The Desktop Pet arrives!
A fun diversion for your family and friends!
Tuesday, December 13, 2005 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News
Just in time for Christmas, Stardock has released the Desktop Pet. The Desktop Pet lives on your Windows XP desktop. He will interact with various included desktop objects. A sophisticated artificial intelligence engine helps bring him to life by giving him needs such as hunger, sleep, boredom, and even (ahem) the need to take a potty break.
Users can set the various included desktop objects to be automated or take care of the feeding and cleaning up on their own. It also includes options for muting sound, pausing, and unloading. The pet is saved to disk regularly so that if you close it or reboot he will be back to where he left off when you bring him back up again.
Stardock hopes to keep updating the pet after release to keep adding new behaviors, additional objects, and new habits to help keep the experience fresh and to respond to customer input. The Desktop Pet is a fun $10 diversion and makes a great stocking stuffer for the computer user in your family.
The home page for the Desktop Pet is https://www.stardock.com/products/desktoppet
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Reply #42 Wednesday, December 14, 2005 5:26 PM
It would be possible to save it, of course, but such things tend to be easy to work around. Ultimately, you have to look at what it is costing you - about as much as a good pizza for one (or a crappy one for two
). Assumably you've tried Stardock's products before as well, so you know it'll probably be good, and if you don't like the taste, you didn't exactly break the bank over it. Everyone here who bought it seems to be happy with buying it, too. 
Reply #43 Wednesday, December 14, 2005 5:43 PM
Reply #44 Wednesday, December 14, 2005 5:44 PM
Thanks for the solution, my little guy is now happily playing with his ball....
This is a really great toy!
Reply #45 Wednesday, December 14, 2005 9:01 PM
Wed, December 14, 2005 0:00 PM
Stardock got permission to use a Gremlin...
LOL. I wonder if Furby got permission. I wonder if Creatures got permission. I wonder if the trillion other similar things got permission. Little harry critter with big ears is pretty generic these days.
-------------------------------
It's not a Furby. It's unmistakably a Gremlin. And Stardock's all about not infringing on copyrights. That's why I asked.
Reply #46 Wednesday, December 14, 2005 9:50 PM
Roll on next payday
Reply #47 Thursday, December 15, 2005 12:28 AM
imtoomuch: We'll have to agree to disagree. It does look a lot like Gizmo from Gremlins to me but it also looks like a Furby to me as well. And the game Creatures has similar critters. They're not identical and it's definitely not a gremlin (there's a lot more to a gremlin than a quasi-mini bunny look). Maybe it's because I've used it and not judging purely from a single frame of animation. But overall it looks like a fairly generic fluffy little critter. If there's complaints, we can always tweak the texture or model or whatever since we don't want people to think it is a gremlin or whatever. The value is in what the pet does not what he looks like.
Reply #48 Thursday, December 15, 2005 11:15 AM
| The value is in what the pet does not what he looks like. |
Well, I'll have to agree to disagree on this one, Frogboy. I love the "idea" of the pet (and have in fact purchased the program), but I don't really like the look of him (first off, he's brown..my LEAST favorite color)-- needs to have the ability to change his appearance some (color, weight, height, fur or no fur, etc.). Secondly, I'd much rather see some other type of "critter" choice...maybe something as generic as a dog, cat, sheep, bovine, whatever and then some types of "imagined" critters that don't exist in reality. I love that he plays and interacts with the objects, but I don't care for the look of it at all (if I wanted a dose of Gizmo, I could have spent half the money and rented Gremlins from the video store). I much prefer running my Aquarium Desktop vs. the Pet for the time being, though. The look of the critter has a lot to do with why people will purchase and continue to use it...after all, people spend way more on a car and they won't blow money on something they don't like the asthetic appeal of.
DD
Reply #49 Thursday, December 15, 2005 12:04 PM
DigitalDanes: What I meant is that I don't think the current look of the desktop pet is why people are buying him. Instead, I think it's because they want to see what he does and how he interacts with the user's desktop and lives out his virtual life.
Like you said, it could be a lizard or a dog or a cat or whatever.
Reply #50 Thursday, December 15, 2005 12:23 PM
| Like you said, it could be a lizard or a dog or a cat or whatever. |
Or a chameleon/lizard/monkey?
That would rock! Who wants to skin (reskin?) the Desktop pet first?
Reply #51 Thursday, December 15, 2005 6:26 PM
DD
Reply #52 Thursday, December 15, 2005 8:14 PM
Depending on how things go, we could look at doing a lot of pets.
The modeling, rigging, and animation is pretty expensive though so we first have to see how this initial pet does.
Reply #53 Friday, December 16, 2005 12:30 AM
DD
Reply #54 Friday, December 16, 2005 3:42 AM
i was under the inpression that is happened because of my virtual desktops, cause it tries to find my mouse pointer?
but deskt~1.exe is taking upto 50% of my system time. and windows is missing mouse clicks?
if i browse somewhere it could happen that i need to click 2 or 3 times instead of 1.
i have put in om my pc at home, and my girlfriend was complaining about something like this, so i closed it, haven't looked at it closely at home, but it looks like the same (no vd there btw)
Felix
Reply #55 Friday, December 16, 2005 4:48 AM
Reply #56 Friday, December 16, 2005 9:55 AM
| and how he interacts with the user's desktop |
Hmmm mine just kicks the ball and sleeps.. doesnt do any more than that (besides eating and hitting the bathroom) Is he supposed to grab desktop icons and play with them too?
Reply #58 Friday, December 16, 2005 10:08 AM
| Is he supposed to grab desktop icons and play with them too? |
I had a screen saver back in the Win3.1 days that had Jawas come out after a bit and steal parts of the desktop. I loved that screensaver.
I need to wait until after Christmas to buy the pet . . . (need to save monety for the wife's gifts [and I checked, she doesn't want the Pet]) . . . but I'll pick it up later.
I wonder how interactive the pet is/could be? Could it be bad and move icons I was trying to click on? Or just get under the mouse so I couldn't click on an icon? If I poke it in the eye, will it at some point, bite?
Reply #59 Friday, December 16, 2005 12:45 PM
| [and I checked, she doesn't want the Pet]) . . . ...If I poke it in the eye, will it at some point, bite? |
heheheh that sounds like my wife
Reply #60 Friday, December 16, 2005 3:39 PM
| [and I checked, she doesn't want the Pet]) . . . ...If I poke it in the eye, will it at some point, bite? |
Poke the pet, not the wife. Just to be very, very clear.
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Reply #41 Wednesday, December 14, 2005 5:15 PM
Agree, their should be a demo that is fully interactive for 10 minutes or something like that