Here are the top 10 skins from March 2005. It was a good month for Alienware who took the top two spots. WindowBlinds visual styles had 6 of the top 10 spots this month with a DesktopX based desktop making it up there as well.
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When someone links to one of their skins, articles, or something they've recommended on their personal page from another website, they get an advocacy point.
For the month of March, here are the top 10. Those we haven't recently sent goodies to will be receiving some Stardock/WinCustomize goodies in the mail:
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The number besides their name is how many users came to WinCustomize.com last month from other sites because of something linked to them. You don't have to be a skinner or article writer to get advocacy points. You can recommend skins and themes and such to others on your personal page here and link to that.
Thank you for your help in spreading customization beyond this place.
Today I'm going to create a set of objects that allow you to control the position of another object. In essence, I am going to make 4 objects that will act as up, down, left, and right and then the cursor object that will be what is being controlled by the others.
Step 1: Create the first object.
Step 2: Go to its properties.
Step 3: Change its image to be an arrow.
Step 4: Create the target object and give it an image too.
Step 5: Give this object a name.
Step 6: Go back to your original object and create new script for it.
Step 7: Using the scripting guide located here: https://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx/docs/3x/DXScripting.doc have this object take over the mouse button down message.
You will find that the what you want to add is something like this:
| Function Object_OnLButtonDown(x, y) DesktopX.Object("TargetObject").bottom = DesktopX.Object("TargetObject").bottom - 10 End Function |
Step 8: Clone your control object 3 more times and make a couple tweaks so that they are down, left and right buttons.
For example, I want to use the same up arrow graphic but I need it to point right. So I rotate it 90 degrees. For the down one I would rotate it 180 degrees and the one pointing left I would rotate is 270 degrees..
| Sub Object_OnScriptEnter Object.Rotation = 90 End Sub |
Then I change what is being done to the target object based on which button. For example, the button moving it to the right would have this code:
You're done!
And voila. There you go. I'll now export it and upload it for yourself. If you have DesktopX Pro, you could export it as a stand-alone program to send to anyone whether they have DesktopX or not.
So the beta has gone out and we're starting to get some coverage. It's hard to believe we have almost a full year left of work on this. The main engine is done so we have plenty of time to fill in all kinds of content and detail in here.
The stability what somewhat better than I had feared/anticipated. But there's plenty of issues to resolve between now and Beta 1B which is due out at the end of next week. That will be the last public build of Beta 1.
Beta 2 is scheduled for the the week of E3. That's where we'll be making a bunch of announcements on some pretty exciting things. Suffice to say, it'll be a lot easier to find Galactic Civilizations II at your local retailer than it was to find the first one.
We are also interested to see if in the two-years since the first game's release that there will be more people who want to purchase and download the game. The technology has certainly come a long way. That is, Stardock Central is much more advanced now and this beta is allowing us to work out kinks in the system to make the final process as smooth as possible.
This week we released a new build of Stardock Central in which just entering your logon ID here SHOULD (assuming you used mostly the same info when you purchased the game) automatically find your purchase info and register ALL the program's you've purchased from us. So no more having to type in bunches of serial #'s.
The changes in Galactic Civilizations II's technology is helping us make things more electronic-friendly. Beta 1's base game is only 28 megabytes to download. The use of the new .dxpack technology allows us to take a screen that would have been 5 megabytes in GalCiv 1 and make it 100K in GalCiv 2. In short, we should be able to have a game that has vastly more content that is smaller in size. Of course, cut-scenes and multimedia won't be smaller (if anything, they'll be bigger) but they're a seperate component.
There was also a lot of discussion this week about the MMORTS our second game development team is working on. We'll be announcing more on that around E3. But don't get too excited, it won't be available in its final form until 2007. I was quoted as describing it as The Sims meets Total Annihilation. It would probably be more accurate to say it plays a lot like somone might imagine a Massively Multiplayer Civilization game might play except it's RTS and you deal with individual buildings and can see your citizens going about their lives (hence the Sims thing). But you don't control your citizens directly (NO PEONS). Only military units.
So in Beta 2 we hope to have a lot more screens in, there's going to be a lot of UI re-design work based on feedback and the AI should be more intelligent by then. Stay tuned.
Years ago Norton Utilities included a handy little program called SI.exe for System Info. Nowadays, such simple utilities seem to have been superceded by bloated GUI programs.
But HWareInfo, a simple freeware program does much of what SI did and much more. It's a simple command line utility that gives the user a great deal of information on their system.
Over at Penny-Arcade Tycho mentioned he's wondering what people are thinking of the first beta of Galactic Civilizations II.
So our question is to you - what do you think? Overall. Obviously we have a long way to go and most of the game isn't there but, do you like what you see so far?
Check out the interview over at CG Online that gives some details on what's coming up with Galactic Civilizations and beyond.
Livonia MI - April 1st, 2005. Software developer Stardock Corporation has announced its intention to port its popular Windows dock program, ObjectDock to MacOS X. ObjectDock is a freeware program that enables users to place a "dock" on any edge of the screen that can display both running programs and short-cuts to programs as well as have special items such as a trashcan. It can be configured such that when the mouse overs over the icon, that icon and nearby icons are "magnified".
"The availability of ObjectDock on the Macintosh platform indicates a growing movement of software developers to recognize the benefits of developing for MacOS X," said Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. "Many of our users who use Microsoft Windows on occasion and been exposed to Stardock's ObjectDock have clamoured for a way to have a convenient, yet stylish, way to quickly access their programs and tasks.
Stardock expects to release ObjectDock in conjunction with the next major release of MacOS X, code-named "Tiger". Stardock is also considering adding a few additional features to a MacOS version.
"With the advanced features of Quartz Extreme," said Eric Reid, developer at Stardock, "we could add some really cool effects to ObjectDock. For instance, imagine having windows look like they're being sucked into the dock when the user minimizes a program? The possibilities are endless."
Stardock's home page is https://www.stardock.com. ObjectDock will continue to be a freeware program on both platforms though there is some talk about bundling it with the next generation Macintosh to ensure that Macintosh users are able to have this functionality right from boot up.
