So this next week I'm off to visit the game magazines.  It's almost the same time of year that I went to show off Galactic Civilizations I.  We didn't get much preview coverage. Maybe..just maybe it's because the graphics were awful and looked like shareware from the 80s?  Look at this first screenshot.  This is where Galactic Civilizations I was at that point.  Look at the top left, you'll see the frame rate.  36 frames per second.  Which was certainly ...

What a difference 4 days can make.  So as I mentioned in my last journal, I was concerned that the visuals of Galactic Civilizations II wouldn't be where we want them to be.  But if you can compare these in-game screenshots with the ones I did just 4 days ago, you can see how much just a few days can make. And bear in mind, we have nearly a year of work to do. So you can imagine how cool this stuff will be when the final graphics are done. The planet interface still ...

Last week I had a cold. A pretty strong head cold.  And the only thing really unusual about this is that I've never had a cold before.  I'm 33 years old and I've never had a head cold.  I didn't realize that the "common cold" was really common.   Since I'd never had one, I just assumed plenty of other people hadn't had it. As my mother, college roommate, and my wife can all tell you, because I've never had a head cold I've also never had to blow my nose. Ever.  I've ...

Being the only child of a single parent with no extended family nearby gave me some pretty warped views on a lot of things. One of those things was the concept of love.  Since the only relationship I had growing up was my mom, I came to believe that love was a finite thing.  I.e. If I felt close to others, I would feel less-close to my mom. Of course, that went out the window the minute I fell in love. My first true love was a girl I met at the end of high school. We were togethe...

One thing that is both amusing and frustrating about the left in the United States is the claim that we went into Iraq mainly because of WMD.  That this was the only real justification for going into Iraq.  Left-wing comedians like to make a lot of noise on this.  John Stewart on the Daily Show, like many left wingers uses the "I'll make a snarky one liner to make the other side look stupid even though it's a strawman argument". Here is the resolution that congress voted on: ...

Not too many good Democratic politicians these days. What we mostly hear are shrill idealogues who come across as pretentious whiners. Not the new Senator from Illinois who has shown poise and intelligence in Condi Rice's senate confirmation. Here are some observations from Belgravia: OBAMA: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, members of the committee, Dr. Rice. First of all, let me say how grateful I am to have the opportunity to serve on this committee. I know that it has a...

Expert blacksmithing gets you to 150.  Artistan starts at 200.  So what do I need to do to get from 150 to 200? I dunno but I'm finding black smithing to be kind of a waste of time so far.  Aldar is a much better blacksmith and we have no enchanters in our guild.  So I've thought about being an Enchanter but I fear that's too much work to get started and I'm already at 150 on blacksmithing.  

DeepT had this to say on professions: After doing all the professions to a reasonable level (not including specialist blacksmithing), I have decided none of them are that good. Alchmey: None of the potions give fantastic buffs or effects. Powerful, usefull effects are very short lived. For example one potion gives 1000ac, but for a mere minute. Another gives invisibility, for a mere 30 seconds. And then healing potions have timers which is stupid. I can understand the 'diablo' effect ...

I walked into the living room and my wife was watching one of those fat people losing weight shows. I said, "Deb, why are you wasting your life watching this junk?" To which she responded, "Big talk from the man who just spent his entire day playing World of Warcraft." A pause. "Well, I did make it to level 30 today." At which point my son Alex chimes in, "Yea, now daddy can wear a helmet!" My wife looks at my son and then looks at me and says, "Brad, I think you need to wea...

Gives me a headache just seeing someone compare evolution to space alien seeding as being "equally plausible". Evolution is a theory. But some people here don't seem to grasp that there is a big difference between a theory and a hypothesis or even a hypothesis and a random guess pulled out of ones rear end. There are a lot of things we don't know "for a fact".  We don't know, for a fact, precisely how gravity works. We don't know, for a fact, precisely how magnetism works.  ...

I always feel like I'm walking the tight rope between cheerleader for the project and troll of the project. We have a long time to work on the game and we're doing very well schedule-wise. But taking Galactic Civilizations into the 3D (engine wise) has many perils.  Internally there was some confusion on the overall visual direction for the game. For me, it should LOOK like a game. Early on I made clear that I did not want it to look like Homeworld or something. That's my issue with ...

As I look at Stardock's massive IT infrastructure I realize something - we are well suited to make a massively multiplayer online real time strategy game. The problem with RTS's done as massively multiplayer has always been the persistent world. That is, what happens to your empire when you're not playing? There is also quite a bit more involved in keeping the world compelling and interesting over time. Most game developers would have to build an awful lot of tools to make a persistent RTS...

Only a little boy would think this way.. I caught my son picking his nose and eating it. Disgusting! I don't know why small children are such nasty creatures. "That's disgusting! Do you realize how disgusting that is? Eating boogers is as bad, if not worse, than eating poop. Do you know that? Boogers are the trapped germs of your body trying to get out. They're absolutely filthy. Poop, amazingly, is actually cleaner than boogers. That's how disgusting that is!" To which he responds: ...

Every registered user and every blog has points associated with it. These points are added together set up the different ranks of users and blogs on this site. Why have a point system at all? What motivated me to set this up was that I wanted to set up a medium in which people could write articles and that the popularity of that article would be based, at least in party, on merit. All too often, what gets read on the Internet is purely a matter of luck - some very popular website links to so...

In Harry met Sally, the character Harry, played by Billy Crystal, asserts that men and women can't be friends because the sex thing always come into play. There's always a lot of debate on this subject and as I get more life experience, the more I can conclude a firm maybe.   There are various levels of friendships and there are various forms those friendships can take.  So the simple answer is, yes a guy can be just friends with a woman. But there are a lot of qualifiers to that a...