1) If you are using Windows XP SP2's firewall or a third-party firewall on any supported platform, you must set it to allow PolMachine.exe to connect to the Internet and allow traffic on port 2509 (TCP). This also means ROUTERS.  That said, you should be able to connect to other people's games and play them even behind the firewall. But hosting requires the open ports.

2) If you are playing on dial-up, slow the speed down some. Don't play at "Rabbit" speed for instance. When you play single player, experts tend to whale on various buttons in a sort of speed-dial like way. Don't do this in multiplayer if you're not hosting as you may find that lag loses some of your commands. Play deliberately. It's not an arcade game.

3) In the lobby, use the refresh game option regularly to check for games.

4) From Stardock Central (www.sdcentral.net) go to the chat area and type /join #polmachine to talk to other people including the development team.

So we went up to Higgins Lake.  Had a good time there, particularly thanks to visiting with family there.  My family isn't very large, there's not many of us. Since college, I haven't been very good at staying in touch with my family. Which is pretty lame on my part because there aren't that many people to stay in touch with.

But when my sons came along and work started to be a little less crazy, I decided it was time to start trying to provide them the sort of rich experiences my mom and dad (independently) provided to me.

Hence this year we went to South Padre Island which is where my dad used to take me and Higgins Lake which is where my mom took me.

Unfortunately, the weather didn't cooperate very well. And the cabin we rented was only 400 square foot so it wasn't exactly a fun place to spend the indoors in.  We spent a lot of time hanging out with my cousins up there which saved the day for us.  I'd like us to look for a place up there. I also think it would be a great place for my mom to retire to since she would be able to be around her family and in a place where people would have even more reason to want to visit her which I know she'd enjoy.

So we came back early. And just in time too.  The Political Machine was announced while I was gone but there was confusion on the old "shipping" vs. "general availability". On August 10th the boxes started getting shipped out to stores and to us.  On the website, Stardock is able to sell the game directly but we have to purchase our units from our publisher, Ubi Soft per our agreement.  Users who have a subscription to TotalGaming.net were able to immediately download the game. But that left an interesting scenario -- what about the people who pre-ordered just the game? With me gone at Higgins Lake, things went on according to the original plan which was that we would wait for the boxes to come in and then ship them to people who pre-ordered the game.

However, that would mean that users who pre-ordered the game would end up getting the game after people who just went to the store and picked it up. Not exactly the way we wanted our customers to be treated. And certainly not a situation that us or Ubi Soft would want users to go through. After all, the people who pre-ordered the game are our "core" customers. Their loyalty must be returned.  But luckily, because of the terrible weather, we decided to come home and once I got a handle on what happened, I authorized those who had pre-ordered to be able to download the game via Stardock Central while they wait for their boxes to arrive.  Once we have the boxes, we'll discontinue that. But to make a long story short, there was some confusion on day 1 of release. 

But when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade and that extra day allowed us to finish up some of the changes in 1.01 which adds some new features. So those users will end up being able to get the updated version with the save game manager and multiplayer lobby. So everyone wins.  So people who buy the game from PoliticalMachine.com can get the game and download it while waiting for the box -- at least until the actual boxes come in which could be as soon as tomorrow hopefully.

Everyone is excited though about the game.  Our friends at Ubi Soft and us know the game is really good. Usually these "timely" games suck.  But all bias aside, The Political Machine is one of if not the best game I've ever worked on from raw game mechanics. And I say that as the designer of Galactic Civilizations. I just find TPM very addictive.  It'll be interesting to see how it holds up in multiplayer as there's really not another game quite like it and we're not sure what will end up happening. I think it'll be fun but  it'll be interesting to see what kinds of strategies come up.

Anyway, we have no idea how well it will sell.  We do know we've done everything we can. The game quality is where we wanted it to be. As early players are finding, it's very solid so we've been able to focus on features for the "bonus pak" aka 1.01 rather than fixing "bugs".  On Friday I'll head out to Best Buy to see if it's on the shelves.  Thanks to the power of Ubi Soft, the game should be all over the place.

So that's where things are.

On August 10 The Political Machine began shipping.  What this means is literally the manufactured retail units began shipping from the manufacturer to stores and other resellers.

If you pre-ordered just The Political Machine after June 1, we expect to receive our boxes imminently at which point your orders will get charged and units sent out to you.

If you pre-order just The Political Machine before June 1, we should have the gold version available via Stardock Central for you to download right now while we wait for the retail boxes to arrive from Ubi Soft to send to you.  If you've lost your serial #, visit https://www.stardock.com/support.asp and type in your email addresss and it'll send you your information.

If you purchased a TotalGaming.net subscription then it should be available right now for download.

If you have any questions, post here and we'll try to answer as soon as possible.

The Political Machine is scheduled to be shipping to retailers today.  Those users who pre-ordered the retail package should be getting theirs shipped out to them shortly.

Those of you with TotalGaming.net should have the 1.01 version of it available later today! Have fun!

Currently on vacation up north at the lake but it's raining and I have my laptop with me with my cell phone.

Was doing some searching on the web and came across this article (below) about the liberal media bias. It's quite an interesting read.

I'm going on vacation tomorrow for a week. Hopefully the site will still be here when I get back.   The irony is that next week The Political Machine will be released. It was on CNN Headline News yesterday. I'm working on a post mortem on the game for Game Developer.  One of the things we'll be talking about is the fact that we used DesktopX to develop the game screens and then created a DirectX backend to read in the DesktopX objects and blit them in a full screen game.  But like I said, I won't be around, going to Higgins Lake Michigan. Looking forward to getting away and relaxing. 

Talisman vs. Aston...

The other day I asked if anyone knew of a good Aston vs. Talisman competitive review.  Doesn't look like there are any. So yesterday I spent a few hours playing with them both. Me commenting on other desktop customization products, especially if there's negativity, is highly inappropriate btw since I work for Stardock.  But then again, I'm always inappropriate. So you can take my opinions for what they're worth.  I used them both and I did find Aston to be significantly "better" from an end user point of view when trying out the various themes.

For Talisman, my biggest problem was that it seemed overly concerned with looking pretty rather than being useful out of the box. The biggest problem that all of these shells and shell enhancers (including OUR stuff btw) is that they generally do a poor job of letting you share your desktop with others. They always seem very specific to the original author's machine. But some are less poor than others.  Talisman seemed to me to be something that is probably pretty decent if you're creating a shell environment for yourself. But when you go and create stuff for others, things don't go as well.  The default themes had some problems on my computer. I wouldn't give it a hard time on that except these are the default themes and it was pretty basic stuff like the taskbar goofing up because I have a lot of tasks running and the system try clock looking goofy. And none of them seem to have task grouping which, I suspect, kills these shells to begin with for most users.

I'm really surprised that something that's been developed this long would have such obvious problems.  Again, I want to stress that I am not claiming to be a Talisman expert. I am just talking about loading it up and running into glitches that would happen to anyone.  Taskbar overflowing, for instance, just seems to be unforgivable in a third generation product. I'll be writing a more thorough review when I get back.

My Aston experience was much smoother with themes but it isn't fooling around about wanting to be your shell. Its taskbar features are also pretty primitive but it felt a lot snappier and less flakey than Talisman.  The included themes worked the way you would expect them to.  The only gripe I have is that one of them is an Aqua theme complete with Apple's trademarked logo which I suspect they didn't acquire a license to use.  One can forgive freeware programs for playing fast and loose with intellectual property law but commercial software needs to be at a higher standard.  If you think YOUR stuff is worth charging for, then it's probably good not to bundle other people's stuff with it. A minor quibble since the difference between bundling stuff and having it available on your library may seem like splitting hairs but I think it matters. But I doubt most people care either way.

I think the biggest difference between Aston and Talisman is that Aston feels better put together.  Talisman strikes me as something that has too much legacy code in it and they keep taping more stuff on top of it.  By contrast, Aston feels like it had a specific vision and went for it. Its interface seems more logically put together. Its system tray support seemed more complete to me.  Not that it was a slam dunk either way.  For instance, I couldn't find a way to have my desktop icons show on the desktop. That's a big deal to me and I suspect others too. But overall I had a much more positive experience with Aston than Talisman. And btw, I have no relationship with either developer. I've never spoken to either one as far as I know.

Now, someone might be asking why we don't support these programs on WinCustomize. The biggest reason is simple: deep linking.  Both deep link to the skin libraries of other sites. They don't have their own libraries. Oh, they look like they do. But look closer. If you actually download a theme you'll discover that it's actually going to deviantART or Skinz.org or some other site that is paying the bandwidth bill without even so much as a button promoting the skin site whose bandwidth they're using. And again, one might cut some slack for a free program but these programs aren't free. Aston is $28 for instance. They should have banners or something for those sites. They don't have to deep link to the actual file, they could just link to the library entry. When Studio Twenty Eight links to files from its meta library, it does it right. Example of how to do it. He's not deep linking to the underlying .zip file. This way, the site can potentially get new visitors and get ad revenue and such.  Anyway, it's a pet peeve of mine that maybe you think I'm making a big deal of.  I just think that commercial software developers who rely on skin sites should be trying to support those skin sites, not just silently use their bandwidth without giving back.

But anyway, if you're looking to use themes created by others, I give the edge to Aston over Talisman. If you're looking to create your own desktop yourself, then someone else's view would be more appropriate as I have no experience in that.

Customize your Windows taskbar...

On a totally different topic, I got an interesting email today from a user who just wants to have a nicer Start bar (the taskbar typically at the bottom of your screen). But they don't want the rest of their computer to look all weird.  After some thought I answered: WindowBlinds.  In WindowBlinds you can have one visual style be your main GUI and another one just for the taskbar (Start bar and menu).  So you would just download the Luna WindowBlinds visual style. Use that as your main GUI (blue, silver, green) and then download the skin whose taskbar you like and then set your main skin to be Luna and the taskbar to be the one you like. Voila.

So that's all for now.  Hope you all have a great week! Some exciting things coming in the next few weeks.

I'm going on vacation tomorrow for a week. Hopefully the site will still be here when I get back.   The irony is that next week The Political Machine will be released. It was on CNN Headline News yesterday. I'm working on a post mortem on the game for Game Developer.  One of the things we'll be talking about is the fact that we used DesktopX to develop the game screens and then created a DirectX backend to read in the DesktopX objects and blit them in a full screen game.  But like I said, I won't be around, going to Higgins Lake Michigan. Looking forward to getting away and relaxing. 

Talisman vs. Aston...

The other day I asked if anyone knew of a good Aston vs. Talisman competitive review.  Doesn't look like there are any. So yesterday I spent a few hours playing with them both. Me commenting on other desktop customization products, especially if there's negativity, is highly inappropriate btw since I work for Stardock.  But then again, I'm always inappropriate. So you can take my opinions for what they're worth.  I used them both and I did find Aston to be significantly "better" from an end user point of view when trying out the various themes.

For Talisman, my biggest problem was that it seemed overly concerned with looking pretty rather than being useful out of the box. The biggest problem that all of these shells and shell enhancers (including OUR stuff btw) is that they generally do a poor job of letting you share your desktop with others. They always seem very specific to the original author's machine. But some are less poor than others.  Talisman seemed to me to be something that is probably pretty decent if you're creating a shell environment for yourself. But when you go and create stuff for others, things don't go as well.  The default themes had some problems on my computer. I wouldn't give it a hard time on that except these are the default themes and it was pretty basic stuff like the taskbar goofing up because I have a lot of tasks running and the system try clock looking goofy. And none of them seem to have task grouping which, I suspect, kills these shells to begin with for most users.

I'm really surprised that something that's been developed this long would have such obvious problems.  Again, I want to stress that I am not claiming to be a Talisman expert. I am just talking about loading it up and running into glitches that would happen to anyone.  Taskbar overflowing, for instance, just seems to be unforgivable in a third generation product. I'll be writing a more thorough review when I get back.

My Aston experience was much smoother with themes but it isn't fooling around about wanting to be your shell. Its taskbar features are also pretty primitive but it felt a lot snappier and less flakey than Talisman.  The included themes worked the way you would expect them to.  The only gripe I have is that one of them is an Aqua theme complete with Apple's trademarked logo which I suspect they didn't acquire a license to use.  One can forgive freeware programs for playing fast and loose with intellectual property law but commercial software needs to be at a higher standard.  If you think YOUR stuff is worth charging for, then it's probably good not to bundle other people's stuff with it. A minor quibble since the difference between bundling stuff and having it available on your library may seem like splitting hairs but I think it matters. But I doubt most people care either way.

I think the biggest difference between Aston and Talisman is that Aston feels better put together.  Talisman strikes me as something that has too much legacy code in it and they keep taping more stuff on top of it.  By contrast, Aston feels like it had a specific vision and went for it. Its interface seems more logically put together. Its system tray support seemed more complete to me.  Not that it was a slam dunk either way.  For instance, I couldn't find a way to have my desktop icons show on the desktop. That's a big deal to me and I suspect others too. But overall I had a much more positive experience with Aston than Talisman. And btw, I have no relationship with either developer. I've never spoken to either one as far as I know.

Now, someone might be asking why we don't support these programs on WinCustomize. The biggest reason is simple: deep linking.  Both deep link to the skin libraries of other sites. They don't have their own libraries. Oh, they look like they do. But look closer. If you actually download a theme you'll discover that it's actually going to deviantART or Skinz.org or some other site that is paying the bandwidth bill without even so much as a button promoting the skin site whose bandwidth they're using. And again, one might cut some slack for a free program but these programs aren't free. Aston is $28 for instance. They should have banners or something for those sites. They don't have to deep link to the actual file, they could just link to the library entry. When Studio Twenty Eight links to files from its meta library, it does it right. Example of how to do it. He's not deep linking to the underlying .zip file. This way, the site can potentially get new visitors and get ad revenue and such.  Anyway, it's a pet peeve of mine that maybe you think I'm making a big deal of.  I just think that commercial software developers who rely on skin sites should be trying to support those skin sites, not just silently use their bandwidth without giving back.

But anyway, if you're looking to use themes created by others, I give the edge to Aston over Talisman. If you're looking to create your own desktop yourself, then someone else's view would be more appropriate as I have no experience in that.

Customize your Windows taskbar...

On a totally different topic, I got an interesting email today from a user who just wants to have a nicer Start bar (the taskbar typically at the bottom of your screen). But they don't want the rest of their computer to look all weird.  After some thought I answered: WindowBlinds.  In WindowBlinds you can have one visual style be your main GUI and another one just for the taskbar (Start bar and menu).  So you would just download the Luna WindowBlinds visual style. Use that as your main GUI (blue, silver, green) and then download the skin whose taskbar you like and then set your main skin to be Luna and the taskbar to be the one you like. Voila.

So that's all for now.  Hope you all have a great week! Some exciting things coming in the next few weeks.

Frankly, I'm just astounded at some of the bickering and pettiness I see in the forums. There are hundreds of regulars but a few dozen have coalesqed into cliques.

I personally don't get into on-line cliques. But I don't think there's anything inherently bad about them. The Internet should be whatever you make of it. As long as you're not hurting anyone, knock yourself out. Meet friends, talk to them, etc.

I only worry about cliques when they start to resemble gangs. And I see a couple "rival" cliques that seem to be going after one another. I have no idea why and because clique politics holds no interest for me, I have not really paid that much attention. But it's starting to become a moderation issue. Ultimately, for any community to function, its most active participants have to set an example for others.  That's why we have the whole access hierarchy, to let people move up towards eventually being a moderator.

But even there, people who are (obviously) not familiar with how we run sites think we pick moderators based on some sort of partisan basis.  We don't.  We look for people who have all these qualifications: consistently mature, not easily rattled, not prone to trying to inciting angst in others.

It's been a tougher road than we thought because when you're getting into politics, you can get into heated exchanges.  I won't, for example, raise someone's access simply because I agree with many of their views.  There are very vocal conservatives here as well as very vocal liberals who are citizens and likely to remain that way.

So far, the list of people we've promoted has been pretty small.  I think right now there's Bakerstreet, DharmaGirl, Stevenadalous, JillUser, CS Guy, JeremyG, Greywar, Jamie Burnside and a couple others. People from across the political spectrum.  That doesn't mean that those who haven't been promoted aren't great guys. Our decisions are purely for selfish reasons - down the line, we want the community to regulate itself.  That will probably take a very long time though to happen.

I would agree with those who don't like the access group names. That's my fault for not being more involved with that.  We do need better names for them (feel free to suggest them)

I was thinking Citizen, Counselor, Advocate, Senator, Moderator or something like that. Better than words like "elite" (I REALLY hate elitism and the access title "elite" gives the wrong impression).

I think the whole point paranoia is due to the fact that many users think the system is easily manipulated. My other blog, Skinning the Frog, jumped all the way to #2 with ONE article.  THAT is how the point system works.  If you can get enough readers, and you get them the old fashioned way, earning them by writing good stuff people are interested in and hence link to them and tell others about, you'll get the real points.  The only reason comments and insightfuls by regulars make a difference is because right now most of the blogs are still so new that they don't have their own loyal band of readers.  It bears remembering that I've been blogging almost daily for 3 years, so what I write tends to get read because there are people who bookmark my page, pass it on to others, etc. 

My blog has 103,000 points, #2 has 18,000.  Users who keep at it with consistently high quality articles (or at least ones people are interested in reading about) over a period of time who also do some leg work to get others to link to them will be up there as well.  You get a couple points or something like that when someone comments on your article.  My article on PC gaming I wrote last month has 43,000 points all by itself and has 353 referrals.  It has 103 comments which isn't that significant. So of the 43,000 points it has, it has probably a couple hundred points from the comments.  So anyone complaining that the point system is subject to manipulation either doesn't understand how it works or is just crying sour grapes. 

Complaining about the point system is like a guy in Arizona who's sitting on his butt complaining about a guy in California is "Cheating" at a race in which he too is sitting but slowly inching northward due to plate tektonics.

So guys, the site is what you make of it. Worrying about how OTHERS make use of it is a waste of energy.  It's a blog site. Blog about what you're interested in and stop worrying whether User X is doing somethign that annoys you. It's supposed to be FUN. F U N...

I find it amazing that the group of people most identified with worshipping the first amendment seem to be the ones most intolerant of opinions other than their own. For months we've seen left wing groups like MoveOn.org creating anti-Bush commercials that are only vaguely factual.  Celebrities have lent their voices to unseating George W. Bush.  Bruce Springsteen, for example, is currently doing a "Get Bush Out" concert tour (John Mellencamp wrote a song called "Bush is just another thug"). Heck, I can barely watch TV without some half-witted celebrity telling me that Bush needs to go.  This summer, we've had Fahrenheit 9/11 making over a hundred millions dollars and seen Michael Moore's mug on almost every magazine cover at one point or other.  In short, the left has certainly had its opportunity to get its views out.

But when conservatives try to get their message out, the left cries foul. Listening to the left, you'd think that Fox News was GOP TV.  In left-wing land, apparently, if the coverage isn't overtly left-wing it's GOP TV.  Sure, The Daily Show with John Stewart tends to be less sympathetic to conservatives than liberals.  And CNN, ABC, and NBC tend to prefer to cover social issues that are the strong points of the left.  And let's not forget the ridiculous media coverage of the Iraq war that's come from the New York Times and other "mainstream" media outlets.  But oh no! Bill O'Reilly at 8pm hates high taxes and is (gasp) a Catholic. It must be GOP TV! Those damn conservatives are able to get their message out on a cable news channel on top of AM radio! The sky is falling!

Meanwhile, conservatives have, for years, had to deal with the reality that most of the people who cover the news have political philosophies that are much different than their own. And while most of those who cover the news try to be fair, their own viewpoints inevitably creep into the news and especially in editorials. Conservatives have had to develop a sort of "Reality check" sense when listening to the news.  Liberals, by contrast, apparently are so thin skinned that people like Bill O'Reilly send them into fits of insanity. And don't get them started on Sean Hannity who CO-hosts a show with liberal Alan Colmes. Since when are conservatives allowed to speak at all? Isn't George Will's token appearance on "This Week" enough for those right wing nuts? Sure, "This Week" is hosted by Bill Clinton's former press secretary, but that's fine.

And now this week, the left is going berzerk over the Swift Boat veterans. Cries of unfairness ring loud and clear from the left. Well, as someone who's had to listen to Moore-ons all summer ranting their erroneous "facts" across the net and TV all summer. And had to see snippets of MoveOn.org's venom on TV I say, deal with it.  If Kerry hadn't made the cornerstone of his campaign about the 4 months he served in Vietname he wouldn't be vulnerable to the fact that most of the people who served with him don't support him.  Are the charges of the Swift Boat veterans unfair? Possibly. But compare that to the whole Bush went AWOL nonsense. Was that fair? At least this is based on some semblance of reality.

The first amendment means that all sides get to speak out.  Not just those who hold "correct" opinions.  Those people demanding that Bush or conservatives condemn the Swift Boat veterans and what not should be also demanding that Kerry and his supporters condemn Michael Moore and his ilk along with MoveOn.org.  But don't expect that to happen. Kerry, after, all, complemented hollywood stars such as Whoopi Goldberg, who, in his presence, made vulgar sexual references to Bush. 

So if the left things they're getting treated rough now, then they have no idea what rough behavior is. Perhaps they should start looking at the sewage their supporters have been heaping on the American public for the past half year.