ObjectDock 1.2 has been released.  ObjectDock is a freeware program for Microsoft Windows XP/2000 that lets users have a highly customizable dock on their desktop.  ObjectDock can respond to mouse-over events with zooming and now in v1.2 with new effects such as gentle rocking and glowing.  ObjectDock 1.2 also includes a completely redesigned icon zooming system to provide much smoother looking mouse-over effects.

Stardock also makes ObjectDock Plus which adds the ability to create tabbed docks, supports the Windows system tray (system tray items can appear in a tab or as a dock for instance), taskbar grouping, multiple docks, fly-out-menus and more.

Version 1.2: Change Log

Three new mouse-over effects are now available for non-tabbed docks! Effects include Swing, Gentle Rock, and Afterglow. Let us know which you love the best, as we're experimenting with more for the future. You can configure the duration and magnitude of the effects (Rock and glow are only available in Plus).

• New smoothness setting is now available for the zooming effect! Combines the ultra-fast mouseover animation with gradual entry/exit animation.
• Redesigned "Appearance Tweaks" properties tab for zooming docks.
• Settings "Backup" system in case of crashes rewritten, strengthened.
• Added options to temporarily disable Docklets (for troubleshooting). Look in the Advanced options (Plus) or in the Dock Contents tab (Free).
• Fixed jumpy zoom-animation when dragging within a zooming dock.
• Fixed error message on startup for users with no C:\.
• Fixed issue wherein upon exiting a zooming dock, if the cursor passes over an item's title the dock would take a step in the reverse direction.
• Fixed issue wherein the dock animation could get stuck in the "zoomed" position after the cursor has left the dock.
• Fixed conflict between IconPackager 3 and ObjectDock, which prevented dragging of icons, and at times would prevent program from loading. IconPackager 3.0a also corrects this.
• Adjusting the tab alignment will now take effect immediately.

ObjectDock's home page is http://www.objectdock.com.  ObjectDock is freeware, ObjectDock Plus is $19.95.

Screenshot: ObjectDock - standard dock
Screenshot: ObjectDock Plus - tabbed dock
Screenshot: ObjectDck Plus - fly-out menus
Video: ObjectDock mouse-over effect demo
More Info: ObjectDock Media Guide

When the Longhorn beta arrives, we expect to release an update to WindowBlinds to support beta 1.  The only issues we know of is that the new Start menu has an edit field in it and the toolbar icons are handled a bit differently.  We're working on that.

..As for people who have been applying unauthorized MSStyles, they're out of luck. Those msstyles will not run on Longhorn beta 1 unless they use them via WindowBlinds.

Everyone show us your home computing rig.  Here's what I've got going at my house.  I have two PCs connected up using Multiplicity.  One is a P4-3.4 Ghz Dell gaming setup and the other is a P4-2.8Ghz Dell black box.  Both ahve 2 gigabytes of memory on them (I do a lot of video editing and such).

Most of my week on Galactic Civilizations II was spent doing game-balancing.  That meant messing with the various .XML files that determine how long technology takes to research, how much different weapons and other ship items should cost and how powerful they should be.  The result was that a ton of changes were made to the values of these things.

For example, the weapons used to scale way too fast IMO.  You could quickly end up with ships doing 300 damage and that starts to become problematic to game balance.  Instead, weapon series go up very gradually.  Example: Lasers do 1 damage, Plasma weapons 2 damage, Phasors 3 damage, Disruptors 4 damage and so on.  The difference between Laser I and say Laser IV has to do with its cost and how much space it uses.  So the benefit is that your ship might be able to fit some other goodies on it (such as better defenses) rather than just having ridiculous kill-power.

It also didn't take long to realize that the current technology tree we had in there just wasn't workable.  It took way too many clicks, wasn't very fun, and was confusing for new players.  What we really needed to do was to rethink the technology tree.  Technology trees aren't bad, they just have to be organized. GalCiv I's tech tree was a total mess because it was a hold-over from the OS/2 version.  If we could go back and re-do it from scratch and have it more logical, it might not be such a bad idea to have a tech tree instead of whatever it is we were trying to have this time around.  Getting back to the screen itself, the tech screen was also a pain because you had to press "research" in order for it to research. The newer system is much more streamlined.

Old vs. New

I also began working on the computer AI with more vigor.  The current AI is pretty brain-dead and it's still not very good. But it's definitely non-trivial getting the computer players to design decent ships or even figure out what they should build on their planets.

Speaking of planets, we've started simplifying things on there.  We're going to get rid of the concept of "unemployment".  It just complicates the game without adding any fun to it.  Perhaps in the future we can look at finding a way to have employment rates matter but for now, it was just a hassle.  The new morale system is much more straight forward -- entertainment units per capita with the tax rate providing an overall affect on approval/morale.  In GalCiv I, morale was basically a voodoo type thing.  Now morale will be very straight forward to understand.

The other change we're working on is going to take some play-testing.  If you're not building anything on a given planet then by default only half the resources going in that area (such as military) are used.   You will be able to build improvements that will bring that down to the point where you might only have a couple of resources being used if you're not building something.  We didn't want to get rid of it entirely, fact is, whether you're building something or not, you still have to pay your employees.  But this way, it turns it into a game mechanic.  One can imagine a galactic wonder that cuts the "Wasted" spending down to 1/4th or something on all your planets.

So that's all for this week. 

Summer is here and that means lots of people are outside. But fear not, there's also been lots of activity in the Windows customization front as people check out the cool things in MacOS Tiger and Longhorn and start to try to spruce up their PCs.

In the article front, here's a guide I wrote on different ways of using the popular Windows customization suite, Object Desktop. You can read about that HERE.

Meanwhile, in terms of actual goodies to download for your computer, I came across some neat stuff:

Star Wars Yoda is a replacement boot screen for Windows XP. It looks totally cool and sure beats that standard Windows XP logo.

Speaking of Star Wars, I found a cool looking light saber replacement mouse cursor here. You use CursorXP to apply it. If you're looking for something a little more..well normal the Encoded mouse cursors are pretty cool too.

For you widget lovers out there, I found some pretty cool stuff. These widgets use DesktopX. Once you have DesktopX intalled on your computer, these widgets run like any other program except widgets use less memory to do what they do than traditional programs use (which is one of the points of using widgets). The On-Time clock widget is pretty nice. There's a gazillion clock widgets out there already but this one is particularly nice.

One of the most interesting widgets I've seen lately is the LCARS MP3 widget. It lets you specify which media player you want to control (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player or its own built in one). For anyone who is really into Star Trek TNG, this is definitely worth getting.

Meanwhile in icon land, there have been some incredibly cool icon sets packaged up with IconPackager 3. There's Luna Alt, Icon-A-Day, and the Encoded icon package. All are very nice and all are incredibly cool.

If you have ObjectDock Plus, there's some cool new backgrounds out too. I'm partial to the Gizmo background myself.

You maynot have heard of Rainlendar before, but it's a free program for giving you skinnable calendars. While there are lots of calendar widgets out there, the difference here is Rainlendar only does calendars so it has really specialized on making them very useful. NWC Blue
and elsdee RL are two recent ones that look good.

Customizing wouldn't be complete without wallpapers of course and here are a few I liked in particular:

SpaceBall.

TouchWinOS

Testosterone

Pixxel Boxx

Over in Windows Media Player land things have been somewhat quiet lately but the World of Warcraft skin for WMP is pretty cool.

In the GUI skinning department, there's been a lot of activity lately. Visual styles or whatever you want to call them change the look & feel of the Windows GUI. The most popular way to do this is with WindowBlinds, a program that extends the native visual style engine to support all kinds of cool new stuff.

Mr. Clean is like the name implies.

My Longhorn is a pretty solid attempt to get Windows XP to have the look and feel of Longhorn complete with an alpha blended Start menu.

Also in the "clean" style is MoonBlinds.

And finally, Pixel Pirate who has all kinds of cool stuff lately has made Encoded as a visual style as well.

So that's all for now. Until next time, don't be a drone, make Windows reflect your style.

I admit it. I'm a bad man.  It's not my fault though, I just don't have enough free time to be a good man.  You see, I play World of Warcraft.  It's a massively multiplayer on-line role playing game (MMORPG).  In MMOs, you are, in theory, supposed to group up with other players to go on quests and such.  I did this a lot when I was first got the game.  I even have a guild with around 100 members.  But as time has gone on, it's increasingly difficult to find people to go on quests with.  So for me, World of Warcraft is pretty much like Blizzard's classic RPG, Diablo except in 3D, I play it single player.

The problem is, without other people, some of the quests are really hard. If only I had a reliable "friend" who could help me out.  My son plays World of Warcraft on occasion. But he's not so much into questing as he is exploring and fishing.  Sometimes we've played together -- I have two accounts, one for me and one for him.  The second computer is only a few feet away from mine so we could play together.

And after dying that 3rd time trying to get through some cave, I would just look at that second computer.  Just sitting there.  What if I created an alternative character, like a priest or something to help out my first character so that when I am questing by myself, I can heal up myself just enough to get through.  After all, I'm paying for two accounts and it's NOT a PvP server so it's not like it's harming anyone.  The problem then is controlling both characters.  Trying to juggle two keyboards and mice is tough.

That's where Multiplicity comes in.  Using a network cable (or Firewire or a special USB cable that gives you an IP address) I hooked up both computers. I made my main machine the primary and my son's computer the secondary. Multiplicity then found the secondary machine right away and within minutes I  was using both computers with one keyboard and mouse.

Only my primary computer needs the keyboard and mouse.  When I move my mouse cursor off the monitor connected to my primary computer onto the monitor connected to the secondary computer, I'm now controlling it.  The transition is perfect, that is, there's no lag at all.  Now I was ready to fire up World of Warcraft and give it a try.  I created an alternative character and made her ("Amanda") a priest.  I then made a couple of macros that made it easier to have Amanda follow my main character around. 

Within a few minutes, I was able to control both characters without any issue at all. I just whip the mouse over onto the other monitor to make some adjustments to Amanda and then back to my main monitor to be killing the monsters and what not.  In instances where my guy would be getting overwhelmed, I just have Amanda cast a heal spell or a protection spell and off I go.

Now some people might say this isn't being fair.  I say bull feathers to that.  I'm paying for two accounts (me and my son's). If anything, I'm still at a disadvantage compared to the guy who has buddies helping them "power level" them.  I'm still at a disadvantage to the guy who's guild buddies supply them with massive gold and equipment right away.  And in terms of questing, having a party of 3 or 4 real people (and if I wanted to really get into this, I could use Multiplicity Pro and control 6 characters at once if I was really hard core) is still easier.  But those of us who are more casual players or simply enjoy playing the game mostly as a single player experience, this is a great help.

Just as often I'm using Multiplicity so that while I'm traveling to some place in World of Warcraft I can move my mouse over to the other computer and be surfing the net, checking email, instant messaging, etc. all without having to worry that I'm slowing down my primary machine by using its memory and CPU.

Multiplicity is mostly used by companies and power users, but ironically, its ability to handle full screen games so smoothly makes it an excellent gamer's utility as well.

..A long time ago Stardock developed a game for OS/2 called Galactic Civilizations. It was published by a small company called "Advanced Idea Machines". Stardock never saw a penny of royalties from the retail release of the game.  Learning from history, for Galactic Civilizations 2 on OS/2, Stardock decided to self-publish it.  To get to retail, it worked with a distributor called Micro Central.  Micro Central filed for bankruptcy and never paid a cent in royalties.  Years later, in 2003, Stardock developed Galactic Civilizations for Windows and went with an "established" publisher called Strategy First.  Strategy First soon after filed for bankruptcy without paying the bulk of its royalty payments.  It remains Stardock's goal to one day get paid for retail purchases for a Galactic Civilizations game.

But 2003 wasn't the same as 1993 (when the game was written for IBM's OS/2 operating system).  Now we have the Internet in mass, Broadband access.  And so Stardock's response was to create something called TotalGaming.net.  The idea being that users would be able to buy and download Stardock's games.  This system was up in its basic for when Galactic Civilizations I was released and thanks to it, there's still a Stardock's game team since nearly all the revenue Stardock collected from Galactic Civilizations was because of electronic purchases.

Last year (2004), Stardock decided to expand TotalGaming.net and bring on other games.  Nearly a dozen games were added to TotalGaming.net as of Spring 2005.  The challenge going forward was how to bring on more games in a way that was fair to game developers.  And that's where TotalGaming.net: Phase 2 comes in.

With TotalGaming.net Phase 2, people can purchase games individually and then immediately download them.  Because Stardock has been doing electronic distribution of software for years with its popular Object Desktop series of products, it has long since migrated away from digital rights management (DRM) techniques.  Simply put, a user who pays $40 a video game expects to be able to download it and install it on their computer without any hassle.  They expect to be able to put it on their laptop and be able to play the game on the plane.  They expect to not have to worry about whether they installed it on "4" machines over the past 5 years sometime in the future.  In short, they want to be treated as a customer and not as a potential thief. 

Stardock's technology revolves around a technology called Secure Software Delivery (SSD) that it has developed over the past several years.  It works on a basic assumption -- the piracy to really worry about is not about some guy giving their friend a copy of their game but rather someone putting a game up for download on a warez site or a peer to peer file sharing mechanism.  Stardock Central, which is its practical application of SSD, works in a manner similar to iTunes -- users install the software via Stardock Central.  But once it's actually installed, the user can use it whether they're connected to the Internet or not.  They can play their game on the plane or install it to other machines in their home.  It's designed to provide a balance between piracy resistance and customer convenience. And unlike most DRM schemes available, SSD has a proven 6 year track record with Stardock's own software.  It's not any more secure than DRM, but it's a heck of a lot more convenience for gamers which, Stardock believes, is the key to success for wide distribution of electronic content.

In addition to being able to purchase games individually, they can also get a TotalGaming.net membership for $69.95 which provides 10 tokens.  Essentially, users who think they'll be buying a lot of games have the ability to pre-purchase in exchange for a steep discount on the games.  For instance, a user could pre-order Galactic Civilizations II for 5 tokens.  Where the final game is expected to list for $49.95, TotalGaming.net members would effectively be paying $35 (half of the 10 tokens which cost $70 for all 10).

Armed with the new royalty system for game developers, Stardock has been able to attract a lot of independent game developers to put their games on TotalGaming.net. In fact, presently, the limit on getting new games is essentially a matter of how fast they can be reviewed and processed by Stardock's Brian Clair (formerly editor-in-chief of Avault.com).  Moreover, TotalGaming.net is not going for quantity of games.  While some emerging electronic distribution "stores" are boasting the sheer number of games they carry, TotalGaming.net games go through a very strict quality process (hence bringing in professional game reviewers such as Brian Clair to look at submissions).

Meanwhile, Stardock is also negotiating with large publishers who have libraries of excellent games that are just gathering dust due to not being available on retail shelves.  Many of these games are just as good today as they were 2 or 3 years ago but have no real way of purchasing them.

Here are just a few of the new games on TotalGaming.net:

Astral Masters is one of the most addicting games on the net today. In the same spirit as card games such as Magic the Gathering, Astral Masters was designed from scratch to exist on-line.

Breakout, Arkanoid, yes, there are many Break-out type games out there.  However, imagine a break-out style game with a real physics engine. That's what BreakQuest brings to the table. It's incredibly cool. Try it for yourself.

Geom is so addictve that it actually caused Stardock some internal..."issues" due to excessive "play testing" of it in the development lab. It's one of the most addictive games out there today.

Gish is..well he's a hero.  Well, not exactly. He's..well...okay he's a big ball of tar.  But that hasn't stopped him from getting a girlfriend who has been kidnapped and needs rescuing. This game has already won a bunch of awards for its fun, creativity, and incredibly clever gameplay.

Jets'N'Guns has also taken its share of gaming awards. It brings classic arcade action into the 21st century.  If you've ever gone back and wished someone who really "got it" would recreate some of your favorite games of the past with today's technology, then this game is for you.

These are just a few of the games in there.  We'll highlight more in the coming weeks.  This just gives you a small taste of some of the cool stuff.  Not only are there other awesome games in there from independent developers but Stardock has its own slew of new games that we'll be talking about more soon as well.

You can either purchase games individually or purchase a TotalGaming.net member ship.  To learn more, go HERE.

What is Object Desktop and how is it used? If you've ever wondered how Object Desktop is used, see this article and add in your own experiences to the mix.

London UK was the target of terrorist attacks today. 37 people have died (so far) as a result of this attack.  Various terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, have claimed responsibility for the attack.

 It's easy, even tempting, when one lives in another country or another continent to think of the whole thing as very far away. Such mindless destruction and hatred can have far-reaching effects.  Not all that far from the attack is where WindowBlinds, WindowFX, IconPackager, Stardock Central, Theme Manager, and other programs that are used by millions of people are developed.  Moreover, popular community helper, GreenReaper, had just left the London area to come to the US today. 

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the victims.  One can only hope that the monsters who were involved in this senseless, hateful act are able to be brought to justice.