Stardock Magazine: December 2018

This edition of Stardock Magazine brings you an editorial from Brad Wardell, what's happening with Cider and Fences, and new content for Star Control: Origins. Stardock Magazine December 2018 By Brad Wardell, CEO (@draginol) Topics: • Editorial • Cider • Fences® in the Enterprise • Star Control®: Origins - Earth Rising Editorial This year is the 25th year since Stardock was incorporated. Many of you have been with us for quite a few of those years, going all the way back to the OS/2 days. As a practical matter, a technology company has to reinvent itself every 7 or so years. At least, that's been my experience. Whether we are talking about big companies like Microsoft and Apple, or little companies like Stardock, any company that is around long enough has to adapt to the changes of the market. Microsoft went from being a compiler maker, to an OS maker, to an office app maker, and, most recently, a cloud services maker. Apple's transformations have been even more obvious. Stardock started out as an OS/2 utility and game developer, became a Windows desktop enhancement developer, then a digital distributor (until it sold Impulse), and has spent the past few years investing in core-neutral software technology for what it thinks the next "big thing" will be -- core neutral software products. As we end 2018, we are keenly aware of the direction the software and game industries are heading, which is why we've invested so much into the development of Oxide's Nitrous technology and Stardock's Cider game engine. Your games, software, etc. will eventually be executed on the CPU cores that are the fastest and least utilized, whether that be your local PC or handheld device, a data center, as well as a mixture in-between. This is what core-neutral means. Your new PC might have 8 cores, or 16 cores, or even 32 cores. In another few years, they'll likely have hundreds of cores and with the advent of 5G and ever-faster, lower latency network connections, your personal computing power will no longer be the lowest common denominator of whatever device you're using. It'll be computing power of all your devices combined. It's going to be an exciting time! Cider When Stardock sold Impulse to GameStop in 2011, it took that money and created the Strategic Investment Fund to fund start-ups for the purposes of developing a core-neutral scheduler, a movie-CGI rendering engine, and asset creation tools that made use of this technology, as well as a load of content to support it. As has sometimes been the case, we did better on the technology side than on the content side. Publishing games is hard. Of the multiple studios we invested in to create content to publish, only Soren Johnson's Offworld Trading Co. actually was released by us. But on the technology side, Oxide Interactive was successful in building Nitrous, easily the world's most advanced core-neutral scheduler and graphics rendering engine. When some of the games we were supposed to publish didn't materialize, our "test" Nitrous game, Ashes of the Singularity, had to be re-designed late in development in order to become a full game. Similarly, the small game that was supposed to build out Cider (the game engine that we developed that sits on top of Nitrous), Star Control: Origins, had its scope increased as well. But, now as 2018 ends, Cider is fully realized and being ported to console, android, Linux, etc. The reason Cider is so important to us is that by combining Nitrous's core-neutral architecture and rendering engine with asset creation tools (CiderMill), DirectGUI, Art pipeline tools and all the other goodies needed to build large-scale titles, Stardock becomes capable of delivering new types of games that were previously impossible to create. For example, future strategy games, simulations, role playing games, or even first person shooters could be given massively greater detail if their physics, lighting, and AI were able to be distributed to your entire arsenal of CPU power rather than simply what is local on your computer or phone or tablet. This is what Cider has been made for. Fences for the Enterprise As we develop the next major version of Fences, a lot of our focus is going to be making Fences more applicable in work and enterprise environments. If you're interested in sharing your suggestions, please visit the [Fences v4 wishlist thread](=/aHR0cHM6Ly9mb3J1bXMuc3RhcmRvY2suY29tLzQ5MjMyNy9mZW5jZXMtdjQtd2lzaGxpc3Q-dXRtX3NvdXJjZT1zZG1hZyZ1dG1fbWVkaXVtPWVtYWlsJnV0bV9jb250ZW50PWZlbmNlcy13aXNobGlzdCZ1dG1fY2FtcGFpZ249c2RtYWctZGVjMjAxOCZ1dG1fdGVybT1zZG1hZy1kZWMyMDE4LTIxMjIw). [Fences] Star Control: Origins - Earth Rising The first expansion to the recently released Star Control: Origins is about to come out. [Star Control: Origins] Star Control: Origins - Earth Rising is a multi-part expansion delivered as a season pass that expands upon the theme of Earth's ambitions and the hidden powers that seek to prevent that from happening. It does not require having "finished" the main story-arc of Star Control: Origins, but rather blends the new adventures into Star Control's well known non-linear gameplay. You can learn more about it at [www.starcontrol.com](=/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc3RhcmRvY2suY29tL2dhbWVzL3N0YXJjb250cm9sLz91dG1fc291cmNlPXNkbWFnJnV0bV9tZWRpdW09ZW1haWwmdXRtX2NvbnRlbnQ9c2NvLXdlYnNpdGUmdXRtX2NhbXBhaWduPXNkbWFnLWRlYzIwMTgmdXRtX3Rlcm09c2RtYWctZGVjMjAxOC0yMTIyMA==). 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