This holiday weekend my plan is to get some serious AI coding on GalCiv. I've been looking forward to it and my new home PC box has arrived.

I don't know if it's because I'm getting older or if there just isn't as much benefit to upgrading as there used to be but the box it's replacing is over 3 years old. I used to upgrade every year and now it's 3 years.

My new box is an Alienware machine. We do a lot of business with Alienware and in the past I haven't bought their machines because they were too loud. But with liquid cooled options and sound dampening, it's not bad.

The machine is a monster though. Besides being the fastest quad-core currently available, I also got two 64GB SSDs put in RAID 0 configuration. Yes, it's insane.

Only on the video side of things did I not get too crazy. I have a Radeon HD 3870 X2 in it -- but only 1. So, you know, it's only insane not INSANE. Ahem.

Right now, I'm installing the various compilers, updates, etc.

GalCiv is written in Visual Studio 2003 which is a bit of a pain these days. Microsoft hasn't been real good about making the latest versions of their tools very compelling. Word 2007 = Compelling. Visual Studio 2008 != Compelling.

In a few hours, this machine should be set up and ready to make the Drengin, Arceans, Altarians, and so on smarter.