Far be it for me to invite scorn and ridicule on our hard work in the form of Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor but let's face it, GalCiv has long since stopped being any sort of traditional "product".  We love working on it. If I didn't work at Stardock, I'd be modding it in my spare time.  But I do work at Stardock so that means I still get to mod it in my spare time but I have the source code.

That said, in this post can you list the 5 things you would ...

Tonight (4:28am so technically this morning) I'm hanging out on the GalCiv II forums between compiles.



The above is the issue editor for The Political Machine 2008.  In it, I must go through every conceivable issue, write a description and then put in the values.

The values on position are between -10 (strongly against) and positive 10 (strongly in favor). The other variable (new in this version) is how important the issue is which is on a scale from 1 to 10.

I also ha...

   We're in crunch mode and yet I have a lot of free time too. That's the nature of development in crunch mode - hurry up and wait. Right now, I'm waiting for some changes to the issues editor so that I can begin putting in new political issues for The Political Machine 2008.

Hard to believe that this UI was done with DesktopX 3.5. The game is going gold in about a month and there's a lot to do to get it ready.  We've got pre-orders from most of the major retailers so ...

Well today I've got a lot of coding and forum work to do.  We released Twilight of the Arnor and people seem happy. But I'm not convinced that all the final strings got in (i.e. tech descriptions).  And while we did release the info guide and a twilight manual, I want to keep updating them as well as hang out on the forums answering questions and helping.

Unfortunately, my middle right finger is swollen up.  As some of you know, I keep bees. I've got 6 honey bee hives this ye...

Stardock is pleased to announce that Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor has gone into final gamma testing. The expansion pack to the critically acclaimed space strategy game, Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords, completes the Dread Lord saga with the return of the powerful Precursor civilization, the Arnor. 

Arguably the most comprehensive expansion pack in strategy game history, Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor has more new features and content than Galactic Civilizations II had over the original.

A labor of love, Twilight of the Arnor is nearly complete.  This week, we are putting it through final gamma testing as lots of content and goodies that were held back during the public beta are integrated in, tested, polished, etc. 

So last year I started beekeeping. I got 3 bee hives. 1 died off and the other two survived the Winter. One of the two has egg laying workers which means the hive is probably doomed.

Yesterday we got 4 boxes of bees to install into new hives. Now, we're talking 2 to 3 pounds of bees per box (mostly 3 pounds each).

So how do you get the bees out of the box? You shake them out. Which, of course, means there are bees all over the place.

Here are some pictures.



Alex helpin...

what a mess.

Next week the Impulse Preview will be officially released.

May 5, 2008 will be the "official" launch of Impulse.

Object Desktop 2008 is here! The world's best, most powerful, easiest way to transform your Windows experience! [Read More]

NPD has released the top 10 best selling PC games for February. Here are the results:
February 2008

Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Activision) Sins Of A Solar Empire (Stardock) World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest (Blizzard) The Sims 2 Free Time Expansion Pack (EA) World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack (Blizzard) World Of Warcraft (Blizzard) The Orange Box (EA) The Sims 2 Deluxe (EA) The Sims: Castaway Stories (EA) Crysis (EA)Stardock's Sins of a Solar Empire was #2 overall for the ...

Version 6   I have to admit, I'm pretty excited about SkinStudio 6. Which is surprising in some respects because I was deeply involved in the design of SkinStudio 1 through 5.  With SkinStudio 6, the WindowBlinds team wrote it with my part being mostly that of providing input rather than design direction.  SkinStudio 1 through 5 was designed to provide a quasi-Corel Draw style user interface.  The design worked out well in the early days when WindowBlinds wasn't tha...

After a year of rewriting SkinStudio from scratch, Stardock has released SkinStudio 6.

SkinStudio is a free program designed to make it easy for people to create WindowBlinds skins.  Version 6 has been completely rewritten to provide a much simpler user experience for creating skins.

Making your own skinsSkinStudio makes it a snap to design your own skins for WindowBlinds.  When a user desires to create a new skin, they start out with either Luna (if it's on Windows XP) or Aero (...

Our friends at Ironclad are experiencing first hand what it means to make a 4X game that has really good multiplayer.

Each time we do an update, users (almost exclusively hard core multiplayer users) come out and make posts decrying this or that change to the game.  To the casual visitor of the site, you'd think the sky had fallen "1.03 is ruined!" or "We need an emergency patch!" but when you actually look at the content of the post, it's always some trivial tweak that users believe has...