One of the benefits of having been an only child is that there was always room to store all my stuff and I had no siblings to break them. I always told my mom that one day I'd give my children my toys. Well, sure enough I did. Here's Ryan with my matchbox cars all lined up.
What an awful day it was today. It started well. One of our key developers is leaving to go to Microsoft whic is a bummer but we had a last day lunch and movie (saw Van Helsing which was pretty good). Then it all went down hill. Various technical problems - Stardock Central messing up, can't make news items via our internal news syndication system, and other minor mishaps. And then the contract negotations with publishers on one of our upcoming games. I'm faced with some unpleasant choices...
This whole war on terror thing seems rather all over the place doesn't it at times? What does Iraq have to do with 9/11? Americans asked the same questions in 1942 when Americans were attacking French soldiers in North Africa -- what did France have to do with Pearl Harbor? Wars only seem neat and tidy in hindsight. Only when all the facts and information are publicly available after the events are over can the tangled web of a global strategy be made to make sense. This war is no exceptio...
If I were trying to model what it takes to become a world power in a competitive strategy game these would be the key factors I'd use: A single contiguous common market (currency, language, culture) A large population Abundant natural resources A free press Sufficient access to the ocean Relatively low tax rates (limited government) Relatively few impediments to starting a business Strong property rights laws (both physical and intellectual property) Light...
I was thinking today about how many developers aren’t very good partners to their publishers. I think too many developers don’t look at the business aspects involved in game making. I think this is one area, because we’ve been a publisher too, that can help potential publishers as we look forward. A good developer should be thinking about how they can make the life of the publisher easier. Publishers have 3 major jobs: 1) &...
The POW abuse case has really made the line between those who hate all things Americans and those who believe the United States is a force for good in the world. I happen to be one of those people who falls into the latter category. Some US soldiers abusing POWs is not a good thing. But it needs to be kept in the proper perspective. It's not systematic and it wasn't torture in the way that most people think of torture (it was more akin to pre-interrogation humiliation). But reg...
People on-line seem to have a...need to give their opinion regardless of whether it's relevant or not. I see this particularly in the tech world where a new product gets announced and someone who wouldn't even use the program feels the need to comment "I wouldn't use that." Whenever I see that, and it's often, my initial thought is, "Well who cares?" I just don't get it. I have no use for greeting card making programs, for example. When I see a news item about one, my first thought i...
As time goes on, the more I am convinced that most people who are anti-USA (specifically Americans who are anti-American) don't get their information from things we call books. At best, it seems they get their "information" from the Internet or from some propaganda source. You have the people who claim Bush "lied" about our reasons for going into Iraq. It's hard to conclude that these people are either mindlessly regurgitating things they've read on the net or they just have no idea what...
Some Iraqi POWs were "abused" by American soliders. Bad. Right? But how much do we know? For all people know, these Iraqi POWs were the ones who burned those American civilians to death and then dragged them through the street and had them hung upside down from a bridge for days. The point is, we don't know. Something clearly made these particular POWs hated beyond belief. Hated to the point where the soldiers felt an unordinary amount of freedom to humiliate these particular POWs. That...
Saddam's gone. Which is, in my mind, the principle point of the whole matter for going into Iraq in the first place. Removing Saddam was relatively cheap in blood and treasure. But we've stayed on to try to rebuild Iraq, a proposition that has been vastly more expensive and more bloody than the actual war was. Yesterday, a new gallup poll was released in which 57% of Iraqi's want US troops out now. If the Iraqi's don't want us there, then I think we need to seriously look at pulling out...
The problem I have with the anti-war crowd, particularly those who are on-line, is that I find them intellectually dishonest. When someone tries to say "Bush lied about WMD" or that the invasion of Iraq was largely because we believed Saddam had stockpiles of WMD they are really being dishonest. But dishonesty in debate is, sadly, a regular occurrence. But when it comes to blogging, blogs can be re-read from the time frame. And those who favored going into Iraq have been consistent in th...
I decided to exile one of our more vocal users for a day after sending him an email. I had meant to do it last week when he got caught using a fake user to create a second account to disparage his various enemies (real or imagined). It was designed as a shot across the bow. I don't really like exiling anyone because it takes energy to do that (i.e. I don't like doing things that negative affect others) when I really have a lot of other things to work on. Things with JoeUser.com have gone diff...
This issue occasionally comes up and will almost certainly come up again in the future. That is, how does one go about getting something they've written on the home page of JoeUser.com. There is no simple answer to this. Instead, the best I can do is provide some general tips on two basic things: a) How the feature system works and How to make a good article. How the feature system works today Right now JoeUser.com hasn't even officially been launched. We've been tidying up features...
In game development subtlety has to take a back seat to directness. This is particularly true in algorithms where many developers with dither around trying to tweak their algorithms to the nth degree while the more successful ones will come with more straight forward approaches that do the job. That isn't to say directness is superior to subtlety. It's just that the successful developer knows when the situation calls for subtlety and when the situation calls for directness. The same is true i...