Things are about to get very exciting for TotalGaming.net subscribers. We are about to embark upon TotalGaming.net: Phase 2.

First off, existing TotalGaming.net subscribers are going to be getting two new games shortly: Hacker Elite and Nexagon.

Shortly after that, we’ll be going into phase 2. It will be a different type of subscription model than what we’ve had before but one that we think will benefit gamers and developers more so than the current system.

TotalGaming.net Phase 2 will change to be as follows:

Price: $69.95
Time: 2-years
Tokens: 10

In the current system, a user pays $89 to receive all the games available plus what we come out with for one year. On paper, it sounds terrific. But in reality, it creates a real challenge to keep getting new content onto the system.

In the new system, different games will cost differing amounts of tokens. For instance, The Political Machine would cost 2 tokens. Celtic Kings would cost 2 tokens. Galactic Civilizations would cost 3 tokens, and so forth. The user would have 2 full years to use their tokens. If the tokens are used up before then, they can purchase booster packs at $34.95 for 5 more tokens at a time.

Through this system, game developers will be able to receive royalties based on the popularity of their individual game. This enables Stardock to provide newer games from a larger variety of sources for the player to choose from.

Existing TotalGaming.net customers would be transitioned to the new system. On the day of Phase 2’s launch, existing TotalGaming.net active subscribers would get all the existing games on TotalGaming.net automatically.

On top of that, they will receive 10 tokens to use on future games and two years to use them. This has the advantage of ensuring that players who want to get Galactic Civilizations II (for instance) don’t have to worry that it will come out after their subscription expires (it’ll be definitely out within the next year or so, let alone two).

Needless to say, if you haven’t already gotten TotalGaming.net, now’s the best time to get it since existing TotalGaming.net users end up with the best of both worlds.

And for game developers, the new system enables them to receive royalties on the tokens spent on their game. Games can still, of course, be purchased stand-alone.

Stardock also has a massively multiplayer real time strategy in development that will be available first in beta for TotalGaming.net subscribers.

If you’re a game developer and want to have your game distributed on TotalGaming.net, contact [email protected].

To learn more, visit http://www.totalgaming.net

In the "skinning" world (for those of you not familiar with skinning, it's a large community of power users and techies who enjoy customizing their PC software and operating systems in unique ways) there are occasionals complaints that there are too many Stardock "groupies" or "fanboys" who defend everything Stardock does.

Hah. Stardock may be "the Blizzard of skinning" but there is no substitute for Blizzard but Blizzard when it comes to having fanboys.

I'm friends with people at Blizzard and it amazes me how down to earth and normal these guys are because their forums are populated by fanboys of an almost unbelieveable variety.  I swear, they're only a few steps away from buying shirts that say "Blizzard: Pee on me please!"

I never participate on a forum until I've gotten the "lay of the land" and so I've been very careful not to write anything remotely critical of World of Warcraft on the forum because it's useless.  The fan boys are so totally in control there that it's almost cult-like.

I recall, shortly after release, when the game was having some connection problems a user making what I thought was a pretty good point: "Look, when you're down for a weekend, you should be compenating us. We are paying for a service that you're not providing. And giving us 2 extra days doesn't cut it because most of us can't play during the week. Weekends are precious."

To which he received a ton of infantile flames that included "Blizzard don't owe you a thing!" or "It's a game! Get over it!" or "Too bad, so sad. I hope you quit playing, will cut down on the queue!"

The "Blizzard don't owe you a thing" comment (and there were many of that nature) really struck me.  If I'm paying for a monthl service, then actuall yea, the company does owe me a service. It's a basic part of business.  To be sure, Blizzard has not taken on this attitude. They've made a really honest and good effort to make good. But their fans, oye.

Recently things have been heating up because the bulk of original players are starting to get up into the "level 50" range.  This is uncovering some issues that we saw during the alpha and beta.  The alpha and early betas of World of Warcraft only went up to level 30.  The level 30 to 60 content was put in much later with relatively less play testing.  Based on reports, things become quite problematic as you get higher with most quests being "elite" quests (quests that you have to get a bunch of people to do). 

There are signs that the raw number of quests starts to really dwindle as you near the higher levels of the game.  I have a level 35 Paladin, only 5 levels beyond the original beta and I'm already starting to notice this.  I created a new character today and I was floored by the rememberance of how good the early level experience is - or as I call it, the pre-addiction phase.  You walk into a village and it's full of quests. Half the town would be full of quests.

By level 35, as you enter Booty Bay or South Shore, the number of quests has dwinded remarkably. Still quite a few, but nothing like it was early on.  As you move up and get into the Plague Lands, you're left with only a handful of non-elite quests to do. It really starts to dwindle.

But don't dare make any criticism of the game on the forums - where the developers might see it. The fan boys will attack.  Check out this post made by a level 53 player (I've put in a lot of hours and had the game on day 1 and I'm only at level 35 with my main character, so  you can imagine how much time this guy has put in).  His post isn't totally polite but the responses are infantile.

As a professional game designer, I tend not to be critical of games since it's a bit cheesy for one game developer to critique another's work.  But I do know the importance of listening to constructive criticism. And the out of control fanboyism in teh Blizzard forums creates an atmosphere where few are going to want to provide useful constructive criticism.  What they'll get instead are drive by flames by people who don't really care (they get tons of nasty, unconstrucive flames in there too).  But that key feedback where the player has put in some time and effort to try to improve the game? Forget it. Not worth getting attacked over.

World of Warcraft is a fantastic game..for the first 30 levels or so.  It survives beyond that due to the sheer time investment one has put in and addiction.  But I suspect that if the first 30 levels played anything like the last 30 levels, it would not have the following it has.  And the fanboys need to get out of the way and recognize this. They need to get out of the way so that people feel comfortable putting in constructive criticism that Blizzard may read.

If you want to make a program that you plan to give to other people to use, you will probably find that they will want some sort of preferences dialog. Something to change the settings of the program to match their particular set up.  In today's example, we want users to be able to make an email checker. The email checker is different for each user. They have their server, user name and password.  So how do we let users of our widget set these things?

In DesktopX 2, you would do this on your own by creating your own special panels that you designed yourself.  This had the benefit of letting the author have a lot more control over presentation but it was very time consuming. Some widget enabling programs do all this in a separate XML file that the program then uses to create a standard preferences dialog. This is, in my view, superior to what was in DesktopX 2.

But with DesktopX 3, it was decided to take the next logical step - do all of this in script (VB Script, JavaScript, whatever).  When the user starts the script, the first thing they do is create their preferences dialog (if applicable).  You don't have to create a preferences dialog this way but it does make things much much easier.

So let's think about how we want users to enter in their User Name, Password, and Server name. In DesktopX 3 you create a widget like this:

Widget.Preference(PREFERENCENAME).Type = TYPE

So we authors would fill in PREFRENCENAME and TYPE . For the former, you can call it anything like "Password".  For the latter, you have to pick one of the control types DesktopX 3 supports which are:

“Hidden”: No control will be displayed in the Widget properties panel. Hidden is the default type. “Text”: Text box control type. “Password”: Text box with obfuscated characters for password entries. “Checkbox”: Checkbox control. Values for checkboxes are “1” or “0”. “ComboEdit”: Editable text combobox control. “ComboList”: Dropdown list combobox control. “Slider”: Slider control. Values for sliders are still in string form.

So in this case I would pick two text fields for the server name and user name and the password field for the password (password being the same as text but obfuscated).

The screenshot above contains the example code for our mail preference.  There's a second piece we need, and that is, what we do when someone actually does something in the preferences:

Sub Widget_OnPreferencesChange   RefreshData   CheckMail End Sub

A new call is added  by the system: Widget_OnPreferenceChange.  In this case, we call a function called RefreshData that we've written and another one called CheckMail that we've written.

Sub RefreshData   sLogin = Widget.Preference("User").Value 'object.localstorage("MailLogin")   sPass = Widget.Preference("Password").Value 'object.localstorage("MailPass")   sServer = Widget.Preference("Server").Value 'object.localstorage("MailServer")   sType = Widget.Preference("Type").Value 'object.localstorage("Type") End Sub

In this function, we save the data from our preferences dialog with the DesktopX storage system so that you don't have to keep entering this data every time you load the widget.

When the widget is made, the preferences tab becomes part of the properties dialog for that widget.  So now I can not only control how the widget looks and behaves and set the hot key to activate it, but I can now configure it right from the same place.

 

 

 

 

For those of you wondering if Galactic Civilizations II is the only big thing coming out this Spring, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

We've got 2 new games about to be added to TotalGaming.net, a third one that's in development, and a bunch of others in the pipeline. Oh, yea, one other thing, we have a MMORTS in development too that we are very excited about.

Next week we should have the preview ready to go to give you an idea of what's happening.

This week Blizzard updated its popular massively multplayer RPG game, World of Warcraft. The main changes was a "bug fix" that dramatically decreased the amount of damage the Paladin class was capable of doing.  The change occurred in how the "Seal of the Crusader" is handled.

Previously it allowed the Paladin to swing faster AND keep doing the damage he would normally do with each swing.  Now, it's been changed so that the Paladin swings faster but each hit does less damage (so the effect is mainly that the player is getting more hits in with the same overall "damage per minute" occurring).

The problem is that the Paladin becomes pretty tedious to play in the game once the player has reached level 40 or so.  Prior to that, the Paladin is probably one of, if not the most, powerful classes in the game.  Needless to say, players who remember having been killed in PvP by Paladins during their character's "youth" (level 20 to 40) aren't sympathetic to the plight of the Paladin.

What they don't realize is that the Paladin in World of Warcraft tops out. That while the Paladin may be king of the hill (not so much now but still pretty damn good) at the early to mid stages of the leveling, it ends up being one of the dullest, most tedious classes to play. The end game of the Paladin is a study in bordeom.  Battles, which used to take 5 seconds at level 20 take 30 seconds ore more at level 50 (battles against creatures of the same level).

Meanwhile, other classes, particularly preists, rogues, and mages, see their damage dealing continue to properly scale as they move up. The Paladin, in effect, falls behind in every way except in how difficult they are to kill.

In effect, the Paladin is good only in that he is hard to kill and outlasts opponents. Hardly a fun trade-off for most people.  I suspect most players would gladly have their Paladin be more vulnerable in exchange for more damage power.  The Paladin at level 50 is very very hard to kill. The Paladin at level 20 does serious damage but is, relatively speaking to the level 50 Paladin, quite vulnerable.

A suggestion I emailed off to a friend of mine at Blizzard is that the Paladin at level 40 should get a new spell.  "Aura of Might" that doubles their attack power for 30 seconds but with a cost -- it counts as a use of shield of invulnerability.  Aura of Might would have a 15 second cool down but every time it's used, it would reset the cooldown on the various invulnerability shields. So the Paladin would have to make some tough choices.

Any Paladin under level 40 complaining about the changes is, as others gleelfully point out "just whining".  But there were serious problems with the Paladin class even this "fix" was put in after level 40.  Blizzard needs to address the post level 40 Paladin fighting ability that becomes increasingly problematic as the player rises up in levels.

 

If you're interested in seeing how Galactic Civilizations II is progressing, check out the Galactic Civilizations II developer journals pages. It'll give you a week by week outline of what's going on and where things are going.

Irrational Games, the developers of the hit "Freedom Force" go through their experiences with the development of Freedom Force along with their trials and tribulations over how best to get its sequel, Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich into the hands of gamers. Check it out!

The Political Machine (the game) was released this past August and it sold quite well. It was published by Ubi Soft at retail and distributed electronically via TotalGaming.net.  But as a money maker, it was so-so.  That's because a game that retails for $20 that has only a few month life span is going to have a hard time making back its investment.  Luckily, The Political Machine made its money back.

But even if it hadn't made its money back, it was worth doing. In fact, it would have been worth doing even if it had only made a quarter as much money.  Why? Because during the months of August through November Stardock had a tremendous spike of overall sales. We're talking a spike of 40% in sales from our electronic store.  And when you're talking about an electronic store that does millions of dollars in sales each year, that's significant.

You see, the game itself generated so much coverage because of its topic that it brought hundreds of thousands of new people to our websites. And many of these people then purchased something else.  Some bought TotalGaming.net subscriptions. Some bought Object Desktop. And some bought a whole bunch of things.

After the election, sales returned back to where one would expect..well not quite, they have remained higher than projected ever since. But the lesson learned is that there's more to products than just their sales. Something the retail world has known for a long time.

Here's the dirty little secret I've picked up about successful business people - they have mastered the art of not just figuring out what the most important tasks are but, and this is key, figuring out which needed tasks to drop off.

I don't claim to be a paragon of business. But I am coming to understand that each day, there are things that need to get done that I simply cannot get done. I haven't fully made the transition to doing this optimally as I still end up trying to do more things than I can realistically do with the resulting "half-assed" results. But I am getting better.

Each day I receive requests to do this or that or come up with tasks that will better our business prospects.  And each day I'll look through those tasks and see that many of them simply cannot be done in the time required.  Maybe it's an interview. Maybe it's a skin that I need to do. Maybe it's some code I need to write. Maybe it's a product evaluation.  It's different each day.

I wonder which things I won't be able to finish up today.

WindowBlinds is a program that enables users of Microsoft Windows to apply themes (which we refer to as "skins" or "visual styles") that change the look and feel of your Windows GUI. However, WindowBlinds 4.5 allows users to change the color of each particular "theme". Traditionally, people would download a given "theme" and if it wasn't the color they liked, they were out of luck. Now, with WindowBlinds 4.5's hue/saturation support, the skin's default colors are only the beginning...

Let's have some fun with the new coloring feature of WindowBlinds 4.5. I don't think most users, even long time users, really appreciate just how powerful the built in coloring features are in this new version. Going to a hue-based coloring system is a big deal.

To demonstrate it in action, I'm going to pick a skin that that one wouldn't necessarily would realize how much coloring it would add to its longevity - Morphium's SouLuna skin.

So the image to the right here is how it looks on my system with no coloring at all.

 

So here's what I do. I click on the "Change Skin Color" in the WindowBlinds configuration (found in your system tray typically or by double clicking on the WindowBlinds icon).

Now I'm going to go to town..

Now it's somewhat bluer..

I feel..pretty..

All business now!

Evergreen enough?

How about now?

Drab?

Same as above but with saturation turned up a bit.

Bloody!

Far out! (inverted)

My final desktop appearance today with the colors changed. I've got so many blue skins already that it's sometimes interesting to go with a skin that has more of an earth tone. But as you can see, with the hue/saturation/gamma features of WindowBlinds 4.5, you can get a lot of different looks with just a single skin...

WindowBlinds 4.5 Price: Free to try, $19.95 to register on its own or $49.95 if purchased as part of Object Desktop. Web: www.windowblinds.net Developer: Stardock (www.stardock.com)