This UI was made by AI.   So was this:   We are not quite at the point where AI can make the actual WindowBlinds skins themselves. Certainly not in real time. But I think we are getting close to where skinners will be able to make skins much more easily.

We don't generally allow politics on the forums.  With the obvious exception of The Political Machine.  The Political Machine - The Power of the Presidency Can Be Yours! Forums But the world trade situation is probably something worth discussing provided people can avoid assuming "the other" are stupid or evil or greedy or whatever.   Now, I'm a child of Michigan USA.  Detroit area.  That means cars.  And I can say, regardless of political association, t...

Today we were finally able to get most of the forums back from the dead.  2 weeks ago we didn't think we would be able to bring them up.  And to be honest, we probably will never get everything back.   Fun fact: These are (one of) the oldest continuously running forums on the Internet.  When we wrote the forums, back in the late 1990s, we had to do everything from scratch.  We built these to replace Usenet. So a few things: If you're forum account is "new" ...

I recently got back into Virtual Machines and found the performance terrible on Windows 11.    I couldn't figure out why.  There was noticeable input lag and even moving windows around was sluggish.   I looked on Reddit and elsewhere and got advice about installing tools or configuring the VM differently but eventually just had a feeling that it had something to do with security on Windows.  So after a lot of trial and error I found this option: Now, I...

Over at Reddit I saw this post. Now, so far this year, the best book I've read has been the new Bobiverse book. But what about you guys?

So you want faster internet speeds, eh? So did I. Let me tell you about my journey. It all started with Xfinity offering 1.4Gb/sec internet speeds. I wanted some of that. So I upgraded but noticed that my speeds were still maxing out at around 800Mb/sec. That's pretty good, but a lot less than 1.4Gb/sec. The first thing I did was get a new cable modem. It has a single 2.5Gb/sec output. My router actually had a 2.5Gb/sec input port. Victory! Or so I thought. Turns out every single output por...

So our friends over at Amplitude have announced Endless Legend II.  It's due for Early Access late Summer.  My good friend Kael (Derek P who was the lead designer on Elemental: Fallen Enchantress and did the Fall from Heaven mod) is working on it.  

These days I'm mostly playing our stuff.  There's just not a lot of time for other games.  So lots of Ara: History Untold, GalCiv IV, Sins of a Solar Empire II and even some Ashes of the Singularity. But what are you guys playing? Anything you would recommend I should check out?

You might’ve noticed we had a serious outage that took down our website, forums—everything. Some people have speculated on what could be so catastrophic as to take us down for WEEKS?  For legal reasons, I can't get into the details other than to say it wasn't ransomware but it was a total data loss. This catastrophe wiped out everything at our data center, including the on-site backups, so we lost over three decades of data in one hit. Fortunately, we run nightly offsite bac...

Microsoft is shutting down Skype, the internet-based phone and video service that was once the dominant way of staying connected in the mid 2000s. Check out the External Link above... But others and I have been checking out similar products and the best one found is Signal, go ahead and check it out:  Signal >> Download Signal It is quite similar to Skype and you can send files up to 100MB.   Enjoy!

At long last, Galactic Civilizations IV v2.95 is here and it's a big one. I'd like to think it addresses most of the high priority feedback we've gotten on the game since launch, especially in terms of map generation. But well beyond that, v2.95 is a major improvement in everything from performance, balance, multiplayer stability, late game stability, AI, and more. Seriously, this is a big update. Assuming there's no issues with it, the next big update will be version 3.0, which is one tha...

Releasing my first new Premium Windowblinds theme on my site for this month, hope you all like it. Here is my Valor WB: Valor – LightStar Design   Hope you all like it!  You can also see all my latest releases here:  Themes New – LightStar Design You can check my previous posts here on the site too:  LightStar Design Windowblinds Themes » Forum Post by LightStar Enjoy!

All I can say is...if only. See the linked article for W11 2025 and abdi's other OS animations. Abdi is famous for his graphics and animations of "If only MS let it's Art Department determine things...". But, it didn't, or hasn't and we got the mediocre pablum that we have. Worse? It prevents skinning to improve it.  

Gene Hackman has passed away at 95. Always enjoyed his films...as a goodie or a baddie. He'll be missed. R.I.P., Gene

I ran into a rather knotty problem when trying to import RnD's port of 2of3's WB "Endeavour" docks into Winstep Extreme. Luckily for me (maybe not so lucky for Jorge), I was able to catch him on IM and work through this and a problem my weather module had connecting as it turns out due to Bitdefender. Thank you, my friend.    Turns out, the only way I can get the WSX Preferences Theme Import to work that is, to open the Windows File Manager is by changing to the default W11 ski...