Last night I came home early so that I could focus on the Object Desktop 2004 documentation. It's finally finsihed or at least good enough to go up on Stardock Central. 120 or so pages of "stuff". And it only covers 5 major components of Object Desktop. But still, it's far better than what we previously had -- NOTHING. I need to take Martin's excellently done SkinStudio documentation and make it available as a stand alone PDF document. Very pleased with how that turned out even if the examp...

* Spent the last couple of days shaping and molding political machine to fit the spec. There's more work than I initially thought. The game has changed quite a bit from its first incarnation. It'll probably take me the rest of the week to do. It looks like a fun game though as soon as we get everything in. * Brainstorming about Issues and Questions. I'll have to create editors to make content generation easy.

Well, a mixed day yesterday. The weather has closed in which always makes things seem misearable, but now the modem on my laptop has packed up. This is a real pain as obviously it's not just a case of buying another cheap modem, plugging it in and using that. It's definitely not the line so It's a call to the manufacturers. Just as I get my machines running in tune this happens. As for work, that was far more successful. I finally finished proofing the SkinStudio Docs. There's still potential...

Well, a mixed day yesterday. The weather has closed in which always makes things seem misearable, but now the modem on my laptop has packed up. This is a real pain as obviously it's not just a case of buying another cheap modem, plugging it in and using that. It's definitely not the line so It's a call to the manufacturers. Just as I get my machines running in tune this happens. As for work, that was for more successful.

So I got WinCustomize magazine done. It took quite a bit of work. The work not only derives itself from the actual writing but the research for it. Two big things I do in the magazines is sift through all the...well crap that gets submitted and have to narrow things down to highlighting 30 or so skins and themes to show off. That means I have to skip over a lot of good stuff too which is a bummer but I have to focus on things that casual users will want, not just power users. With >800,000 Wi...

Meetings eat up increasingly greater amounts of my time. In a theoretical 8 hour day today, I spent 4 hours of them in meetings. That leaves 4 hours to do actual "work". Widgets to do: [X] IconPackager Media Guide finished/checked/printed [X] Went over JoeUser.com and featured some articles [X] GalCiv Beta testing [X] GalCiv Beta went up (not really any work on my part, just had to press the trigger) [X] DesktopX 2.1 testing [X] GalCiv screenshots [X] IconPackager PR. Meetings: ...

p>A very busy day today. * Finished converting the network code to work with our new screens. The only thing left to do is add code to handle the case where the host opens, closes and kicks a player. The host can open and close the game repeatedly if they want. This can cause a strain on our network startup/shutdown code. * Added the new Korx and Drath graphics to the MapEditor. *Also cleaned up the Scenario Editor interface. * Gave the latest editors to Cari for posting in the n...

Well, this has been quite a week. I have been working on a laptop since before Christmas, because I fried some components in my main machine (how stupid am I - kneeling on carpet, building up some lovely static while building a machine!). Some replacements arrived (nForce2 motherboardwith IGP, and Athlon 2200+ for the sake of economy), and I built the machine only to find that the HD was dead. Thankfully nothing was really on there, but I still had to order a new one and wait for that. Well, th...

Worked on the cut scene some more today, I had some more scenes that needed to be added to the edit. Mostly worked in aftereffects getting the timing down, seems like everyone was pretty happy with the overall look of the intro. I also removed a large part of intro and added one from gal civ 1 (Ship entering stargate) it looks like it fits and really does make sense since the scene is basically about the past. Talked with Kristoff about the second part of intro and it seems we are on trac...

Not so much to show today. Spent the entire day reworking our networking code so that it can hook up to our new screens properly.

Just checking in and seeing how everything is going.

Over the past couple days I've been getting side-tracked from the VESA version of BootSkin to work on a couple other projects. First we've been having implementation issues for DirectSkin with a client - debugging on 9x is always fun. Working on a company a for company b basis is always interesting, as you start to get into the specifics. In this case we were looking at things like window-manager recycled handle values causing issues when 100+ dialogs were created and destroyed over the spa...

My new foray into Game GUI design took a bumpy side trip today, that rocky side street came in the form of, “philosophy” statistic. While making what should have been a rather simple “Edit Candidate” popup window, for the Political Machine. All seamed to be going well. I had everything in a expectable layout. With what I thought was a rather simple, and not to “Excel Like” Window. Everything fit together, just like a puzzle. Than the trauma began. While pondering if there was anything m...

Started last night with taping coverage of the State of the Union and followup commentary for The Political Machine team. Spent the early part of the day fighting with IconPackager over stripping out updating author info from icon packages. With Brian's help, we worked around that so Jake could test a CD version of IconPackager (requested by more people these days). Took some 6 installs to get OpenBSD 3.4 happily installed on an older machine. It didn't seem to be too fond of the ZIP dri...

Got in this morning to find one of the rendering boxes had crashed the night before so my render is still going even as I type this.. Lame. 1. fix some minor problems with hands and such being render in weird area's it's the old "max render bug" where mesh seems to like to fly around the screen and set up shop where ever it feels like. After 6 versions they have yet to fix this bug, I predict in version 14 it finally may be. 2. Basically got the Main Intro for Gal Civ 2 going, I g...