The Evil Sysadmin

Welcome to the end of another week.  Between this week and last, a lot has been happening on Impulse.  Last week we added Ubisoft to our list of publishers and have already put up several of their most popular titles for purchase; Assassin’s Creed, Prince of Persia, Far Cry 2, Heroes of Might & Magic V: Tribes of the East.  And that’s just the start.  I’m working on Dawn of Discovery and Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood right now, and hopefully we’ll be able to release them next week!

There’s a lot going on in this week’s summary, so I’ll just get to it.

Oh, If you’re looking for a chance to save a few bucks on your Impulse purchases, follow me on Twitter, I’m @Zoomba and I have a whole stack of Impulse coupons I need to get rid of.  Help me out here!

Impulse Weekend Buys

Featured Buy:

Heroes of Might & Magic V Tribes of the East

Heroes of Might and Magic® V: Tribes of the East chronicles the final chapter in the epic struggle that began with the interrupted wedding of Queen Isabel. Players will meet the brutal and proud warriors of the Orc faction, and follow in the steps of the Necrolord Arantir as he uncovers the prophecy of the Dark Messiah and exposes the Demon Sovereign’s conspiracy.

Heroes of Might & Magic V: Tribes of the East is a stand-alone expansion to Heroes of Might & Magic V. 

Normally $19.99, this weekend only you can get it for just $4.99!

Other outstanding Sales this week…

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• Sword of the Stars Complete - $15.99
  Sword of the Stars Ultimate + Argos Naval Yard.  This bundle is only available for a limited time (6/29) so get it now and enjoy the entire Sword of the Stars experience!
• Elven Legacy - $9.99
  The shadows of destruction begin to loom on the horizon once a human mage uncovers a dark and powerful secret dating back to the remote past of the Elven race.
• Space Rangers 2 Complete - $19.99
  Get both Space Rangers 2: Rise of the Dominators and Space Rangers 2: Reboot in this terrific bundle deal.  Set in the distant future, you’ll start your journey by creating your character and initial profession, which will determine how you begin your adventure. From there you’ll join the Space Rangers, a group of volunteer "heroes" who have chosen to fight against the rampaging Dominators.
• Supreme Commander Gold Edition - $19.99
  Take war to the ultimate level with both Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance in Supreme Commander Gold!  Fight the Infinite War, a horrific conflict that has shattered a once peaceful galaxy.  Take command of the Cybran Nation, Aeon Illuminate or the United Earth Federation as you fight to rule the galaxy. 

  Continue the fight in Forged Alliance, which adds a new campaign pitting the UEF and AE against the deadly Seraphim.

• AI War: Fleet Command - $14.99
  AI War: Fleet Command is a space-based RTS with incredible AI and the largest number of units (30,000+ in most games) of any game we know of. Up to eight players team up against two deadly AI civilizations in lengthy, multi-session campaigns spanning an 80-120 planet galaxy map.

New Releases

This week we welcomed Auran/N3VRF41L Publishing to the Impulse fold with their Trainz games.  Also a handful of independent titles went up such as Droplitz from Blitz Games.  Droplitz is one of the more addicting puzzle games I’ve played lately.

• Prince of Persia - $29.99
• Trainz Classics 1 & 2 - $19.99
• Trainz Classics 3 - $19.99
• Trainz Simulator 2009 World Builder Edition - $29.99
• The Entente - $14.99
• Droplitz - $9.99
• Midnight Nowhere - $14.99

Updates

On top of all the new games we’ve been working on, a few received patches this week…

• Demigod 1.1
• And Yet it Moves
• P.U.R.E.
• AI War Fleet Command

That wraps things up for this week.  Everyone enjoy the weekend, pick up a few cheap games from our Weekend Buys list, and have a good one!

Stardock is closed on Friday, July 3rd for the long holiday weekend.  There will be no Impulse Weekly for next week.

Uncategorized

If you’ve been following Impulse (or Stardock for that matter) for any length of time, you know one of the things that sets us apart and makes us unique is how accessible we are, and how easy it is to get in contact with us, be it via the forums, IRC, e-mail or instant messenger.  We know that a lot of our success comes from our outstanding community of gamers, and we are always looking for new ways to get news out there, and talk talk directly to gamers.

Now, some of you may already know this, but over the last few months we’ve started posting to Twitter.

Twitter, for those of you who haven’t heard of it, is a micro-blogging service….

Here’s the official description:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.  People write short updates, often called "tweets"  of 140 characters or fewer.  These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search.

It’s free, and doesn’t require any special software (though there are some excellent twitter apps out there.  I use TweetDeck myself).  It’s also incredibly easy to use.

We use our various Twitter accounts to announce releases, interesting news bits, and even a few giveaways.  Not to mention we just like chatting with other users on the service.

If you’re on Twitter, you can follow us and keep up on what’s happening with Impulse:

• @Stardock – The Official Stardock Twitter Feed
• @ImpulseDriven – The Official Impulse Twitter Feed
• @IslandDog – Spencer Scott, Stardock’s Technology Evangelist
• @mittense – Trent Polack , Game Developer
• @Zoomba – My Feed!  Mike Crassweller, the guy who brings you weekly updates and more

Follow us and keep up to date on what’s happening. 

If you’re on Twitter already, post your Twitter name in the comments below.  I’ll check on this thread every now and then and update this post with a directory of all of the Impulse community members and their Twitter links.

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Impulse Twitter Directory…

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This week saw another blow to the beleaguered US housing market with the release of foreclosure statistics for the second quarter of 2008 (April, May, June).  In that period 739,714(1) foreclosure filings were recorded.  This is a jump of 14% over Q1 2008, and up 121% over the same period in 2007.  This means that one in 171 homes received a filing.  220,000 homes were actually repossessed by banks in that period.

There’s no question that the housing implosion is not only continuing with little sign of relief, but that it is accelerating at a nearly unimaginable rate.  It’s reached a point where congress has finally decided to step in to try and hold back the flood, to give home owners more time, and to try and prop up financial institutions as hundreds of thousands of borrowers default on their loans every month.

This, combined with out-of-control fuel prices pushing the cost of virtually everything else up, is creating a perfect economic storm that could threaten everyone, even those who are on sound financial footing at the moment.

Things are definitely looking grim.

In a declining job market, with high fuel costs, soaring food prices and a black hole of a housing market sucking everyone down, you would think that there would be a drop in luxury item sales like high-end techno toys.  As the financial future darkens, maybe folks would start cutting back to essentials.

Well, you certainly won’t get that impression if you look at iPhone sales.  The first twelve days of the iPhone 3G showed sales nearly double over the initial sales launch of the phone a year ago.  The iPhone overall has pushed up AT&T’s profits by 30% (2). Read more…

Life economy, housing, responsibility

Over the last few years, streaming music has grown in popularity as more and more people get high-speed Internet connections at home.  The convenience of opening up a web browser and hitting “Play” is hard to argue against.  No more sorting through CDs, or a massive MP3 collection.  And as time goes on, the sound quality has improved to the point where there’s little discernable difference to the average user.

The next step beyond just having online radio stations of preset playlists was to let users select exactly what they wanted to listen to, or be able to intelligently suggest similar music based off a small amount of user input.

At the moment, there are many online radio services from folks like Yahoo, Napster, Last.fm etc.  But this article is about two services that compete on a more direct level:  Pandora and Deezer.

Pandora

http://www.pandora.com/

Pandora grew out of the Music Genome Project, an effort to classify music using over 400 attributes to describe songs, and then use a complex algorithm to analyze and sort them.  The result is a system that can take one song, or artist and suggest other similar songs.  In general it’s very accurate and is a great way to discover new artists and music.

The service has thousands upon thousands of songs and artists in its library.  There are only a few bands I haven’t been able to find in the service, but that’s mostly because they’re semi-regional and not big enough to show up on the radar.  In general, I’ve been very happy with the suggestions the site gives me, and have found new artists I really like (Great Big Sea… go listen to them… now).

The big down-side is that you have very little control over what you’re actually listening to.  You can have the site build you a playlist based off of The Goo Goo Dolls, and you’ll get a few of their songs mixed in, but you don’t get to choose which or how many.  You also can’t go back and replay a song you really liked, you have to wait for it to come up in the rotation again.  Also, you can’t move around within a track.  It gives great recommendations, but you have to take what they give you.

This is because of copyright and royalty issues supposedly, so I can understand the limits to an extent.  The lack of control is made up for by the great suggestion system.

Pros:

• Huge selection
• Great suggestions
• Good sound quality
• Simple interface
• Buy music directly from iTunes/Amazon through the site

Cons:

• Virtually no control over playlists
• Can not replay select songs
• Virtually no options.  It would be nice to have more control over how songs are selected for me

Deezer

http://www.deezer.com/

Deezer is the new kid on the block so to speak, formerly blogmusik, this French site has evidently struck deals with music labels to overcome some of the limitations faced by Pandora.  With Deezer, you can play specific songs, build your own playlists song-by-song, or go with their own suggestion system “SmartRadio”

Where Pandora is super-simplified, focused on getting you listening to music as quickly as possible, Deezer aims to give you a lot more control, with a lot more options.  While this is overwhelming at first, it only takes a few minutes to figure out all of the basic features.

Deezer’s strength comes in its ability to search for artists, albums or individual songs and then playing exactly the tracks you want.  You can also play pre-built radio stations, or use their SmartRadio recommendation service.  Also, you can add your own MP3s to the service, further expanding your choices.

Deezer strikes me more as iTunes for your web browser, with access to a ridiculously large music catalog.

Since Deezer is a relatively new service, their catalog seems to not quite be as extensive as Pandora, and their suggestion system isn’t anywhere near as good yet (but I imagine it will improve with time).  There are also a few features that don’t work quite yet, such as creating a playlist. 

Pros:

• Select individual songs, artists etc.  Play exactly what you want to play
• A lot of choice
• Good sound quality
• Good selection

Cons:

• UI can be overly complex
• SmartRadio suggestions are very hit-and-miss
• Selection seems more limited than Pandora
• Some features don’t work yet
• Half the pages on the site are still in French

Technology music, online radio, pandora

Now, I’ll admit that I’m definitely on the outside looking in of the blogging/web 2.0 community.  While I manage very large sites with a ton of users and reach, I’m still on the periphery.  Why?  Well, I live in Michigan.  Not exactly a state known for it’s thriving IT industry.  If you go beyond IT services that support manufacturing companies, you can probably count on one hand the number of companies doing anything significant with online communities or digital media.

Yes, I’m a bit of a victim of geography here, and even though it’s all online now, it’s all IM, Twitter, email and blogging, proximity is still important.  So when I see events like Gnomedex coming up, I’m interested because it could be one of the few opportunities I have this year to actually network with other people working in my field.  And in this nebulous profession, professional networking is king.

Gnomedex struck me as an interesting conference to attend with its focus on blogging, podcasting and other personal media, the stuff that’s really sweeping the ‘net at the moment.  The really interesting tech and approach to information distribution that will become pretty standard for regular users in 5 years is what this conference focuses on now.  And there are some pretty impressive names attached too, with folks from CNN, Amazon’s AWS initiative, Google and a selection of people to know around the blogging world.

I’d love to go.  It would be a wonderful opportunity to meet people, get some new ideas for JoeUser/WinCustomize/ImpulseDriven.  Plus I think it would be a blast.

But I won’t be going.  Why? 

It costs a damn fortune!

The conference, just to get in the door, costs $600 (if you’ve attended a Gnomedex in the past, you get a $50 discount).  Now, that’s a pretty hefty price to begin with, but what if you’re from out of town?  Well, then you have to factor in plane tickets and a hotel.  I just did some quick checking via travelocity, and looked over the hotel list close enough to the conference so I wouldn’t have to rent a car…

Leave August 21st, return August 23rd:

• Plane Ticket: $373
• Hotel: $389 (before tax, this was one of the cheap ones)

That brings the base cost of the conference to $1,362.  Funny enough, that’s how much I paid in taxes this year.

Unfortunately this doesn’t include the incidental costs like dinners, drinks with folks you meet at the conference, or anything you may need to pick up while there.  From what I’ve been told about Seattle, and about these sorts of conferences, I could probably safely add another $300 or so to the bill.  So now at a conservative estimate I’ve passed $1,600.

Of course I could do things like find someone to split a hotel room with, and probably just not do the dinner/drinks thing, but after a point the cost cutting gets in the way of what these conferences are about: meeting folks in the field.

I could probably swallow the travel costs if the conference pass didn’t virtually double the cost.  It almost seems like the pricing is setup to keep out people who aren’t either on that side of the country already, or who don’t have a corporate card to cover the costs.

Maybe someday there will be a tech conference here in the midwest….

Yeah, right.

Blogging, Social Networking, Technology conferences, gnomedex, lockergnome

Alright, so the whole podcasting thing is a few years old now, and I’ve definitely missed the boat in terms of gaining fame and fortune by broadcasting my voice across the Internet.  However despite my lateness to the craze, here I am, with a podcast.

The WinCustomize SkinCast is a brief 15-20 minute podcast covering the happenings in the Windows Skinning world, with an obvious focus on WinCustomize.com.  Every week, Spencer Scott and myself will ramble on about whatever’s new and interesting in the community.  From time to time we hope to involve others from the site, take questions, do mini interviews etc.

Yesterday we posted Episode 1.  You can listen to it here

[audio:http://zoomba.stardock.com/skincast/podgen/media/2008-04-21_skincast_ep1.mp3]

As you can tell, it’s rough around the edges and there’s a lot of room to improve and grow.  Hopefully next week’s episode will turn out much better.  Feel free to leave feedback/comments below!

Blogging podcast, self-promotion, wincustomize

DeskScapes 2.0 lets users of all versions of Windows Vista, not just Ultimate, use animated wallpapers. The 2.0 preview released today for free download allows users to take the software for a spin and see what they’ve been missing. It comes bundled with three professional quality animated wallpapers; Silent Hill, Watercolor and Cube.

read more | digg story

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Windows Live Writer is one of a number of blog writing/management tools out there, and personally, it’s my favorite.  It’s completely free to download and use, works with both Windows XP and Vista.

Grab Live Writer here.

Essentially what Live Writer is, is a word processor for blogs.  Type and format until you’re blue in the face.  Spell check, save a copy to work on later, insert rich media easily etc.  It makes writing long and complex blog posts incredibly easy.

Plus, it does auto-thumbnailing of images if you have somewhere to post them.

Configuring Live Writer is the only tricky part, and to do that you need only a few bits of information:

1. The URL of your blog (i.e. http://zoomba.joeuser.com/ )
2. Your login information (username/password)
3. The JoeUser MetaWebBlog API File:
   http://www.joeuser.com/api/MetaWeblog.axd

Now, once you have Live Writer downloaded and installed, it’s time to start it up and configure it to connect to your blog.

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Configuring Live Writer

When you start Live Writer for the first time, it will ask to create a new weblog account.  If it doesn’t, just go to the Weblog menu and select "Add Weblog Account" from the bottom of the list.

You’ll see this window:

To start, you’ll want to select "Another weblog service" since neither of the other options applies.

Click next.

Now enter the URL for your blog, and your login information.  I suggest you check the box to save your password.

Click next.

It will briefly try and detect some settings.  You’ll then be told to select a provider.

Select Metaweblog API from the drop-down list, and enter this into the Remote posting URL field:

http://joeuser.com/api/MetaWeblog.axd

Click Next.

Now it will try and detect your blog theme  and ask you if you want to create a temporary post.  Click no.  JoeUser does not support this feature.

And you’re done!  Just make sure you have your JoeUser blog selected from the Weblog menu before you start writing blogs to publish.

Using Windows Live Writer

Using Live Writer is incredibly easy.  You can almost treat it as a regular word processor.

Here’s a quick look at the major parts of the Live Writer interface:

The most important parts are the Publish Button, the Writing Area and the Category List.

The first line you see in the Writing area is your blog title.  Live Writer unfortunately doesn’t support subtitles like JoeUser does, so you’ll have to edit those in on the site later if you want to include one.

Write your blog, format it however you like, go crazy.  When you’re done, make sure you have a category selected from the list, and then hit publish.  After a few seconds, the post will be done and you’ll automatically be taken to your article on the site.

It couldn’t be easier!

You can also edit previously posted articles by selecting them from the "Recently Posted" list on the right bar.  It will download your post from the site, allow you to edit it in LiveWriter and then update it.

It’s important to note that this will only work with articles originally posted via LiveWriter.

Well, those are the basics.  Later on I’ll put up a tutorial on advanced topics like uploading images, special formatting settings etc.

Uncategorized

I missed my Friday Fidget last week, but I blame that on simply being insanely busy.  You see, we launched Sins of a Solar Empire at the start of the week to retail and digital distribution.  This means there was a fairly constant flow of work related to Sins that needed to be taken care of, on top of everything I do on a daily basis already.  This week things were starting to calm down, then we decided this coming weekend was the perfect opportunity to do our massive database migration.  No rest for the weary.

Anyway, on with the Fidget…

Read more…

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Introduction

Sins of a Solar Empire is an incredibly robust RT4X strategy game that allows you to grow your empire and conquer the galaxy. Games can last hours, weeks or even months. To start you off, Sins comes with dozens of pre-built maps, 3 sizes of randomized maps and a sophisticated in-game map generator that lets you define virtually every aspect of a map. Set your preferred planets, stars, distances etc and have the game automatically generate a map based on your choices. You can even share and distribute the map to friends, either via the Sins of a Solar Empire site, or directly in online multiplayer matches.

Unfortunately, the in-game designer doesn’t give you complete control. You can’t choose, for example, where you want a planet to be placed, or what you want it to connect to. You can’t set how many militia forces are stationed there, or whether or not it’s a homeworld, or if it’s a pirate base. If you want to hand-craft your map, the in-game tools won’t meet your needs.

Galaxy Forge is the answer to that problem. Part of the Forge Tools suite used by Ironclad Games to develop content for Sins of a Solar Empire, Galaxy Forge is a map editor tool that allows you to place stars, planets, travel lanes and more. You can build a map to your exact specifications. Do you want a multistar map with strategic choke points and no pirate base? No problem, just create it in Galaxy Forge and load it in the game. Galaxy Forge is a WYSIWYG editor, so placing planets, phase lanes, stars and more is as easy as a few clicks of the mouse.

While Galaxy Forge is incredibly easy to use for the amount of control it gives you, it’s not fully an end-user-friendly tool. So, to get everyone up to speed as quickly as possible creating great maps to share with the community, I’ve created this short guide to building a complete map from start to finish..

WARNING: The editor has no undo feature, so be careful when you move elements or make any changes. Save early and often to make sure you don’t accidentally delete something you’ve spent hours tweaking and customizing.

Read more…

Gaming