic achievement that vastly increases the quality of your soldiers making them formidable attackers and defenders during invasions.
• The Galactic Privateer.  This galactic achievement will protect your trade routes from attack during times of war.
• Propaganda Machine.  This galactic achievement will double the effect of your starbase cultural modifications.
• Hyperion Shipyard.  This super project will add + 1 to the base movement of your ships.
• United Planets Headquarters.  This galactic achievement increases your diplomacy ability by 50%.
• Galactic Re-supply Center.  This super project increases your ships range by 25%.
• Artificial Slave Center (evil civilizations only). This super project increases military production by 50%.
• Cultural Exchange Center. This super project doubles a planet's influence. (good civilizations only)
• Diplomatic Translators. This trade good increases a player's diplomatic ability by 25%.
• Economic Capital. This super project increases tax revenue on a planet by 50%.
• Eyes of the Universe.  This galactic achievement shows all ships on the mini-map.
• Galactic Exhibition. This galactic achievement makes you more persuasive in the diplomacy trade screen giving the perceived value of your trade a 50% boost.
• Galactic Guidebook. This galactic achievement causes the survey module to cost 0 so that you can equip any ship with the survey module to explore anomalies.
• Starbase Upgrade Center. This super project cuts the time it takes to upgrade ships by 50%.
• Galactic Virtual Reality Center.  This super project increases morale by 50%.
• Gravity Accelerators.  This trade good increases the base speed of your ships by +1.
• Harmony Crystals.  This trade good increases the morale of all your people by 20%.
• Miniaturization Center. This super project improves your miniaturization ability by 20% (allowing you to fit more on your ships).
• Hyperion Miniaturization Center.  This galactic achievement improves miniaturization by a further 15% (giving you the ultimate edge in a fight).
• Information Logistics System. This super project increases your logistics ability by 6.
• Manufacturing Capital. This super project doubles your manufacturing ability on a given planet.
• Omega Defense System. This super project doubles the hitpoints of ships in orbit.
• Hyperion Planetary Fleet.  This Galactic Achievement allows all your planets to be able to work together as a fleet on defense without the need for a Orbitial Control Center.
• Re-education Center.  This super project prevents the planet from being able to be culturally conquered.
• Orbital Terraformer.  This galactic achievement automatically makes all your planets be able to use all the potential tiles on a given planet without the need for individual terraforming.
• Political Capital. This super project doubles the cultural influence of the planet.
• No Mercy Invasion Center. This galactic achievement eliminates the costs of special invasion tactics (evil civilizations only).
• Secret Police Center.  This super project automatically adds 20% to your base approval on the given world no matter what.
• Empathic Tactical Center.  This galactic achievement adds + 1 to the defenses of all ships that have an attack ability in each defense category (good civilizations only).
• Mind Control Center.  This galactic achievements increases the likelyhood of an alien civilization of defecting to your side by 50%. (evil civilizations only).
• Hall of Empathy.  When an alien civilization surrenders, the odds that they will surrender to you is doubled. (good civilizations only).
• Temple of Evil. This galactic achievement causes half of the "background trade" revenue (revenue that a civilization receives due to the % of the galaxy they control) that a civilization of evil alignment receives to go to you.
• Temple of Righteousness. Same as temple of evil but for good players.

Quite a few but the key thing here that is different than GalCiv I is that for the most part, players won't have to interact with most of their planets.  They'll "zone" them early on with the various types of improvements (morale building, food producing, research producing, and so on) and let the governors upgrade them on up.  Then, as a particular super project or galactic achievement comes available, they'll strategically place that on the handful of key worlds in their civilization.  The hope is that there will be little micro management of worlds but instead a more strategic use of those worlds.

The Escapist has an in-depth look at how PC games are dying -- at least in their current business model.  This link is to the second part, you can read the first part here.  The problem with the game industry in general is that it is becoming increasingly capital intensive for each game and more competitive (i.e. a lot more games in a lot more places).  With 3 major consoles and the PC platform, those immense investments in game creation have to battle for your buying dollar harder than ever before.

The Escapist argues that they business model of gaming has to change.  That's something that developer Stardock (which owns WinCustomize.com) agrees with since it launched TotalGaming.net last year as a way to distribute its own and third-party games electronically.  But in the near-term retail is still king.

Read the whole thing, very interesting stuff.

Popular tech news site Neowin.net, which is a partner of WinCustomize.com in the show PowerUser.TV, is previewing the look for the upcoming redesign of the website (code-named Neowin 5). Check it out.

With Beta 4 less than two weeks away, things are starting to get pretty exciting here.  We're in bug-fix mode on a ton of the newer features.  For example, fleets are in and they're pretty fun to watch fight it out.  There will be polishing on those screens until we ship I expect since making a fleet battle look cool is a lot of work. 

I've been trying to tune the game play a bit as we wait to get the fleet stuff ironed out.  Can't really do the AI with fleets until the regular fleet stuff is rock solid -- otherwise we'd wonder whose bug it is.

The music is starting to come in along with sound effects. Most of that won't make it into the initial beta 4. 

Beta 4 and a few builds after that will be available to the public.  After that, only users with "Diplomat" access or better will be able to access private builds so we don't ruin the surprises in the final game for players.  Speaking of surprises, the campaign story has a pretty shocking ending which we hope people will enjoy.

If you click HERE you can see WinCustomize's traffic details.  Most sites keep this kind of thing secret but we tend to operate as transparently as possible.

The key figures are: 788,000 visits per day average. 5.5 MILLION visitors this past week. 

13 days into the WinCustomize subscription drive, we have a total of 345 people who have re-subscribed or subscribed new.  Quite a few of them are individuals who re-subscribed long before they needed to or bought a subscription for someone else.  That means a very small number of people are doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the site.  345 subscriptions means $6,900 in revenue (thank you to those who have subsribed).

As you can imagine, running a site that gets 5.5 million visitors every week is very expensive. Especially when it's on a download site. For instance, Kol's VistaXP skin has been downloaded about 2,000 times today.  It's a 2MB file.  That means 4,000 megabytes (4 Gigabytes) of bandwidth were used just for that one skin. So as you can imagine, the bandwidth costs of this site are immense.  Moreover, as skinning gets more popular and more users interact, we need full-time people to code and manage the site.  Thank goodness we have volunteers who actually run the site and a day to day basis or else there'd be no WinCustomize.

Which brings us back to the start of this news item.  WinCustomize costs probably around $300,000 a year to run.  That's bandwidth + salaries.  Anyone in the Internet business will tell you wer're running the site on a shoe-string.  A site in the top 3000 or so most popular in the world would typically cost far more.  deviantART, for instance, has around two-dozen employees working just on that site. 

So what happens to WinCustomize when October 31 comes and we're not even close to our goal?  Well, for skinners, subscribers, and SD Customers the answer is, not much.  Skinners and subscribers are going to get new stuff -- we have a Halloween skin in the works for instance and there will be subscriber-only content made in the future.

For regular users it's going to be a different story.  Users are going to have to start creating accounts to access skins made that month.  We'll also have to put in some code to make it more difficult for someone to simply create a duplicate account.  This will likely drive away some users -- which will be part of the goal.

In the midterm, the site will begin focusing more and more on the community with the community defined as people who care about WinCustomize.  That would be the skinners, the subscribers, and SD customers.  People not in that category will still be able to do many things on the site, but it will be much more restrictive. 

 

Okay, here's the deal.  It's okay for people to vent on THEIR blogs about things.  The main golden rule is that you may not put the person's real name or full handle into the title of an article (since JoeUser is so popular, what you write here ends up on Google pretty quickly).

That said, you post it to the forums and then it becomes our business.  When you make an article, by default it has a checkbox that says "post to forums too".  If you're writing something that is essentially a rant about some other user or anything else that really doesn't belong in a public forum, you need to uncheck that.

Right now, there's a glitch on JU where I cannot hide a forum post without hiding it from your blog as well.  So here's the deal: It's up to you to uncheck that "post to forums" option if you're about to write a rant about someone.  Otherwise, it's likely going to just go away entirely. 

At IT ChannelVision ATI was demonstrating its new set of video adapters.  The new flagship one, the ATI X1800 claims to be significantly faster than nVidia's Geforce 7800 top of the line card.  But is it?

The answer is, well, probably.  Or at the very least, it's a bit faster than the Geforce 7800 GTX.  The difference depends on the game.  Half-Life 2 at 1600x1200 with full antialiasing gets over 100 frames per second with the X1800XT.  But even with the 7800GTX, it's still nearly 90fps.  Anything over 40 to 50 fps and the human eye really can't tell the difference.

For WinCustomize users, the question comes down to desktop performance.  In our experience, the ATI cards currently have a significant edge with better acceleration of layered windows and other desktop drawing features that make skinning programs run faster.  That is mainly a driver issue.

I asked nVidia what they were going to do with Windows Vista given that nVidia cards have trouble with beta 1.  Their representative told me that they would be holding out for Beta 2 which is due later this year.  In that version, we are assured that nVidia cards will start to really shine.

SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft is set to enter the security arena next year, but Symantec won't compete by complaining to antitrust regulators or suing the software giant.

"We're not looking to go whining to the EU or the DOJ for anything," Symantec Chief Executive Officer John Thompson said Tuesday, referring to the European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice. Thompson was responding to questions from reporters after an event at the Commonwealth Club here.

There is a rumor that AOL may be acquired by Google and Comcast.