Who else is playing it? Where you at?

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2009/10/court-upholds-.html I’d say this is a good call by the court even if I think the law itself to be foolish for California (talk about incenting people to leave).

Someday, someone is going to do a round up of digital distribution platforms and get around to comparing one very important feature: How FAST they download. That’s one of Impulse’s biggest advantages. It’s got crazy fast download speeds whether you’re in North America or Australia or Germany or wherever. Here’s a little video I took from my relatively humble home Comcast cable setup.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that people say they want transparency in things but in action, they really don’t seem to want it. For example, politically, I’m a conservative (more of a libertarian).  I am not particularly “into” politics but I do follow it pretty closely and will debate any issue even if I have to switch sides in order to debate it. But other people take it seriously. Very seriously.  When someone links to one of my blogs, it shows up on my article (coo...

The more I work with the beta of Elemental the more I think we need to integrate info cards into it.  Those of you who have played Sins of a Solar Empire know what info cards are. They are one of the major game UI innovations that Ironclad has introduced to the genre. The idea is that when you mouse over something, a “card” appears on the screen that gives detailed information about it. They’re kind of like super tooltips. Well, for Elemental, that’s what we’re looking to do too. ...

I’m getting overexposed. I’m as narcissistic as the next guy who refers to themselves in the third person in the name of an article and even I am not that interested in my opinions. At PAXX I gave an interview to Shacknews primarily on Elemental but we talked about all kinds of other things including my thoughts on Games for Windows Live. It’s no secret that I’ve been an advocate for Games for Windows Live.  But over time, a handful of the emerging policies have come up that cam...

If you don’t already have Impulse Ready to Play’s beta definitely sign up. People who have Demigod are going to be getting a copy of it added to their Impulse account this week. It’s just a beta but holy cow, it makes a huge difference in getting games going. http://readytoplay.impulsedriven.com

Some of you in the beta are probably starting to recognize the influence you now have and why we had the beta be so primitive – so that your ideas can really REALLY go into the game. So let’s talk about how units should be designed in the game. Here’s how it works: Players design their own units. It’s not like Civilization and such where you have knights or warriors. You start out with a person. The key traits of that person involve their attack (how many HP damage...

This next week we’ve got a ton of things to do. Most of what we’re working on doesn’t show up in the game. In no particular order, here are some things on the high priority list: 1. Gotta expose the AI to Python. Need that so that I can start doing serious surgery on the AI without constantly having to recompile and re-run the game. 2. Nail down what resources we want to have in the game. I keep thinking that it’s better to have more resources than fewer. ...

One of the things that I’m surprised isn’t offered up on the desktop version of Windows 7 more easily is telling the PC to go to sleep after N minutes. A high end PC can eat up quite a bit of power if left on 24/7 – which I do. But over the last couple of versions, Windows has gotten pretty good at coming out of sleep mode really well. Below is step by step on how to  set up sleep mode on Windows 7.

“Any human being, who accepts help from another, knows that good will is the giver’s only motive and that good will is the payment he owes in return.” –Hank Rearden It has been my experience whether it be at the nation-state level or on a personal level that good will distributed freely is often returned with disdain and contempt.

In hindsight, Notes are such an obvious feature that every RTS should have them. Though, admittedly, I would like to thank the various karma gods that such a feature did not exist in Total Annihilation as I would never have been able to find anyone to play (I helped pioneer such tactics as com napping, flash tank sticking, metal creators being “given” to the enemy). We only have half of the note system in.  Here’s how it works: Go to Pantheon ( http://pantheon.demigodthe...

My father in law is the most easy going guy you’d ever meet. He’s gentle. Kind. Thoughtful. But don’t mistake those attributes as weakness. He simply picks his battles because in the apocalypse, this is one guy you’d want to have your back. Politics sometimes is like this. People will rail against "the rich" or corporations and assume wrongly think they have leverage when they don't. This is typically seen with the American left who gleefully hope for higher taxes...

So as I mentioned earlier, I’ve started getting into dietary supplements . Now, I do have two prescriptions now. One is a statin drug for cholesterol and the other is Celexa. Now technically, all those different pills could likely be combined into 1 or 2 pills ala a multi-vitamin is now (when you take your multi-vitamin you’re basically taking what used to be dozens of pills). I’ve done my best to research the various supplements and I have scheduled myself to get occasional bloo...