I've been trying to talk my wife out of living in Michigan for something like a gagillion years. Not that Michigan is awful. It's not. It has beautiful Spring and Falls and summers are quite pleasant. And our part of Michigan (south eastern), is no more north than Northern California. On the other hand, Michigan has terrible roads. Sure, there's no traffic compared to say New York or California but they're full of pot-holes. The excuse is that trucks in Mi...
Here's some interesting links I came across while surfing tonight: Military use of nanotech: http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/03/military_uses_o.html Slashdot review of a game design book: http://books.slashdot.org/books/05/03/29/1926206.shtml?tid=206&tid=6&tid=10 Return of the Mac: http://paulgraham.com/mac.html Revenge of the Sith Comic book covers: http://www.theforce.net/episode3/story/Revenge_of_the_Sith_Comic_Book_Covers_90657.asp Today's Best of the W...
The new JoeUser.com system is still very new. There are still zillions of little buglets we're working through. Just today we fixed a problem with printing of articles as well as enhancing and then fixing the email article feature. There's still a lot of work to be done so please bear with us. But coming in a few weeks, people who create accounts (or already have accounts) will have the option of having their own blog. It'll be free to have your own blog here. And your blog won't be some wac...
It's a whole new JoeUser. The site has been completely rewritten from scratch. Some features haven't been completely re-implemented and there are bound to be some glitches. But we now have the kind of backend and application support to do all kinds of cool stuff. In the coming days, various usability tweaks will be made as we discover what key little features we've overlooked. Then, in the next few weeks, we'll start to add in new abilities and such. We hope you like the new setup. I...
Windows Vista has gotten a lot of bad press. A lot of it is unfair but as any Vista user can tell you, a lot of the bad press was avoidable. Even the finest product can be marred by a handful of minor decisions that affect the overall experience. In the case of Windows Vista, Stardock has identified these problem areas that Vista needs to resolve (either in a future SP or in Windows 7): We need an OS, not a nanny. Vista has too many nags, confirmations, and reminders. Vista is t...
What I like about the Vasari in Sins of a Solar Empire is that they are ridiculously powerful. What you're actually dealing with in the game is the remnant of their exodus fleet. The entire TEC is fighting against what is effectively like their equivalent of Battlestar Galactic, a ragtag, fugitive fleet fleeing something horrific.
One nice thing about Vista is that it requires 256x256 icons which ups the visual quality of things. This is a 128x128 thumbnail of the Sins icon.
Shipping weight is 1.5 pounds. So we can reduce the shipping costs! yay!
Plymouth MI - Stardock announced today that it will be developing The Political Machine 2008, a PC strategy game that lets gamers take a shot at running for President. The game allows players to design a candidate or choose a pre-existing one and campaign across the country against either a human opponent or a computer controlled opponent. Candidates have many resources available at their disposal to both build themselves up and tear their opponent down including speeches, advertisi...
Elegance selecting files in explorer. Subtle and clean. Visual Studio (you can see where VS hard codes its own scrollbars. Tsk tsk).
Yikes! http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2008/01/worlds-smallest.html
This week I traveled to LA to appear on TV (you can see my demo here ). Naturally, it rained on us the whole time. But we had a good time visiting gaming websites. It's a bit of a bummer that I can't hang out more with other gamers my age. Getting together with the gaming press is often the closest I get to "being with my own kind" (i.e. into PC games, and 35+ years old). Here's some pictures I took: The pigeons are really tame in LA. The writer's strik...
Sins of a Solar Empire lets you set your game speed in detail.