Well this weekend we've been taking a beating on the net over Stardock Central. And by we, I mean me as I'm the one who hangs out on the gaming forums.

Stardock Central is awesome technology but has the same kind of issues that the early "multi-mission" military aircraft had. 

Back in the late 60s, the Air force fell in love with the idea of jet aircraft that could perform multiple roles.  Interceptor, air superiority, tactical bombing, strategy bombing, etc.

And for 2 decades, the Air force took a beating from this decision. Even today they still do.  Stardock Central, because of the immense cost to develop it, has to be a multi-role technology. And what might that technology be? What is the actual purpose of Stardock Central?

Stardock Central accomplishes the following goals:

1) It makes it much easier for users to obtain updates to our software.

2) It decreases the size of downloads by only sending exactly what the user needs (no one size fits all "patches"). This helps customers and lowers our bandwidth bill significantly (Stardock spent nearly $150,000 last year on bandwidth).

3) It makes it easier for us to carry out our RD&D software philosophy (rapid development & deployment). When a development team finishes an update, they copy their finished files to a network drive. This network drive is the mirror for Stardock Central. Those files go right to customers.  For those who don't like Stardock Central, we still allow users to download the traditional "patch". But that patch has to go through the installer team. The installer team pulls from the same network drive Stardock Central does it. Except that where Stardock Central is a software program, the installer team are people who take the files and then create an installer script using WISE and put it together for a download. Which means that it takes longer.

The beauty of RD&D is that the moment it's done with QA, it just gets copied onto a network drive and our users automatically get it.

4) It makes it easier for users to get technical support and for us to provide it. SDC has the support forums, documentation, news, etc. all built in. And the interface to the forums isn't some crummy web interface, it actually works like a news reader directly to the database so it's very fast.

5) Cross promotion. We can let our customers know about other programs we make.

But as you can imagine, creating the backend for this kind of thing was an immense 2 year task. Under the covers it has to handle over 600,000 Stardock.net accounts which have varying numbers of products. It has to handle customers who might have purchased directly from us or from a retailer in Finland and treat them equally internally and UI-wise.

So because of the cost, it has to be used on all our products. Which has been a real problem UI-wise.

A person who bought Galactic Civilizations at the store just wants to get an update to the game. Creating an account is not a big deal these days. But then they get into Stardock Central and the sheer myriad of features can be overwhelming. What's Object Desktop? Where's the update to GalCiv?

A lot of suggestions were posted on-line and we've adopted some of them.  We changed the Drengin.net tab to say "Games".  We changed "support" to "Documentation" (so that users know they need to click on software and not "support" to get updates).  We changed the "Stardock software tab" to "Misc" (since it's all Stardock software).

In the coming weeks we're hoping to find a way for it to just scan what you have and let you know which programs you have installed that need updating so that users don't have to hunt Stardock Central for updates.