** WARNING: This article contains shameless plugs of other Stardock software.
If you're easily offended by cross-product whoring, I suggest skipping directly
to another journal. 
**
Well, unfortunately I wasn't in the office much last week due to a death in
the family (my Grandpa), which is never fun, but It's always great to get
together with my family no matter what the circumstances, so It's all good.
I got to see some of the pictures from my Grandparent's Wedding, and it's funny
cause there's a picture of them cutting the cake that looks EXACTLY like one
from me and Jen's wedding (me and my Grandpa have the same facial expressions
and everything), so it's nice to know that he'll always be with me, both
spiritually and genetically 
A very sobering yet positive
experience.
Anyways, that's my excuse for no Journal last week, SO GET OFF MY BACK
As for this week, I had the pleasure of working on GalCiv2 for like 8
hours. The rest of the time was focused on getting some other loose-ends
tied up.
Hopefully next week better, but as far as GC2 goes, this definatly wasn't the
'Best Week Ever' 
#3 - This is it...the only scrap of GalCiv2 I got to
touch this week. I didn't even do the graphics for it, I just hooked up
the code to make it work
It's basically just a little camera control that let's Ship
Designers view the ship from different angles without being an expert and camera
movement with a mouse. You can zoom in and out without a mouse wheel, and
automatically snap to views of the top, side, and front of a ship. It's nice, it
gets the job done, but I sure would've preferred to be showing you guys some
ship concept art or alien cut scene or something. Again, maybe next week
#2 - Here's where the cross-product pimping (or "Corporate Synergy", as the
Buisiness types try to sugar coat it) comes into play. We're planning a
1.1 release of "The Political Machine", where, besides some bug fixes and
tweaks, we'd throw in 10 new candidates for the players to enjoy. A free
and heartfelt "congratulations" to anyone that can name all 10!
Wait for it...
Here it comes....
"The Political Machine" can be purchased
alone or as a
part of Stardock's TotalGaming.Net
premium gaming service!
If you think you have what it takes to win over the American voting public, try
"The Political Machine" today!
I feel so Dirty! But, honestly, It is a fun game, mostly with
some 1 on 1 multiplayer smack being delt (with myself normally on the
receiving end of the smack). If you have TG.Net I definatly suggest giving
it a round...and let me know if you want to play a game or two
I'm always up for being put in my place
#1 - Lastly on my weekly countdown we have something from the Object Desktop
side of the tracks.
For those of you that don't know, Stardock actually wears two hats...the Gaming
Hat (GalCiv, PolMachine, ect.) and their Desktop Enhancement Hat (Windowblinds,
DesktopX, ect).
While most of the art we do is for the game side, we're often pulled over to do
some stuff for our Object Desktop line of products. Over the last few
months, we've been working on the next version of DesktopX, which puts us at a
respectable v3.0.
You may already recall the name DesktopX through previous journals where we chat
about using the the program to make the screens for GalCiv2.
It's a really cool little piece of software that can do SO MANY different things
that it's almost a bad thing - It's hard to convey the coolness of all the
different features in a compact soundbite. I'll Try, though....
"DesktopX is a program for you PC that lets you easily run and design
mini-applications that exist on your Desktop for enhanced functionality."
In the end, you can make cool stuff that looks great. Unfortunately, the last
versions of DesktopX never had a single, consistent theme that really showed
this off. We'd have alot of great objects that people could use, but some
objects wouldn't stylistically fit with other ones.
Long story short (since I'm rambling about something that has no correlation to
GalCiv2) Paul Boyer and I worked on a theme of 10 different objects that all had
the same style and showed off some of the cool things possible with DesktopX.
Named "Silica", the objects and will be available to users that have Object
Desktop or purchase DesktopX3 separately.
It's been in the works for the last 2 months, but work finally wrapped up this
week and we finally get to enjoy (and let others enjoy) the fruit of our labors.
And thats what it's all about...whether you're making a game, some pictures of
politicians, or a series of Desktop Widgets for a new Version of some Great
Software...it all comes down to making something that others can enjoy
(whether on
it's own or part of the
Object Desktop suite of Desktop Enhancements!)