Disclaimer: This is not a comprehensive review, or even a review at that. This is my thoughts of a few things that standout, more visually than anything of beta software. It may or may not represent anything like the final product
As soon as Ballmer announced Windows 7 Beta 1 would be available over MSDN/Technet I began the download and preperation for installing the beta onto my system (Intel Core2Quad Q6600@2.4ghz, 4gb DDR2 800mhz, 512mb 9600GT).
Since I have the luxury of backing up my entire system to Windows Home Server, I decided to forgo the recommended clean install and decided to perform an upgrade of Vista Ultimate SP1 x64 to Windows 7 Beta 1 x64. The process was a little lengthier than I expected, around three hours, but apart from the initial configuration of where I was installing to I could just walk away, and it was still far quicker than installing all the programs all over again (Office 2007 + Visual Studio 2008 + VS2008 SP1 would easily take up that three hours).
I only encountered two problems when the upgrade process was complete, Hamachi needed to be reinstalled, and Daemon Tools is incompatible (Virtual CloneDrive still works fine).
Since then I’ve also discovered that my (new – it was a birthday present) Wacom Bamboo tablet doesn’t work entirely. I’m able to scribe ("no drivers installed/plug and play") but installing drivers doesn’t give me the levels of pressure sensitivity that I get if I use Vista (tested on wife’s desktop, mums laptop). There is no error given, it just… doesn’t seem to do anything.
Start Menu/Taskbar (Superbar)
Difference faces of the Superbar
Once you get Windows 7 up and running, the "Superbar" is without a doubt one of the first things you’ll notice. Why? One of the biggest differences in Windows 95 from Windows 3.x was the Start Menu/Taskbar, and while it has had visual changes in Windows 98, 2000, XP, and Vista, it’s essentially the same thing. The Superbar is a replacement for it, but in a more evolutionary than revolutionary way.
The Superbar has several modes, "Combine when taskbar is full" mode or "never combine" mode for the most part will look like this
and like this is you have "Use small icons" enabled 
It’s fairly self explanatory. Applications pinned to the taskbar, but not yet running appear as just an icon, but anything running will appear with its title the tile. It is very easy to differentiate between running and closed programs. It also isn’t a huge departure from the "taskbar". However, this isn’t the default mode.
The default mode is "Always combine, hide labels"
And again, with "Use small icons" enabled
This mode has attracted a bit of attention for looking much like Mac OS X’s dock. To be honest, I can see why – both use just icons to represent applications.
Just like the OS X dock, the main criticism I’ve seen of the Superbar is some users are unable to distinguish what applications are actually running. The visual clues for OS X’s dock is a little black arrow pointing to what is running, for the Superbar it is a glass border/background, neither are great.
Personally, I think "Combine when taskbar is full" or "never combine" mode should be made default. It will cause less transition problems, and (personally) is just plain better.
Start Menu
As I mentioned when I first looked at the prebeta/b6801 of Windows 7, the Start Menu itself has also undergone a few changes, seemingly all for the better.
Applications now show a frequent or recently opened documents (I guess it would depend on what the individual program exposes), so you can launch your app directly to that file/folder/etc quicker. Most applications that implement a "recently opened" list support this already, which is great.
Searching now expands the results the full width of the start menu, another nice touch for longer names of files or applications.
The final change I’ve noticed to the start menu is the return of text labels for the shutdown button, rather than requiring users to understand that red is shutdown, yellowy-orange is hibernate…or sleep… and restart is orange, or something like that.
Media
Back in November, Long Zheng reported on the new codec support making its way into Windows 7. WMP/WMC (and any other DirectShow – I think – application) supports DivX/XVid out of the box (inside AVI/MP4), and H.264 (inside MP4, 3GP, m2ts) out of the box. This means more files will play after a new install of Windows 7 without having to install any codecs.
Windows Media Player (WMP)
WMP 12 has been a bit of a hit and miss with me. It has been a little less stable (I’ve submitted the bug reports via Connect), and the baby blue theme (which I guess extends all over Win7) is a bit much.
WMP 12 compared to WMP 11
The Vista/WMP11 "taskbar" mode also allowed you to stop, change the volume/mute, the progress of the song and showed data about the song playing a bit better (three line display compared to the one line).
One of the new features is the ability to preview a song, hover over it in the library view will let you play a 15 second clip of the song. To be honest, I don’t think I’ll ever use this. The tracks in my library are in my library because I know what they are, and it isn’t that much work to open a song to preview it anyway. I guess the value is if you aren’t sure of a songs title, and are building a playlist you wouldn’t be interrupting that process.
Another new feature is the ability to play music "to a device". Unfortunately, that requires either another Windows 7 machine (which would be great in a HTPC situation) or a device supporting "Digital Living Network Alliance v1.5" device, of which I have none. Hopefully the Xbox 360 will be updated to support this. WMP12 will apparently transcode-on-the-fly any formats the device can’t handle automatically.
Windows Media Center
Since I didn’t install Windows 7 on to my HTPC, I haven’t really tested out the new or changed functionality in Windows Media Center, so I’ll withhold my opinions on the few changes I did notice and didn’t immediately like.
One feature I did like was the “Album art wall”, which shows all of your album art in a slowly moving wall behind the visuals when playing music.
The new album art wall
It even fades to behind the main menu while music is playing, looking good! (I’ve heard all media will fade like this, rather than the half-menu that used to appear)
The wall is still present at the main menu!
Aero
Aero, the graphical theme/system of Vista/7, has been updated to include a few new things. Aero Shake lets you…err…shake windows. Quickly shake a window side to side, and it will make everything else minimise, repeat it, and everything is restored.
I found Aero Peek a bit more useful than Shake. Peek allows you to "look through" running applications to your target. WinKey + Space "peeks to the desktop" (but lets you see your gadgets), and if you hover over the Live Preview window in the Superbar, you get the X-Ray view to that program. I found it useful for checking IM or twitter apps, without having to switch them to the main focus.
Explorer & Libraries
As I said in my earlier look at Windows 7, Libraries are interesting. Being able to aggregate multiple sources of a single type of file I found incredibly useful, and is probably the second most missed feature (after the Superbar) after going back to Vista.
To recap, a "Library" is one or more folders containing (primarily) the type of file that matches the name of the Library. Libraries are very easy to share over a Homegroup. That combination for less computer literate people (such as my mum and sister) would be great – they just have to put all their pictures into their libraries, then the Homegroup functionality takes care of the sharing. If my mum was browsing my sisters computer, she wouldn’t have to navigate through multiple folders to find all the pictures – they’d be shown in the Pictures Library.
For example, the screenshot below shows my "Videos" library, which points to "My Videos", "Public Videos" and two folders on my Home Server.
An alternate library view, which shows the aggregation of folders well
From these screenshots you can see the revamped navigation pane.
- Favourites has been expanded to include an unlimited (not confirmed, but way more than Vista) amount of links.
- Network discovery happens in the background to populate the networked machines available, it doesn’t require "expanding the network" to initialise!
Compatibility
Apart from Daemon Tools, I didn’t find any programs or games that refused to run on Windows 7, so from that point of view it starts becoming less a question of "will I upgrade" and more a "when will I upgrade". The answer for most gamers who like Windows 7 will be "when Punkbuster* officially supports it".
Like Vista, I expect some teething problems as manufactures slowly roll out drivers for Windows 7, but since it is built upon Vista’s foundations the transition time will be much, much less painful. In the end it was a hardware incompatibility that "forced" me back to Vista – my Wacom Bamboo tablet didn’t work (and why use a beta OS when I could be playing with my birthday present?)
* Punkbuster is an anti-cheating service which runs in a lot of games, such as Call of Duty 4. Currently many servers will kick Win7 gamers out because the Punkbuster service has permissions errors and doesn’t run properly
I’ve been playing with Windows 7 for the last few days, and I’m liking what I’m seeing which so far seems to be a lot of UI polishing. I know there is more going on under the hood than that, but I haven’t dug deep to try and figure out what. There are lots of little things that when switching back to Vista you notice stick out.
Performance has been surprisingly fantastic, it seems just as quick or quicker than Vista SP1 (my machine is beefy-ish, Intel Core2Quad Q6600@2.4ghz, 4gb DDR2 800mhz, 512mb 9600GT). After installing Win7, I had no need to download/install any new drivers – sound, LAN and video drivers were all picked up perfectly. The video drivers weren’t just “Generic Display Device” drivers either, I was able to install Far Cry 2 and play that perfectly smooth without updating/changing any settings!
Back to the UI, there have been a few changes to the Start Menu, all of which feel more like polishing/evolution than the major changes/revolution we saw with Vista. A great example of polishing the UI is that searching in the Start Menu now expands the width of the results to take up all the Start Menu.
Another nicety is each app in the Start Menu can have a list of recently opened documents, so you can launch the app directly at the file.
Progress windows now show their progress as the background on the Start Bar/Super bar, which again isn’t a must have feature but is pretty and nice to have.
The “preview tab” has made a return in many dialogs, it works well now.
There are various changes to Media Center as well, it now has a more Zune-like look to it (in both the main menu and the new “music wall” visualization for music).
However my favourite part of the new UI so far is the new “Super Bar” (enabled with the bluebadge patch). It’s hard to show off how smooth it is with pictures, so I’ve thrown up a screencast on Viddler (using Community Clips, which seems to limit video to 256 colours)
UI aside, there are a few noticable additions/changes. “Libraries” (Collections of like file types that can span multiple folders/machines) are an interesting way to sort/find types of files, but even more interesting is the ability to share them so easily on the new networking concept (for Windows), HomeGroups. The combination of HomeGroups, Libraries and auto-network-discovery will be fantastic for less computer literate people wanting to share files between computers; in theory Libraries from other computers in the same HomeGroup should appear automatically in Explorer.
I think the biggest surprise with Windows 7 so far has been that…Paint is now..useable?! It has been redesigned with the Ribbon UI (which makes its way into a few programs such as Wordpad), and fleshed out with many “new” features (aka, ones standard to any image editing application). Sure, it won’t be taking Photoshop down, but when you need to do basic editing (resizing, cropping, rotating, etc) it actually looks to be a contender!
Curiously "MSN" rather than the Live team have released a beta of "wallpapers".
The app allows you to select from "over 100 wallpapers", and lets you customise the wallpapers by combining elements (background images + foreground images), by adding text, rotating or cropping them. Think of it as a very basic way to create custom wallpapers, but without having to spend any money on programs Photoshop, but still having more power than Paint.
It looks like Thin Martian are behind this wallpaper venture (at least, that is who has digitally signed the installer). Just like the recently released Live Wave 3 Messenger Beta, this acts like a WPF app, but appears to be a native code (rather than managed code in .NET) – at least that’s what a combination of my eyes and ProcessExplorer are telling me.
Be warned that the first 124 wallpapers seem to have to download the very first time you launch the app, or at least thumbnails of, which makes it very slow to run.
The Windows Live suite of applications has now entered beta for “Wave 3″.
The UI on all apps has changed to look more like the Wave 3 design, as well as slowly working in the Office Ribbon, but most noticeably Windows Live Messenger (now version “2009″) has undergone drastic changes. The jury is still out on whether I like it or not, I welcome change but there just seems to be more wasted space than before.
New to the Windows Live suite is Windows Live Movie Maker, which is set to replace Windows Movie Maker (much the same way Live Mail replaced Windows Mail). It’s great to see more frequent development (or at least more frequent updates) been released for Movie Maker, but sadly this first beta of Live Movie Maker lacks some very basic features such as being able to trim/edit the timeline of a clip.
Live Photo Gallery and Live Movie Maker now feature an SDK for publishing to a third party sharing service which is great! This means you will no longer need to hack the Internet Printing in Live Gallery to upload photos to a custom gallery.
edit: LiveSide have a much more indepth look at Wave 3, if you can’t be bothered installing for yourself :)
Please note: I must stress these are my impressions from the beta (v1.4), and may not represent the final product.
Because I bought Command and Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath, I was given access to the Red Alert 3 beta program. Additional keys have been released as part of an exclusive deal between EA and Fileplanet, first to their (Fileplanet) premium account holders but most recently to the free accounts too.
The beta is limited to online multiplayer only and to four maps (2x 2v2 and 2x 1v1 maps), but there is no limit to access to the three factions and their respective units.
Gameplay
It’s hard to comment if the gameplay is good, bad or otherwise in a restricted beta of a game especially when it is limited to just multiplayer, but I can draw comparisons. It plays much like any RTS – you collect resources, create buildings that provide X resource (in this case, electricity), create units, provide defense, or unlock further units (in the case of Russia; the Allies and Empire of the Rising Sun both ‘research’ the next tier of units). There is nothing particularly different or innovative with the gameplay presented in RA3.
The previous two games released by EA since acquiring Westwood/C&C rights have been C&C: Generals (and it’s expansion, Zero Hour) and C&C3:Tiberium Wars (and it’s expansion, Kanes Wrath), if I was to pick which one RA3 is most like, it’d definitely be Generals.
Generals has a “rewards” system, where you earn “experience” by doing stuff, which could include creating buildings, units, or removing substantial chunks of the enemy. In return, you could spend your experience on three rewards trees (dubbed at the time ‘General Abilities’), which included unit upgrades, aerial assaults, spawning units anywhere on the map, etc. RA3 features the same system, although the rewards don’t seem to be turning-the-tide-of-battle as some of the Generals rewards were (hint, this is a good thing – it sucks when all your hardwork can be undone by an enemies reward).
Zero Hour introduced another dimension of combat (sea, alongside air and ground) to Generals (which does not appear in C&C3), but is present in RA3. While this does have the problem that the developers have to balance yet another playing field, it really does add so much more to the game.
Graphics/Art Style
While I haven’t played a lot of the older games in the C&C universe, I’ve played a fair bit of Generals, and C&C3, and it is safe to say the visuals in RA3 are nothing like those. The easiest comparison would be Half-Life 2/Counter Strike to Team Fortress 2. The former are ‘realism’ shooters while the latter is a stylised, over the top, brightly coloured piece of art. RA3 falls into latter category, having many over the top effects and everything is very brightly coloured.
Like all games thus far based on SAGE (or RNA as its now known) it has appealing visuals in the unit models, detail textures, and particle effects, but throw it into a multiplayer arena and massive slow downs occur unless all players turn the graphics quality down. The game doesn’t become choppy as if frames are being skipped, it simply slows down the game speed so it takes longer for things to occur. With C&C3, I found settings that were silky smooth in single player, even during the epically scaled final battles, would bring the game to its knees in even the smallest 1v1 game online.
Problems
While this is a beta and you must expect most bugs or problems that will be fixed, it is hard not to see some that will never be fixed given the track record of EA.
Gamespy
For reasons that have never benefited actual gamers, Gamespy is involved in the multiplayer aspect of RA3, providing the chat lobby and game match making services. It is extremely rare (Quake…sure) to see a game that has benefited from Gamespy’s assistance with lobby/match making – and RA3 is no different. It mimics all the flaws of C&C3′s online play, where available games often don’t appear at all or the list continually expands and contracts so fast that it is often impossible to actually select the game you wish to join! One of the worst ‘features’ is that you have to be in the chat lobby (and currently there is over twenty) of the game creator to see the game; change lobbies and you see a different subset of available games.
Netcode
One thing that has played SAGE/RNA games has been poor networking code. During the days where I semi-frequented a gaming focused NetCafe, it was rare to see a LAN game of Generals finish without at least one of the players crash out due to network issues. The initial release of Kane’s Wrath was plagued with a ‘out-of-sync’ issue, which after a period of time would just lose connection with other players, rendering the game useless. EA denied that such a problem existed (stating it couldn’t be replicated and that a very small percentage of the player base was effected) for some time, until they decreased such occurrences with a patch (but not totally removed) after three months!
In RA3, I’ve already seen one or two out-of-sync issues, and many players randomly dropped from the game!
Balance
In one of the patches C&C3, the ability to construct multiple defenses at once by building multiple cranes was removed. It was a fairly drastic change, and effected singleplayer as well. I can’t help but shake the feeling that there will be some major balance upsets after the release of the game. Russian submarines currently seem to be overly powerful just as their Terror Drones are – to the point where I’ve had a few games where people have quit when others have gone Russian.
Will it drain my wallet?
The inevitable question is: despite its flaws, is this game “good enough” to be worth shelling out for? If you’re a hard core C&C/RA fan, it’s got some solid stuff in there which you’ll love. If you are a C&C/RA fan but are a Westwood purist? Not a chance – there is too much of the “EA Influence” inherited from Generals and C&C3. I fall short of being a fanatic to the series or to Westwood so the decision is a little tougher. I’ve been burnt by the flaws in Tiberium Wars and Kane’s Wrath and generally poor support by EA in those games as well as Battlefield 2/2142, but RA3 does offer some genuinely different gameplay to be entertaining.
My answer is, no, I won’t be buying it upon launch because I don’t feel it is worth the launch RRP of AUD$99.95; while the game might be fun, it’s just too “same-y” in both the good and bad aspects. If I can find it for AUD$60 or under, I’ll reconsider, but for now the similarities in gameplay to C&C3 and Generals are just encouraging me to hold tight to my money until StarCraft 2 is released.
Gallery
The new album art wall
An alternate library view, which shows the aggregation of folders well
