Anyone who's looking to create their own maps and scenarios and such with Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Propecy, post here and we'll do our best to help you along and use those questions to build a tips and tricks document.
Learn more about Altarian Prophecy at the link below.
Many popular PC games are huge nowadays. I mean literally over a gigabyte. The million dollar question (literally) is how much is too big? What what point is the file size such a barrier to entry that it becomes economically unfeasible?
In the recent World of Warcraft beta, the download size was in excess of a gig and there are thousands and thousands of people happily participating in that. I am a big believer that people (like me) want the convenience of pressing a button and having the game. No CDs to mess with (or lose or damage), no wondering if it's out of stock. But there has to be a limit on how big a download can be before most people, even those with cable modems, won't be willing to do it.
I wonder what that size is.
Which WindowBlinds visual style do you think is tops? Which icon package do you think is better than all the rest? What about Winamp? Now WinCustomize subscribers can vote for their favorite entries!
If you're not a WinCustomize subscriber, you can go here to become one. WinCustomize subscriptions are what have paid for the IT work and bandwidth for this contest. It also helps us avoid "ballot stuffing" to get a more accurate idea of the user favorites.
| To subscribe to WinCustomize: WinCustomize Store
To Vote: User Choice Voting Booth |
We have two new sections on WinCustomize!
The first one is for toolbar icons. Those are icons that replace the icons on the Internet Explorer and Explorer toolbars. These require WindowBlinds (www.windowblinds.net) to apply.
The second one is for progress animations. Progress animations are those animations that show up in the various dialogs that come up when you copy, move, download, etc. Like the toolbar icons, they use WindowBlinds to apply.
You can create these easily in SkinStudio 4.3 (just released). If you already have skins that have progress animations or toolbar icons, please feel free to upload them (not the whole skin but the specific toolbar icons or prog anis) to the appropriate section. We will be highlighting heavily top toolbar icons and progress animations over the coming weeks.
That seems to be the hot topic right now. Who is John Kerry going to pick for his VP candidate. In our upcoming game, The Political Machine (www.politicalmachine.com), the AI controlled Kerry tends to pick someone from Missiouri or Iowa. So to be safe, we put in Richard Gephardt complete with artwork for him. That wasn't too tough. I mean, he's a likely choice. But who could Kerry pick from Iowa? The governor of Iowa is Tom Vilsack, a Democrat. He's a possibility. So just to be safe, we added him in there. So if he ends up the VP candidate (not likely but who knows) we'll be all set.
But who do YOU think will be the choice?
New screenshots and game information updates have been made to the Game page. Check them out!
https://www.politicalmachine.com/game.asp
So I didn't win Michigan's Entrepreneur of the Year award this year. I was a finalist and so I'm told everyone who makes it that far is a "Winner".
But the competition always brings into question, what exactly is an entrepreneur? How do you measure different levels of success?
For example, is someone who inherited their business an entrpreneur? If so, how do you measure their entrepreneurship?
And how do you measure entrpereneurship itself? Is it the number of jobs created? The revenued that is grossed? The influence it has on people's lives?
How do you define entrepreneurship?
SkinStudio is a program that allows you to create skins for Windows. It comes in basically two forms: A freeware version that creates GUI skins that can be applied to your entire Windows GUI via WindowBlinds and a Pro version which adds support for creating skins for Windows Media Player and lets serious skinners to able to create new skins by mixing and matching parts from skins they have on their computers.
When you load SkinStudio, this is what you are greeted with.
If you choose to create a new visual style, you start out with this mode. SkinStudio supports the new USF skinning format that can be exported to a variety of skin formats.
Once you are in SkinStudio, you start with the default Windows XP look (even if you're not running Windows XP). From there, you can modify the skin as you would like. For fun, let's take advantage of one of the power user features of SkinStudio: Template images.
Here's a screenshot of another operating system. eComstation, an OS/2 Warp 4 derivative. We'll use this as our template.
So I go to to the file menu and open this JPG I've saved.
From here, I can select the piece of my original Windows XP looking visual style and then replace pieces of it. SkinStudio will automatically take care of the other states for you.
So here is our half-breed skin. You would repeat this scenario on each part you want to change. On title bar buttons, you would need to delete the Glyph images (see on the right side there?) if you are not creating the little button glyphs independently.
New in SkinStudio 4.3 is the ability to create just toolbar icons and progress animations. WindowBlinds can use toolbar icons and progress animations independently of the skin. WindowBlinds can even colorize toolbar icons on the fly.
Here's a progress animation example.
To export you can do it from an existing skin or create a skin that is just a progress animation. Go to the file->export to do it.
And then just name it however you want.
In the past couple of years Microsoft's limited skinning format .msstyles has become popular. The main problem with MSStyles is that in order to use them, you have to patch your system DLL uxtheme.dll which can cause problems (particularly when dealing with XP service packs). Some programs mistakenly claim that they can use these files without using "any memory" or "system hooks" despite the fact that the file they patch in memory is what provides a system hook.
With SkinStudio 4.3, you can now import most MSStyles files into WindowBlinds skins and use them directly without having to patch any system DLLs. WindowBlinds is Microsoft certified for Windows XP, 2000, ME, and 98. Moreover, by default, SkinStudio will import MSStyles into WindowBlinds's accelerated UIS1 skin format which can improve their performance by up to 25%.
Here's an example - on deviantART.com, an MSStyle file is found and downloaded.
Here is the downloaded file.
Extracting the ZIP file I get these files.
When I double-click on it I get tihs dialog.
Once done it asks if I want to apply it.
End result
Since MSStyles don't support toolbar icons or progress animations as part of their format, WindowBlinds users can select toolbar icons and progress animations they've downloaded from WinCustomize.com and make use of them.
In this option, the skin will use its own if it exists but if it's missing, it'll use these.
Toolbar icons changed (in some circumstances one might need to restart Explorer).
SkinStudio is the ultimate skinning program. It lets you create your own skins in a variety of formats and allows you to seamlessly use/edit most WindowBlinds formatted and MSStyle formatted visual styles.
You can download the free version at: www.skinstudio.net. SkinStudio is part of of Stardock's Object Desktop suite of Windows enhancement utilities.
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Joel Spolsky, a very well known Windows blogger and developer of FogBugz (bug tracking software that Stardock uses) has written a very compelling article about how Microsoft is slowly destroying themselves by alienating software developers. The net result is that most developers are now writing web applications instead of local PC desktop applications.
As Paul Graham put it, "There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. if you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs, and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft."
I highly recommend reading this article. It's long but if you only read one article this month, this is the one you should read.
