The new episode of PowerUser.TV is out.  This week, Kristin's gang talks about Autodesk's acquisition of Maya thus making itself THE primary player in the 3D modeling world. They also look at the question about whether bloggers are liable for what they say, and a quick look at the latest Google/Sun stuff -- does Microsoft make its own competitors?

Next week beta testers of Windows Vista are expecting to receive a new build of Microsoft's next-generation operating system.  Neowin is reporting that this week, a leak of that build has begun making its way through the net.  Build 5231 may not have all the features in the official October build, it does have a new build of Internet Explorer and an enhanced Media Player skin.

Read the whole story, complete with screenshots, over at Neowin.net

Society development continues forward though at a bit of a slower pace as more and more resources are put into getting Galactic Civilizations II completed by end of year.

The team has been working to get in 10 scenarios that will act as both a tutorial and as a basic "this is what people do when they play Society".

For example, your Socians have problems.  As ruler, you will want to solve those problems.  So one scenario is to solve 5 problems of a particularly chosen Socian.  Problems include not having access to clean water, wanting more entertainment, wanting some sort of good, wanting lower crime, that kind of thing.  It's nothing that extravagant but it demonstrates that different people will have different wants depending on where in your society the person lives.

What we're focusing on first is the single player, single map aspect of the game.  We know we have to make sure that part of the game is nailed down tight. 

Once we do that, we turn the single map into a multiplayer experience.

And then after that, we place those single maps into the overall realm of a world.  That's where things like your royal family and such will come into play.

Gameplay, thus far, reminds me a little bit of a cross between Simcity and Caesar 3.  That's because the military aspects haven't been added in and we're still playing around with that kind of thing. 

Once GalCiv II is out the door, the team will return to full power again and we'll be looking to bring in more developers and artists to help work on it.  We also need more database and ASP/ASP.net coders incidentally.

Back in 1992 I was in college and was writing a computer game called Galactic Civilizations for IBM's OS/2 operating system.  I hung out on Usenet's comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic and almost like a collaborative design team, the users on that news group, where I was (and still am) a regular put together the features for this game.

I had started a little company called Stardock Systems in order to help pay for school and this game was being done under that umbrella.  IBM was very kind and sent me some software and tools and "red books" to help me write it. I also had bought Teach Yourself C in 21 days in order to program it.  The game also started a tradition that lasts to this day -- open betas.  Users who pre-ordered the game could participate in the beta program and tell us what they wanted changed or tweaked in the game. 

The betas were released in late 1993 and 1994.  But unknownst to us, we weren't the only ones interested in making a space-based strategy game.  Another new company had been started called Simtex and they had made a game called Master of Orion.   It was released at Christmas 1993. 

Because they were separated by OS platforms, the two existed side-by-side.  One might argue that we made the wrong choice in choosing OS/2.  After all, Master of Orion is considered a classic while Galactic Civilizations on OS/2 was a technological footnote.  But in reality, could a game written by a 20 year old college student in his spare time have gotten the kind of coverage that Galactic Civilizations received if it weren't for OS/2?  The publicity Galactic Civilizations received helped build the momentum that takes Stardock to where it is today.  Or put another way, Stardock exists today, many game developers in that time have long since vanished.

Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations wouldn't tangle again so directly until 2003 when Galactic Civilizations for Windows and Master of Orion 3 would face off.  Since I made the original and was designing the new one, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.  Master of Orion 3 was made by a different company - though on a much higher budget.

This time they were both on the same platform and during development, there were heated discussion by fans of each (which typically involved people on moo3.com slagging GalCiv).  Since GalCiv had an open beta, and anyone who's been in one of our betas knows how crappy our games are until the very end, the MOO fans could rightly point out how ugly GalCiv was looking.  We were competing against something that had no open beta, just a few choice screenshots that looked, admittedly pretty good.

Then Master of Orion 3 shipped and things changed.  Regardless of ones feelings on Master of Orion 3, it was not what fans were expecting. What I think many fans wanted was Master of Orion 2 with some tweaks and better graphics.  Master of Orion 3 was many things but it was not Master of Orion 2 with some tweaks and better graphics, it was very different.

Master of Orion 3 actually sold better than Galactic Civilizations -- a lot better.  3 years of pre-ordered ensured it had a massive foot print at retail.  When it came out you could find rows and rows of Master of Orion 3 boxes and then would have to dig around to find a box of Galactic Civilizations.  Still, the game sold well with nearly 100,000 sold in North America either directly from Stardock or through retail via Strategy First.  Some unknown number (probably around 50,000) was sold overseas.  Not too bad.

The reviews of Master of Orion 3 and sales (when compared to its budget) made it unlikely that Atari would be doing a Master of Orion 4 any time soon.  GalCiv, whose budget was about 1/10th of MOO 3's, was ready to do a sequel with a bigger budget and a more vigorous marketing strategy.

So what about all those Master of Orion 3 fans who wanted MOO 2.5?  If my email inbox along with forum posts are any indication, they would have Galactic Civilizations II be that game.  But it isn't.  It's not supposed to be.  The forums really only give a taste of the nit-picking that MOO fans submit but it's there.  Whether it be demands for players to do orbital bombardments without having to invade the planet to demands for tactical combat ("I should be able to select which weapon fires on which ship!").

That isn't to say we won't put in good ideas when we hear them.  But Galactic Civilizations has always been a strategic game.  It's never been a game about tactics.  It's literally a class of civilizations.  You're building a civilization and you want to see how it is able to compete against other civilizations.  Ship design was added for the sequel not to be more like Master of Orion but to help extend the clash of civilizations story-arc: Players can take different weapons and defense technology paths and it would have become ridiculously complicated to stick with the "Technology gives you Ship X" methodology that GalCiv I gave you.  We had to have a way for players to choose what types of weaponry and defenses to put on their ships.  The 3D engine made it too tempting not to let people visually design their own ships.

Fleet battles in Galactic Civilizations II carries forward the clash of civilizations vision as well.  Because fleet sizes are limited by ones logistics ability, it forces players to decide whether to focus on a few huge ships or fleets of smaller ships.  Ultimately, the game revolves around whose civilization can adapt best technologically, culturally, industrially, and militarily to a given random galaxy with a given random mix of aliens controlled by carefully designed AI algorithms.

Master of Orion is not designed to be a clash of civilizations in this sense in my view.  It's a clash of militaries.  In MOO, at any level, cranking out the ships was rarely an issue. In the original, fleets of 30,000 ships was not uncommon.  The game down to being able to design the most effective ships and match them to your own tactical battle strategy the best.  The end-game typically revolved around a genocide run with each player zipping into a system with a massive fleet (held back by how large a USHORT was -- 65,535 ships in a group) and wiping out the planet.  The player with the faster ships could annihilate faster and thus win the game.

A fairly well known story about me and Master of Orion involves the birth my first son.  I played Master of Orion 2 in the delivery room on a laptop while waiting for my son to be born.  Hence, I know when MOO2 shipped because I was playing it on November 30, 1996 when it was still very new.  Or put another way, I'm a MOO fan too.  But that doesn't mean I want to clone it anymore than I want to clone Civilization (which, after all, has a very similar title). 

At the end of the day, we have our own ideas on what makes a fun game and want to pursue that.  And I can sympathize with Master of Orion fans who, ten years after MOO 2's release, are still looking for what they see as a "true sequel".  But please stop trying to push MOO on us.  We don't see being different from MOO as a flaw. 

Beta 4 of Galactic Civilizations is the first gameplay beta of the game.  It's as this point players will get a decent idea of whether we're on the right track.

Beta 3 and before were basically engine tests. We needed to find out what compatibility issues we were going to run into and work around them.  But beta 4 is different. At that point, the clock starts.  We will have from November 1 to Christmas break to essentially "finish" the game.  After that, it's just polish.

And I'm worried.

Not because the team isn't doing great -- they are.  I'm worried about all the computer AI that needs to be done.  GalCiv II is a much more complex game to do the AI for.  Luckily, I have the basics from GalCiv I to start with.  But there's so much to do.

Let me spell it out:

1. Players can play as any race.  To me, as a gamer, that needs to mean something.  If I play as the Torians, who were enslaved by the Drengin, that means the game should play differently when I deal with them.  Same as with other races. We don't want other races to be generic.
2. The AI designs ships. That's proving to be quite a challenge.  It's going to take a lot of play-testing on that to nail that down to make sure the AI is doing a good job with it.
3. The game has fleets.  This is a new concept.  I am supposed to have basic AI fleet handling in for Beta 4.
4. The technology tree is very challenging.  The new tech tree is much more compontenized. That is, there are many many different choices to go.   GalCiv I's tech tree, as big as it was, put the player on a pretty typical "best path".  This time, there's no best path.
5. The AI can play as humans.  If you play as one of the 5 major aliens races from GalCiv I, you get to see the "good" planets. It's one of their native advantages (remember that from GalCiv I? the aliens knew where the decent planets were).  In GalCiv II, the humans and the new races don't have that technology. That means the AI needs to build scouts and go find those good planets the old fashioned way.

The problem isn't just the difficulty in doing these things well, it's the time.  I'm going on a business trip this next week so I'll lose a week.  

I will get it done.  That's not the issue. I suspect my Christmas break will be playing a lot of Galactic Civilizations II to get it all sorted out.  For me, computer games are about AI.  The other features of GalCiv mean little if there isn't a compotent opponent to play against.  I don't want the AI to just be able to win, that's easy.  I want it to play intelligently and I want the human player to see that intelligence on screen.

 

Gamer's Temple has a slew of pre-Beta 4 screenshots. Beta 4 of Galactic Civilizations II will be out later this month.

Our "what's change" doc is a little week but we've been updating and working on ObjectBar 2 over the summer and into the Fall now and we figured it was time to put out a new update.

While it is close to 2.0, it is still not quite ready yet for release.  But this new build has some really interesting things in it. For one thing, it has a bunch of new default controls that come with it including native RSS reading, CPU, disk, and other meters (no need for widgets on those).

It still has some skinning, customization, and sizing issues that we'll need to deal with before it goes gold but it should be a significant improvement over the May beta.

Bush's latest Supreme Court nominee I think pretty much seals it that Bush is really just an idiot.  I've had misgivings about him and was not a fan of his in the past but this nomination reeks of arrogance.

The Roman emperor, Caligula, made his horse a senator.  I suppose now we know that reincarnation is possible though at least Bush's advisors managed to thwart any ideas of nominating a favorite horse to the supreme court. 

Bush's croneyism is possibly the worst in the modern era.  He may be fairly moral in most respects but his professional ethics certainly are in question. 

Frankly, I'm disgusted with Bush.  And since the Republican senators are likely to rubber stamp his nominee, I've lost interest in politics.  We have the Republicans who seem to be eager to appear as the party of the corrupt and the Democrats who are eager to be the party of the screwballs (when they're not bitching and moaning pathetically).

And so here we are. Sigh.

The next version of Windows really does need to take things to another level.

 

Let's face it, Windows XP is basically Windows 2000 with some fixes and cosmetic enhancements.

 

Longhorn needs to be much more than that.  Here are a few things I think it needs:

 

1) New display system. This is what Avalon is supposed to address. The new display system needs to let us always run our systems as the maximum resolution our monitor supports and have the DPI (dots per inch) be fluidly scaleable without impacting software compatibility.  I shouldn't have to run my laptop at 1024x768 in order to be able to read text if it supports 1600x1200.  I should be able to run at 1600x1200 and size everything on the fly to be bigger. 

 

2) Updated Searching.  Google Desktop search only exists because the Find Files feature of Windows is essentially useless.  I should be able to quickly find something on my system instantly.  WinFS won't be out as part of Longhorn so what will they be improving in the meantime?

 

3) Smoother Multitasking.  Windows still sucks at multitasking.  Even when running on an SMP box, if the OS is "busy" doing something, you still can't quickly do something else.  I eventually gave up on SMP since on Windows it's only good for CPU bound tasks and doesn't really affect multitasking efficiency very much (on MacOS X and OS/2, for instance, SMP basically made it so you could always be doing something in the UI, but on Windows, the UI is apparently not as multithreaded as it could be). In the meantime, I use Multiplicity to maximize my computing power. But I'd like the OS itself to let me always be able to do stuff -- even if the app is written badly.

 

4) More Componentized. Whether we'll get Microsoft to make it so that pieces of Windows can be replaced or inherited from remains to be seen. I would like to be able to easily add more views (no, Ishell stuff doesn't cut it) to foldrers. 

 

5) Stop bloating with needless bundling.  Every new version of Windows throws in some half-assed immitation of third party software.  While we can all appreciate having a "free" version of ZIP or uxtheme or movie maker, it damages third party software development. I'd rather think that when I BUY my copy of Windows that the work was put into features that only the OS vendor could do.  Especially since Microsoft rarely puts any effort to let third parties expand on what they bundle (like adding RAR support to the compressed folders for example). There are some features only the OS vendor can really do. I'd rather see resources put there.

 

6) Make Networking better. I don't know about you guys but the LAN support in Windows is still quite a pain.  As I type this, I am on a wireless LAN which has several computers on the same work group.  It often takes several seconds, if at all, to find all the machines on the network.  It would be nice if Microsoft re-thought how people use network resources and included ways of working with them in a more straight forward, ROBUST, centralized way.

 

7) Better use of memory. I have 2 gigabytes of memory on my main machine. I turn off the swap file.  And yet I still hear the hard drive chipmunks going away.  Why is that? And don't even get me started about the limited number of handles. Even on my 2 gigabyte machine, if programs use more than 24,000 or so handles, programs start crashing. The average person doesn't even know why their system becomes unstable because limited user handles on Windows XP has been largely ignored.

 

8) Fix Internet Explorer. CSS 2.0 compliance would be a nice start. How about making it much smarter about what it caches? I have lots of friends at Microsoft who admit to having switched to Firefox (or Opera).  That's sad.

 

9) Fix your third party licenses. One of the ugly secrets of the PC OEM market is that computer manufacturers can't install things on Windows that changes the first boot-up experience. At best, they can put a few things on the desktop.  But they can't, for example, include an alternative shell or have WindowBlinds running by default or change the boot screen or many ohter things.  In short, there's not much way for PC manufacturers to distinguish their computer from every other computer.  That means a LOT of lost innovation.

 

10) Fix Security.  Outlook Express is still a spyware/spammer's dream. We shouldn't have to "upgrade" to Outlook to have some basic protections. There should be more end user tools that make it very easy to monitor net traffic.  The "Network" tab in task manager is a nice start but it needs to go much furthre than that.  Worms and the like should be stopped at the OS level. SP2 was a nice start, but there's still so much more to do.

 

There's lost of little things that are being addressed that I'm very excited about.  Avalon is the big thing for me. XAML in particular is interesting but I fear it may lead to a ton of wacky looking "apps". I don't want my apps to be as poorly designed UI as the typical website. Let me put it this way, the people who make Office are VERY different from the people who made http://www.microsoft.com.  I want the former writings the stand alone apps I use, not the latter.

 

So what would you like to see? What features in Longhorn make you excited?

WindowBlinds 5 Beta 1B was released today. It is a major update and improvement over yesterday's beta and should clear up most of the issues for those users who ran into problems.  But it's more than just a bug fix, additional performance improvements have been put in as well. 

Users of WindowBlinds 5 have also reported that it is significantly faster than WindowBlinds 4.6 (which in itself was already very fast).  That's because WindowBlinds 5's engine has been further optimized for drawing and resizing and taking advantage of the latest video cards.

A few notes about WindowBlinds 5 Beta 1b (4.90b):

1. We don't recommend using it with WindowFX yet.  We have a new WindowFX about to go up that has been optimized to work with WindowBlinds 5.
2. Skin changing should be faster.
3. Right-Click on title bar override to make it roll up the window has been added for Alpha-Blended title bars.
4. RunDLL32 issue resolved.
5. WinZip issue resolved.
6. Min/Max settings respect settings.
7. WB Config now has support for helping those with ATI 9000 that have corrupted mouse buttons.
8. Corruption with Kol's WinVista skin has been resolved.
9. Taskbar corruption (graphical) issues should be fixed.
10. LogonStudio compatibility issue resolved.

All in all, a busy day for the WindowBlinds team.  You need to have Object Desktop (www.objectdesktop.com) in order to get access to the beta.