At long last the new car has arrived. A 2008 Porsche 911 Turbo. My daily car remains the Jaguar S-type R, but on these beautiful days, the Porsche is a fun ride. I'll write up a more thorough review when there's more time. My problem with most car reviews is that they're written by jaded, snotty sounding auto-reviewers who seem to be so out of touch with what normal people care about that their reviews are largely wasted. For example, many of the reviews I re...
Unlike many of our change logs, this one isn't as exhaustive in length but instead focuses on have fewer much more significant items in it. Here is what's new: + NEW: Lease and Maintenance tab on the Economy Screen to manage your finaces better + NEW: The CivManager now keeps a log of events that have happened during the game + NEW: Governor that changes the Ship a colony is building + NEW: Governor that sends all ships of a specified class, and the colonies building that ship class, ...
The expansion pack, GalCiv II: Twilight of the Arnor, will have unique technologies per civilization. This means full trees, not just a few special techs per civ. Below are the general concepts for each. Terran Alliance The Terran Alliance will have more propulsion technologies than the other civilizations. Its weapons will be the most like the default tech tree. It will have a series of technologies called Stellar Defense which will enable it to be more effective in fi...
As I get older (read more experienced socially) I have gotten a lot better in determining whether someone is a winner or a loser. Without knowing how much they make, how well they get along with their families, how in order they have their lives, I can usually tell in the course of a conversation whether the person is basically a winner or a loser. So how can you tell? Here's some things I look for: A Winner… Leaves a given situation better than they found it. If you loan them ...
Tomorrow we plan to put out the beta of GalCiv II v1.7. My work has mostly been on tweaking the AI and some of the values. I made morale buildings a bit better and made the spore stuff a bit more expensive. v1.7 should definitely have stability improvements for players. The new garbage collector code should reduce the memory foot print which will hopefully resolve the problem with out of memory errors that some players have run into. Another improvement is th...
At the airport today I was amazed at how many "Get rich!" books there are at the book stores. I don't happen to ascribe to the belief that everyone can get rich. I think there are a number of basic prerequisites that one has to have in order to become wealthy. In no particular order, here are characteristics that wealthy people seem to have in common: They don't just have ideas, they do something about them. This is a big deal. I always hear people coming up with interesting idea...
My first Summer as a bee keeper is starting to draw to a close. I've had decidedly mixed results. Of the 3 hives, one of them is thriving and the other two are failing. The bees in those two other hives just don't seem that interested in building comb (they have to build comb in order for the queen to lay eggs or store honey and pollen). When I get back from my latest trip (I'm currently on a plane on the way to San Fran) I am going to merge the two weak hives in the hopes that it will...
I just finished finalizing the story for Twilight of the Arnor. While Dread Lords and Dark Avatar were interesting in their own ways, I think that this campaign will be the most fun and interesting of them all. Players will really get to learn about the Precursors and there will be a LOT of Dread Lord action in this. There are entire missions where it's just you vs. Dread Lords. It's no holds barred. One interesting mechanic will be the addition of the new Immense sized galaxy which one...
I am in an airport right now communicating with my Verizon 5750 which is an awesome air card. I am also finishing my first business trip with the LG Env cell phone which just rocks. The cell phone part was very helpful (it has great speaker phone capability) but where it really came in handy was its built in GPS and local search features. Being in Manhattan, there's a lot of stuff everwhere but it's really nice to be able to look up the local Best Buy or a good Italian restraurant...
We have so many ideas that we've documented based on player feedback that we could keep doing expansion packs indefinitely. Some people might say, "Why not do a sequel?" but as a practical matter, whole new games are much more expensive to do than expansion packs are. In the case of Galactic Civilizations, the soonest a GalCiv III would come out would be like 2010 and that would be a best-case scenario. That's because the bulk of our development resources are working on the un...
This is a real tragedy but a woman in a mini van was racing through a parking lot to try to beat a train to the crossing. She lost. Inside her van were her 4 children. Two of them (her two daughters) were killed. Her two sons survived but were badly injured as well as the woman.
32-bit gaming is going to come to an end. Not today. Not tomorrow, but a lot sooner than most people think. That's because no matter how much memory your PC has, no matter how much virtual memory you have, a given process on a 32-bit Windows machine only gets 2 gigabytes of memory (if the OS had been better designed, it would have been 4 gigs but that's another story). Occasionally you run into people in the forums who say "I got an out of memory error". And for months we could...
You can now use Microsoft Word 2007 to post your blogs on JoeUser.com. To do it, do the following: Choose new blog from Word 2007. Then, for the API choose MetaWebBlog and for the Posting URL use this: https://www.joeuser.com/api/xmlrpc.aspx Then enter your UserID and PW from JoeUser.com and voila. And that's it!
The number of college students I meet these days whose life goals are purely to accumulate wealth is getting pretty distressing. They pick their career paths based on the path of least resistance to "getting rich". When they meet me and ask me questions, my answers tend not to be reassuring. What I tell them is this: Do something you love that happens to make money. Because if you love what you do, you'll tend to get very very good at it. And only through being the top of your ...
Summer is starting to wane. I have 3 honey bee hives this year. All 3 I started this year. One is doing great. It has 3 mediums full of bees. One is doing not so great with 2 mediums full of bees and starting on a third but with a pile of dead bees in front of the hive. And the last is doing terrible. 1 medium mostly full of bees with little progress being made. I'm not sure what the deal is with the last two hives here. I think one was exposed to some pesticides but I have no ...