Stardock''s Brad Wardell and Gamespy have gotten together to write up a Post Mortem on what went right and wrong during the development of Stardock''s hit strategy game, Galactic Civilizations. The article goes into considerable depth and is written from the perspective of a gamer on the trials and tribulations of trying to compete in today''s game industry.

Stardock''s Brad Wardell will be reporting from the floor of E3 for JoeUser.com this week. E3 is the world''s largest game-related expo. All the major new games coming out this year can be found there. Check it out.

For those interested in seeing what happened during Galactic Civilizations'' development, both good and bad, Gamasutra has a post mortem up that Stardock''s Brad Wardell wrote with Alex Dunne from Game Developer. This post mortem is written with Game Developers in mind. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030507/wardell_01.shtml It''ll ask you to create an account but it''s free and pretty easy and contains a lot of interesting details on the nature of developing a PC game in ...

Stardock releases WindowBlinds 4 Windows XP gets skinned For Immediate Release Tuesday, April 15, 2003 Canton MI – Stardock released WindowBlinds 4 shareware today. WindowBlinds is a program that extends the Windows user interface to be fully “skinnable”. Once installed, users can change their title bars, scrollbars, push buttons, Start bar, and virtually every other aspect of the Windows GUI using “visual styles” that the user can make or download from the Internet. By defa...

ObjectDock is a combination program launcher and task manager that is presented as a dock that can be placed on any edge on the screen. When the mouse is placed over an item, it magnifies itself. Users can replace the images used for tasks and programs and submit packaged themes to websites such as WinCustomize.com. New in version 0.90: -Ability to have outward borders on backgrounds added, to allow for simulation of a shadow on the outside of backgrounds. See"Default with Shadow" ...

The full DesktopX User Manual is now available as a PDF manual (Adobe Acrobat). The manual is over 50 pages long and gives users a thorough explanation of how DesktopX works, how to create things with it, and how you can put it to use. DesktopX is part of Object Desktop. Stardock is in the process of creating PDF manuals of all the major components of Object Desktop in preparation for the Object Destop 2004 CD snapshot (which will be available to all Object Desktop users).

Every wanted to put cool objects and widgets on your desktop? How about make some yourself? You can do this and much more with DesktopX, a program that makes it easy for end users to completely redesign their desktops to look, feel, and function however they want. The Media Guide goes over what is possible to do with DesktopX. DesktopX 2 is a free download at http://www.desktopx.net. The Media guide is at http://www.desktopx.net/media

IconDeveloper is a new program that is part of Object Desktop that makes it incredibly easy to create your own Windows icons. All those .PNG files (or JPG or BMP, etc.) can quickly be turned into standard Windows icons of various sizes. Visit the IconDeveloper home page to learn more about it. IconDeveloper is expected to go 1.0 before the end of the month.

Object Desktop 2004 Announced Desktop Enhancement suite provides unprecedented ability to transform the look and feel of Windows For Immediate Release: Contact: Bradley Wardell bwardell@stardock.com 734-762-0687, x226 Canton MI (TuesdayOctober 21st, 2003) – Stardock announced Object Desktop 2004 today. Object Desktop is a suite of programs that are designed to enhance the base feature set of Windows while allowing complete control over its look, feel, and function. Stardo...

Stardock is in the process of migrating it's web servers to a new ISP and on new servers. To facilitate this migration we are planning on having some down time. On Wednesday, October 8th at approximately 7:00 AM EST we will need to shut down several of our servers during that time. The outage is expected to last approximately 4 hours. The following sites and applications will be affected: www.wincustomize.com www.galciv.com www.joeuser.com Stardock Central Thank you for your ...

This month marks the 10 year anniversary from when Stardock was incorporated. Back in 1993, college student Brad Wardell, looking for a way to pay for school, founded the company. In an article that looks back over the 10 year history of Stardock, Wardell talks about the highs and lows in a year by year round up. URL: https://www.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=328

The first public update of WindowFX in over a year is now available. WindowFX is a program that adds special effects to Windows including: • Shadows under windows • Minimize/Maximize transition effects (windows can spin into the taskbar amongst other effects) • Change the desktop icon size to 48x48 while leaving the rest of the Windows icons their normal size. • 3D icon labels • Window dragging effects (windows can sway and rotate as they are dragged on the screen). • Set what re...

Galactic Civilizations™ Expands Award-winning strategy game gets a free expansion pack Canton MI (September 16, 2003) – Developer Stardock Entertainment has released Galactic Civilizations: Expanded Universe, a free expansion pack for their award winning strategy game, Galactic Civilizations today. Set near the dawn of the 23rd century, the player takes on the role of leader of the human civilization and must compete against dozens of alien civilizations in the creation of a...

WindowBlinds 4 got a 5 star out of 5 star review in today's USA Today newspaper. The review compares WindowBlinds 3 and WindowBlinds 4: "Stardock Software's WindowBlinds 3, a nifty Windows-skinner that allowed you to customize the Windows operating system graphical interface, was good, but it was far from perfect. Not every skin worked correctly and the WindowsBlinds 3 could leave your PC and some applications less than stable, forcing some users to remove it after the novelty wore of...

WindowBlinds lets you totally skin your Windows user interface to look like anything you want it to be. You can make Windows look like an alternatie OS (Mac, Linux, OS/2, BeOS, etc.) or something completely different. The WindowBlinds 4 guide goes over some of the specific features of the latest version of WindowBlinds. WindowBlinds has been licensed by companies such as Microsoft, nVidia, Nintendo, Warner Bros., Dell, Bell South, and others to add more visual styles to Windows XP an...