Well this weekend we've been taking a beating on the net over Stardock Central. And by we, I mean me as I'm the one who hangs out on the gaming forums.

Stardock Central is awesome technology but has the same kind of issues that the early "multi-mission" military aircraft had. 

Back in the late 60s, the Air force fell in love with the idea of jet aircraft that could perform multiple roles.  Interceptor, air superiority, tactical bombing, strategy bombing, etc.

And for 2 decades, the Air force took a beating from this decision. Even today they still do.  Stardock Central, because of the immense cost to develop it, has to be a multi-role technology. And what might that technology be? What is the actual purpose of Stardock Central?

Stardock Central accomplishes the following goals:

1) It makes it much easier for users to obtain updates to our software.

2) It decreases the size of downloads by only sending exactly what the user needs (no one size fits all "patches"). This helps customers and lowers our bandwidth bill significantly (Stardock spent nearly $150,000 last year on bandwidth).

3) It makes it easier for us to carry out our RD&D software philosophy (rapid development & deployment). When a development team finishes an update, they copy their finished files to a network drive. This network drive is the mirror for Stardock Central. Those files go right to customers.  For those who don't like Stardock Central, we still allow users to download the traditional "patch". But that patch has to go through the installer team. The installer team pulls from the same network drive Stardock Central does it. Except that where Stardock Central is a software program, the installer team are people who take the files and then create an installer script using WISE and put it together for a download. Which means that it takes longer.

The beauty of RD&D is that the moment it's done with QA, it just gets copied onto a network drive and our users automatically get it.

4) It makes it easier for users to get technical support and for us to provide it. SDC has the support forums, documentation, news, etc. all built in. And the interface to the forums isn't some crummy web interface, it actually works like a news reader directly to the database so it's very fast.

5) Cross promotion. We can let our customers know about other programs we make.

But as you can imagine, creating the backend for this kind of thing was an immense 2 year task. Under the covers it has to handle over 600,000 Stardock.net accounts which have varying numbers of products. It has to handle customers who might have purchased directly from us or from a retailer in Finland and treat them equally internally and UI-wise.

So because of the cost, it has to be used on all our products. Which has been a real problem UI-wise.

A person who bought Galactic Civilizations at the store just wants to get an update to the game. Creating an account is not a big deal these days. But then they get into Stardock Central and the sheer myriad of features can be overwhelming. What's Object Desktop? Where's the update to GalCiv?

A lot of suggestions were posted on-line and we've adopted some of them.  We changed the Drengin.net tab to say "Games".  We changed "support" to "Documentation" (so that users know they need to click on software and not "support" to get updates).  We changed the "Stardock software tab" to "Misc" (since it's all Stardock software).

In the coming weeks we're hoping to find a way for it to just scan what you have and let you know which programs you have installed that need updating so that users don't have to hunt Stardock Central for updates.

 

Why use a 3D engine for a strategy game? Especially ones that take place on a 2D plane (like land or a space board game style?)

A big thing that isn't discussed much is that 3D is much more hardware accelerated than anything done in 2D.  What that means is that at some point, when the lowest common denominator machines start to have Geforce 2 level cards (with T&L) then you will see more games go to 3D.
 
For instance, our next generation strategy game engine is going to be done as a 3D engine.  The game map will still be 2D (i.e. on a plane), but it won't be sprite based.
 
Here are some things that buys you:
 
1) Hardware acceleration.  This is a big deal. In GalCiv, we have limits on how much stuff we can put on the screen because the CPU is doing all the work in animating those sprites and such.  But with a 3D engine, the same scene could be much more complex and still be faster. All eye candy aside, hardware acceleration would mean that the strategy game would be faster and more responsive which is the type of thing strategy gamers really care about.
 
2) Multiple resolutions. It's easier to make use of different resolutions with 3D.  With sprites, you're either stuck keeping them the same size or creating different sprites for different resolutions.  With 3D, things are treated almost like a vector -- they're rendered on the fly. Warcraft III made some use of this by having the units be more detailed and nicer at higher resolutions (though I would personally prefer a compromise -- slightly more detailed scenery but be able to see more too).
 
3) Much more seamless effects. With 2D sprite based engines, you have to pre-render your explosions, weapons, etc.  With 3D you have a lot more effects at your disposal more easily. Lights. Shadows. Tintings.  Sure, it's eye candy but if I'm playing a World War II strategy game it would be nice to see the terrain taking damage. Imaging Heroes of Might and Magic if the spells have a lot more visual punch, damage and morph terrain. Think of the additional game mechanics you could have in HOMM if spells could morph terrain on the fly in visually exciting ways?
 
4) More fluid animation.  In sprites, you're very limited to how many frames of animations you have since each frame has to be kept in memory to have adequate performance.  So units tend to move a bit jumpier.  How many different positions can a unit take when moving around? 7? (n, ne, e, se, s, sw, w, nw?).   Maybe double that? With 3D you can have it totally smooth.
 
5) Less disk space.  Sprites take disk space.  They're pre-rendered.  In GalCiv, the WEAPONS animations use up 30 megabytes of disk space.  Models use only a few K in space.  So that starship that might use 6 megs prerendered and only have 32 different direction movements could now be 600K, have perfectly smooth rotations and even bank when turning,  have light effects as it nears a star or change hue as it travels through a nebula.
 
But there's been a huge gotcha against using 3D in strategy games -- strategy games need a lot of polygons.  We used sprites in GalCiv because we wanted our ships to be distinct and have good performance on low end hardware.  I don't like muddy, polygony ships.  But pretty soon, the Geforce 2 level cards will be that low end and when that happens, you'll be able to have games that have all the advantages of 2D (sharp looking units and graphics) with the advantages of 3D and they'll actually be more responsive, use less disk space, and look nicer.
 
But that doesn't make 2D dead. It depends on the use.  Sprites make a lot of sense still in lots of cases.  But 3D engines are very close to reaching the point that they make sense to be used in creating strategy games. Even strategy games that are on a 2D plane.
 
Here are some screenshots from stuff we have in the lab that runs at very high frame rates on a Pentium 1Ghz with a Geforce 2MX card which by 2005 will be a very low end machine.
 
(rough but you get the idea, click to zoom)

Normal view
 

Zoomed out.

I'm going on a trip tomorrow and where I go, so goes my laptop. The laptop is a pretty good game machine. Unfortunately, I can't play very many games on it when I travel. That's because most games now use rather obnoxious CD-ROM copy protection.

Copy protection on PC games is, in my opinion, not just ineffective, but stupid. I say that as a software developer and publisher of 10 years. And as time has gone one, I've become increasingly convinced that any copy protection that inconveniences customers does more harm than good.

Programs like Object Desktop have sold millions of dollars in unit sales directly over the Internet to end users. No CD. No hassles.  And on Galactic Civilizations, we insisted that our publisher, Strategy First, not put any CD copy protection on it.  When you purchase the game at the store you can literally install onto your machine and throw out the CD. Heck, you don't even need the CD in the box, you could just toss that out and keep the serial # and use Stardock Central to download the latest/greatest version of the game. Then you can put it on your main machine, put it on your laptop, whatever.

Who are the pirates?

But what about piracy?  Well, the first problem with piracy is that most people who worry about this kind of thing really don't have much experience in actually dealing with it in terms of what real world impact it has on sales.  We've been selling our stuff via the net for years and piracy, as an actual cost to business, is vastly overrated.

That's because there are really two groups of software pirates that one has to deal with:

1) "The kids". These are the guys who wouldn't buy the product anyway. The "scary" piracy stats thrown around always counts these guys as if they would have been buyers.  Many developers and publishers get really ticked off about this group. I know we did back when we got started. "These guys are stealing from us" and so all kinds of copy protections spring to the imagination to stop this group. "But what's the business objective here? These guys aren't going to buy the product anyway. If they can't crack it, they'll just not use it. And you punish legitimate customers.

2) "The casual pirate". This is where the biggest chunk of lost sales come from. For them, it's about convenience. These guys pirate not because they're cheap but because it's convenient.

To them, they'd love it if they could be reading a review at Gamespot and press a "one click buy" button and a link to an ISO CD image comes up for download.

Effectively Reducing Piracy

What we did with GalCiv was make Stardock Central in such a way so that you could play GalCiv with only a tiny percent of the game downloaded (i.e. figured out the meat vs. eye candy) so that a dial up user could just press a button and be playing the game in 30 minutes or so and get the rest electronically when they had time or wait for the CD to come in.

Our "copy protection" is three parts:

a) The serial #. Unique and virtually unbreakable since it's server generated (i.e. there's no "code" to crack).

Frequent updates.  The frequent updates are the key. Remember, because it's all about convenience for group 2, then it becomes increasingly more convenient to own the game than to pirate it if one has to hunt around warez sites for each update rather than just press a button and have the update in a minute or two.

c) Full download ability. This means that 3 years from now, when they've lost their serial #, lost their CD from moving or whatever that they can go to the site, put in their email address or some other piece of info that may not have changed and it will automatically email you all the info you need. (and if you've lost everything have a phone # that they can call so that they can find you in the database and update your info).  In Stardock's case, a user just goes to the support page, types in the email address that they registered with and they get everything (links to the full download of whatever they've purchased with serial #s). 

This is what we've done on Object Desktop and its yearly revenue direct from the Internet (right form Stardock.com) is in the millions of dollars annually. And it's what we've done with GalCiv and retail sales of GalCiv are looking to be about 3 and a half times what our publisher had estimated prior to release. Sure, there are lots of other factors involved but certainly having users see the value of being a customer has to be part of it. And we're tiny fish really. So if little guys like Stardock can do well with this kind of system, imagine how well it could work on a larger scale?

It's also relatively inexpensive to implement. It does, however, require sucking it in and making it easy for group 1 (the warez kiddies who wouldn't buy it anyway) to pirate it. But even then, some percent of group 1 is going to still buy it for various reasons (group 1 isn't a bunch of amoral robots, it gets increasingly difficult to pirate from people who are providing frequent and free updates).

This doesn't eliminate piracy. But over time, it does reduce is considerably while at the same time not unduly inconveniencing customers.  The easier you make it for someone to be your customer, the more customers you'll have.

The "Stupidity" of Copy Protection

There are no good statistics yet on what percentage of people are significantly affected by CD copy protection. But the anecdotal evidence is very disturbing.

I suspect that many reading this have either personally experienced what I'm about to describe or know someone who has gone through this:

Joe Gamer goes out and buys a game from the store. They get it home and play it and enjoy it. But one day, a few months later, they go to play it and can't find the CD. Where is the CD? There are piles of CDs everywhere. Maybe the kids took it. Maybe it fell into the trash.

Frustrated, Joe Gamer goes onto the net to look for a way to play the game without a CD. They go onto Google or Yahoo or whatever search engine they use and over the course of an hour or two they finally make their way to the "warez" world where cracks, file downloads, etc. are all easily available. More than that, warez has gotten frighteningly sophisticated with seamless distribution file systems and more.  They find not just the CD crack but links to all the latest titles.

So then Joe Gamer, who normally buys games, now has to look at his options:

a) He can do "the right thing" and drive out to the store. Spend $50 on the game, bring it home and deal with the CD copy protection.

or

He can click on a link and have the game in a few hours. No CDs to mess with and no cost.

What do you think many Joe Gamers of the world are going to do? And what about the Joe Gamer whose game won't work because the CD protection doesn't work on their model of CD-ROM drive or DVD drive? Talk about motivating people to learn about warez.

In short: CD Copy Protection Creates Pirates.

Joe Gamer previously knew nothing about this stuff. The demographic info on Joe Gamer (which we at Stardock over 10 years have a pretty good idea of) is that money isn't the issue, it's convenience.  And once he's invested the time to solve his lost CD problem, he then has a harder time justifying the hassle of buying future titles. And many people find it very easy to rationalize their piracy. Joe Gamer included.

So the game publishers, in their attempt to stop the 16 year old pirate (and failing) has instead turned the 25 year old casual PC gamer into a pirate. 

The Future of copy protection

So what should we do? Implement some sort of Microsoft-like product activation system? No. I don't think that is the solution. That doesn't solve the problem of people being able to install their game on their "main PC" as well as their laptop. 

My suggestion would be to recognize the people who buy games for what they are: CUSTOMERS. Treat them as CUSTOMERS. A scary suggestion I realize but it's worked pretty well for us over the years.  Make it easier to be a customer than a pirate. That can't be repeated enough.

So what does that mean? Specifically:

a) Have each game still have a serial # to it.

Give your users a personalized account. You can then tie those serial numbers to the account. You don't require it to play the game, only when they want to utilize some of the added benefits you create for being a customer. As I type this, there are approximately 654,000 Stardock.net "accounts".

c) Provide frequent and meaningful updates after release over the product's active lifespan. Like I said, you don't want to require people to have a net connection just to play your game. But if they're on the net anyway, you can then give them accounts tied to those serial #s. Since each serial # is unique, you can reduce piracy by keeping an eye out for duplicate serial #s floating around in accounts.  Through these personalized accounts users can then get convenient access to frequent updates. These updates should address suggestions and ideas presented by users. Just assign a developer or two to keep track of the good ideas that aren't too expensive to implement and put out an update. We've found that users like to see updates every 45 days or so for a period of at least 9 months after release.  The more updates you do, the more inconvenient you make it for people who are pirating your game to "keep up to date". Each update peels some pirates off and turns them into customers. And existing customers see the support they are getting and are more likely to purchase future products.

d) Provide added benefits to customers.  Don't stop at software updates. The Internet is the key to this strategy. You want people to be your customer. So make it worthwhile to them to be your customer in every way you can. For us, we have focused on creating on-line communities where customers gain added benefits. In Galactic Civilizations' case, that mean mod libraries, medals, ranks, fan fiction, blogs, etc.  Things that add to the benefit of being a customer. Check out this thread on the GalCiv.com forum. There are all kinds of rankings, users accesses, medals, etc.  that can enhance the post-purchase experience.

Now someone may point out that these suggestions only work for those with an Internet connection. True. But people without a net connection are also not likely to be hanging out on warez sites either. And for those people, being hassled by CD protection is still a big deal. In addition, people without a net connection are probably more likely to remember which companies inconvenienced them with CD-ROM protection and which ones did not which can affect future sales.

The Big Picture

Game companies just need to realize that software piracy is vastly overstated in terms of how much it affects real sales. And there are ways of reducing software piracy considerably by recognizing who their target audience is -- customers and potential customers.  Make the incentive for being a customer be greater than the incentive to pirate it and you'll see what we've seen -- piracy not having a significant affect on revenue and a lot of happy customers.

"

So tomorrow I'm heading out on a 2 day trip. Blech. I don't know why but I just hate to travel. Well actually, I do know why. I don't like the actual "Travel" portion.

If I could just beam to wherever I was going that would be great. Gotta pack up and get ready to go.

Over the past several years I've gotten packing down to a science:

2 days: light clothes. No suits. I won't wear a suit when I travel. If a suit is going to make or break a deal, then I don't want to do business with a company that concerned about dress atire. Stardock polo shirts and such work just fine.

Laptop bag with ThinkPad T40, USB cable for my SprintPCS phone so that I can be on the net with my laptop anywhere via the cell phone's 3G network. Plug and Svideo cable and 1 DVD just in case I get stuck in an airport.

1 tube of Sudefed in case I'm stuffed up (traveling when congested is not a good thing). 1 tube of Tylonal. 1 tube of Dramamine. (you can tell I'm not typing this blog from front page, all the typos!). 1 pack of Orbit gum.

I'm almost out of business cards but I have enough in my wallet for now.

What I don't have: I have no PDA. I gave up on Palm, too primitive for what I would want in a device. Haven't decided on the PocketPC yet.

On longer flights I bring noise canceling headphones so I can listen to a DVD on the plane. Highly recommend getting these to anyone who travels long distances.

On short flights I go coach. On longer flights (>3 hours consecutive flying time) I will go first class. Makes a big difference in terms of how much energy I have when I get there. It's not about the food or anything, you can't justify the cost that way. If I got on a trip to say California from Michigan via coach I'm basically out of energy when I get there. But if I go first class, I can make appointments that day when I get there. I can also get real work done when I'm in first class which is hard to do in coach (I always sit behind the person who leans back as far as possible it seems).

Tomorrow's a relatively short flight to the east cost so I'll be going coach. I'll be bringing a book ("A short history on nearly everything").

If I write on Monday or Tuesday, I'll be posting via my cell phone!

The current internal version of SkinStudio Pro not only will let you create Windows Media Player Skins, WindowBlinds skins, Universal Skin Formatted skins but now can create icons of every known Windows icon format.

It can handle both individual and batch processing of images created in .PNG, .TGA, .BMP and other formats and automatically transform them into icons of various sizes.

I tried this out last night on a .PNG file I downloaded from the ObjectDock library last night and it worked great.

http://draginol.stardock.com/writings/skinni8.jpg (screenshot of final icon in various sizes).

SkinStudio comes in 3 forms: The free version which just creates WindowBlinds visual styles.  The enhanced version which is $19.95 that adds widget, colorizing, and skin importing into skin creation.  And the pro version which will have an introductory price of $29.95 and has Media Player skin support and icon creation.  SkinStudio (all forms) is part of Object Desktop: http://www.objectdesktop.com

This new version should be up on ODNT next week.

CHIP INFO.......... Chipinfo displays comprehensive information from the mainboard chipset, as well as the corresponding devices and the PCI bus. The DOS version, which was integrated into PC Analyser originally, was optimized and developed further to a Windows version. During the development of the program special attention was paid to keep the original descriptions as well as the completeness of the data. The supported operating systems are Windows 9xFrogboy as well as Windows NT/2000/XP/2003. Learn exactly which chipsets work in your system and which options the chipsets have.....(free).....

Source: http://www.shellcity.net (Shellcity.net)

QuickTime Alternative will allow you to play QuickTime (.mov .qt) files. This way there is no need to install the offical QuickTime Player. As a bonus, Internet Explorer will play all QuickTime movies that are embedded in a webpage. You do need a player that is capable of handling QuickTime movies. The included Media Player Classic works very well with QuickTime.

Source: http://www.betanews.com (Betanews)

Lot of cool stuff going on with SkinStudio. The newest internal builds allow you to create your own icons.  Now, I haven't created a serious icon since the OS/2 days. Awhile back I started looking into icon editors and it turns out these icon editors are incredibly expensive. Why? Well because they include a whole load of image editing features.

But why? Why try to compete with Photoshop and Corel Draw? If I'm going to create a modern icon, I'm not going to use some icon editor's graphics tools. I'm going to use a real image editor.

So I asked our SkinStudio team to look into adding the ability to take say a .PNG file and create an icon out of it. I know how to make PNG files with Corel Draw and Photoshop. What I want to do is be able to take that PNG file and turn it into an icon.

For my first try at this internal preview, I downloaded a neat PNG file uploaded today in the ObjectDock section at Wincustomize created by "DockZone".

So I Opened that file and here I am. So now what? Well only 4 options so I clicked on "Cut Image".

Oh sweet. It automatically took care of the various icon formats.

Even has a ton of options for trying to find the one that does the downsizing the best.

So here I am with my various icons set up in all the various formats I could possibly ever want.

And here is the finished .ico.  So cool. Now even I can create icons.  Paul Boyer, Ed Deans, look out, here I come!

Welcome to the skinning blog group! If you already have a blog on JoeUser and are interested in sharing your thoughts and ideas on the world of skinning, click here to join this blog group. If you don't already have a blog, get one, it's free and fun! Just create an account if you haven't already done so and then in the account tab at the top you can do it there.

So today I decided to try out two new DesktopX "ability extensions" (plugins). The first one makes it a snap to get some basic info on your computer and display it as text. In my build, I have to manually make the DX object a text object but I'm told tomorrow's beta will automatically set the object as text which is nice.

I can easily find out things like system up time, what kind of CPU I have, my IP address and all that good stuff.  Very handy.

The next one I tried out was the new Performance Meter 2 plugin. Furan made this and it's quite incredible. Basically any performance related thing on your system you ever wanted can be done with this.  In addition, you can create skinnable bars and such.

Here I'm choosing between various types of visual displays for my data. This could be a CPU meter, disk space meter, memory monitor, network performance, or a ton of other things.  In fact, it hooks into MS's performance monitoring API so you can graph things that are well...incredibly unimportant for most people too.  

So here's my first quickie graph.  Of course, it's afar cry from having something fancy.  I'll need to put together some .PNG backgrounds and such.  I'll try to do that soon.

Unfortunately I can't find my Corel Draw CD here to start making the graphics so I'm a bit bummed. I'll mess with this more soon.  For other DesktopX users, these goodies should be available by the week of 9/22/2003.

 

http://skinning.joeuser.com

I have a blog at JoeUser.com now at draginol.joeuser.com. I created a blog group called Skinning.

A blog group is where multiple people can write articles and put them together onto a single page. It's still a work in progress.

But if anyone here is interested in a) Getting their own blog going and Joining the skinning blog group please visit the link at the top of this post and we'll get things going.

I'm not aware of any skinning blogs on the net so this could be highly cool.