There's so much going on that I have no life. Life at Stardock is changing so rapidly. It was just a couple years ago that Stardock was an $8M company. This fiscal year ends on June 30th and it's looking like Stardock is going to break the $20M mark. If all goes well, we'll double that again next year once certain big projects get launched this Summer. The skinning world I know and love continues to evolve. The "power user" market for skinning has pretty much peaked. Tha...
I have been pretty fortunate in my life when it comes to health. To put it in perspective, I never had to blow my nose until 3 years ago. I typically go years without getting so much as a cold let alone the flu. So I guess it was time to catch up on being sick because on this trip, it hit hard. I started coming down with it just before I left but by yesterday, I could barely move. I managed to drag myself in for the Games for Windows podcast where an equally ill Jeff Gre...
Here are some screen shots of our current internal build of The Political Machine...
Players can visually design every aspect of their candidate. The candidates in the game aren't "modeled". We just provide the pieces and the rest goes from there. All candidates are bobble-headed in order to make them more like real-life politicians.
This new machine is even faster than my monster machine at work which is saying a lot.
Anyone notice some of the subtle improvements to JU this week? More coming next week.
In terms of listing new articles and latest article comments, we need to make some distinctions: An article has a blog ID. A forum post does not. Therefore, newest articles and newest article comments should only be listing things that have a blog ID. We should use that as an opportunity to display both the latest articles, latest article comments, and latest forum activity. I think one of the frustrations (Certainly one of mine) with the new JU is being whisked away to...
We have some usability changes in the works for JoeUser 2. Here are a few highlights: 1) Ignore user. A given user's posts would simply no longer show up (though their comments probably would as there'd be a significant slow down there). 2) Filter category. Categories you're not interested could be turned off and the site would re-adjust based on that. 3) Blog Friends. You will be able to set given users as friends and be kept up to date on what they're doing on your own blog o...
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.