http://hotair.com/archives/2009/07/07/state-run-health-care-by-the-numbers/

Great article.

Only 2 years away…

It’s always only 2 years away…

Back of future house taken from the woods. Had to combine a couple pictures together as I can’t walk far enough back to get a single picture. Love the iPhone’s camera and Pano.

You can see the brick starting to come along.

I can’t tell what kind of tree this is.

Another tree I’m not sure of. I think it’s a Macintosh Apple tree.  Still early in the season.

Another tree I am not sure of.

The basement has GreenGuard on the floor. Above this is the radiant heating tubes and then, I presume, cement.

Another tree I am not sure about.

In no particular order…

Scientists are Democrats…right?

Pew Research says that 55% of scientists say they are Democrats, 6% Republicans. Gosh, must mean people who value the scientific method are Democrats while Republicans are just a bunch of religious nut jobs right?

Strangely, the left-wingers who have commented on it don’t seem to be that concerned as to how the survey identified who a “scientist” was.  Is a scientist someone who works at a university doing pure scientific research on the breeding patterns of fruit flies? Does it count someone who works at say a software company researching new ways to simulate different uses of carbon nanotubes?  Something tells me the survey identified the former as a scientist and the latter was not counted as one.  Icky capitalists aren’t scientists right?

Would people who want “affordable” health insurance be willing to go to your door with hat and hand?

I was reading Digg the other day and as some of you know, Digg is largely populated by far left-wing people who are largely unaware of how far left they are (they freak out about FOX News pretty much daily). 

Anyway, on the topic of health care, every time there is a discussion on it, it always boils down to the consensus (on Digg anyway) that single player health care is the way to go.  Single player meaning really tax payers which, as some know, is only around 60% of the US population, the other 40% paying zilch.

So let’s put this in perspective.  Presently, around 88% of the adult population of the United States has health insurance that they either pay for themselves or (mostly) is paid for by their employer. No matter how you slice it, they’re “paying into” the system.

But single payer advocates prefer a system in which only 60% of the population is paying into it.  This means either massively higher taxes just to get what we have today OR (more likely) a lot crappier quality health care than we have today and all so that the remaining 12% of the population can have health insurance.

Most people I’ve met who want a single payer system happen to be in that 40% of the population who pay no net federal income taxes.  I wonder if they’d be willing to come hat in hand and ask you to pay for their pills in person? Of course not, they’d rather act like they’re taking the moral high ground in demanding that you pay for their pills via taxes.

Tree huggers & agendas

I don’t expect a lot of out activist environmentalists.  Most activists seem more concerned with making themselves feel like they “care” than actually doing anything constructive to help the planet. It’s purely about emotional satisfaction for them.

In the mind of the modern American liberal, results are irrelevant, it’s about caring. Don’t you care about the environment? Don’t you care about the poor? Don’t you care about…?

I wish they’d do a little less “Caring” and a little more “DOing”.

Case in point, in an on-line debate on whether SUVs should be outlawed or not I pointed out that yes, I drive an SUV to work every day. It only gets 18 MPG. 

The lady debating me in the post took the high and mighty position that it’s people like me destroying the environment because I don’t “care” about the environment.

I pointed out “Well, I only drive 6 miles a day, that means I only burn 1 gallon of gas every 3 days, how far do you drive?”

Well, she has a 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid. She kept pointing this out throughout the discussion because it apparently gets 40MPG.

After a few times of me asking how much she drives, she admitted she works “about” 30 miles from work.  That means 60 miles a day or a gallon and a half of gas PER DAY.

So when I suggested that if she’s so worried about the environment and wants the government to start banning things, why not limit the # of gallons of gas someone can use per week instead of worrying about what kind of car they drive.

And so I got the usual “Not everyone has the luxury of living only a few miles from work, I can’t afford to live any closer.”

Awww. See, it doesn’t matter that she’s burning about 8 gallons a week of gas because she cares. It’s not really about saving the planet. It’s about feeling better about oneself.

I mean, if CO2 is going to cause “millions” of deaths and is the most important issue facing the world (as she repeatedly said) then how can she possibly justify burning 8 gallons of gas a week? Especially when she’s saying “deniers” like me need to give up our “toys” (said toy that burns a quarter as much gas a week as she does).

That’s always been the bottom line with the activist environmental movement. They’re not really serious. It’s just narcissism posing as political posturing.

This week our friends from Ironclad were visiting to discuss strategy on an assortment of future projects.  One of the fun things was showing Elemental and comparing notes on different engine techniques – ways of doing cool stuff on screen without having requiring crazy hardware.

One of the things the team here has spent some time on is on fonts.  It’s amazing how crappy font handling is in Windows IF you’re not putting it on a dark background.  DirectX 11 apparently will fix this but then, how many of you have DirectX 11 video cards? So in 2015, we can look forward to easy to have nice fonts.

If you look at some of the early Elemental screenshots that show UI, the fonts are awful looking.  That’s fixed now. W00t.  But it’s amazing how much effort it took to create a font system that works on a light background.  Next time you look at a text-intensive game on the PC, look carefully at the background. How often is it a light background? Ironic given that outside of games, that’s the norm.

Cleaning things up for the alpha

Another thing we’ve been working on is getting things ready for the alpha.  Now, originally the alpha (beta 0) was going to come out in June.  Then Demigod happened and I had to pull a bunch of people off Elemental and put them on Demigod to help get things to where we wanted them to be (at least in the areas that we could help on).  So we lost easily a month, possibly two.

Fear not, this doesn’t mean we lost 2 months off the overall schedule.  What it means is that we lost 2 months from the time we start taking the technologies developed and assembling it into a game.

To make up for those lost 2 months, I assigned myself to the project.  I’ve even moved out of my nice corner office and am in the lab area with the rest of the team to help focus on assembling the techs together to make a cohesive game.

To put it in perspective, for a game with a 1Q release, I don’t normally get intimately involved until 4Q.  So in this case, getting involved in June let’s us move into the iterative development process earlier.

That said, on Tuesday I’m heading out on a working vacation up north. I’ll still be around but I won’t be in the office.  I have a lot of overall Stardock stuff to work on (the annual business plan and lots of legal/accounting and other boring stuff is what I work on during July traditionally and I try to do that from somewhere that involves swimming or other distractions in between mind numbing balance sheet projections, updating the standard contract agreements, reviewing the latest tax statues, and this year investigating the difference between Python 2 and Python 3 and seeing if I can get Visual Studio 2005 to work with Python 3 as opposed to just Visual Studio 2008.  So that’s what I do in July.

The downside is that that means that the alpha version of Elemental won’t pop out until August. The current working release day for the Alpha is August 6 with the public beta being September 2 so mark your calendars. No promises but that’s what we’re aiming for.

Jobs

BTW, we are hiring right now across the board at Stardock.  Particularly for game developers, animators, and artists to work on Elemental and other game-related projects and even general software.  Email [email protected] if you’re interested. Must be willing to relocate to Michigan (Plymouth area).

Vacations are always over too fast.

Ever wondered why games don’t tend to be released in the Spring or Summer? Besides the Winter being better for retail, the other thing, at least in software that I’m beginning to see is that it’s harder to get updates out quickly because that’s when people tend to go on vacation.  So it’s definitely been a slog getting updates out the door these past few weeks.

It’s just as well because as games evolve, the needs of the game community change.  Here are some of the things that have risen high on the list of things to add into Demigod in future updates:

1. I’d like to see a randomize teams in custom games. That is, players press a button and when the game starts, the teams are mixed up.  There is definitely a growing issue about “pre-mades” vs. “random”.  We will have to talk to Gas Powered Games to see what can be done without blowing up the budget but I think this is an issue that is needed.

2. I also think that clans/groups are probably going to need to be moved up ahead of mod support. Currently v1.2 is looking at modding as a major focus. But I’m curious to hear what you guys think about this because I think modding, as important as it is, may not be as important as making it easier for groups to play together.  The pre-made issue wouldn’t be so obnoxious if it were pre-mades vs. pre-mades.  Again, the trick here is to do this without blowing up the budget.

3. More demigods. This is a topic that comes up on every call with Gas Powered Games. Right now, they’re focusing on finishing up the demo but getting some sort of pipeline of new demigods is something we think is critical. 

4. The freaking stats.  While this would probably be #1 on my personal list, I’m painfully aware that I’m in the minority on this.  Nevertheless, abusing my position here a bit I assigned part of our software group to get in there and nail down the stupid stats.  I’ve come to understand that the situation is a lot harder than it would seem (at least intuitively).  But not to be a bastard, I don’t really care if it’s “complicated”. If I win, it better bloody show up on my record. 90% of people probably don’t care but I personally think the 10% who do care are crucial to the game’s long term on-line viability. 

Now, this is by no means a complete list. Replays, Rematches, and lots of other things are on the list for a v1.2 which we are negotiating with GPG.   But these are the kinds of things that I think are pretty crucial in my opinion.

Not a well publicized beta feature of Impulse but still quite handy:

http://anywhere.impulsedriven.com/

Not all titles are on it yet, only those that support GOO in one form or other I believe.  But a great thing for those who play PC games on other platforms.

As we reach the end of June we’re racing ahead towards trying to get an alpha out sometime in July along with the beta at PAX.

Here are some screenshots of where things are (some old, some new):

Note: Shadowing isn’t in yet so these are not representative of what the final game (or even the beta) will look like.

Cities exist on the map itself. Clicking anywhere on the city will bring up the city menu.

Players can zoom in and out as they see fit.  Players design roads ala Simcity but they are built automatically by workers (similar to Civ IV).

Players can zoom in very close to cities. Eventually you’ll be able to see your population at work. It’s purely cosmetic but it’ll cool to watch your cities grow and thrive.

The tactical battles are very different than what we’ve seen before in these types of games.  The best way I can describe the battles is that they’re tactical with XCom being a major inspiration but designed to be relatively short.  Depending on how well they turn out, we may make the tactical battles an optional mini-game that people can play online if they just want to play a simple arena-style strategy game.

Players will be able to zoom in and watch the battles very close up.  This screenshot is of an internal technology demo so it’s designed to show you what our goal is.

We’ve been hesitant to show too many screenshots until the shadowing is in.  Those of you familiar with this stuff know how weak modern games look if you turn off the shadows.  We’ve been working on a shadowing system that scales really well but still looks good.

Also this week we’ve been developing a new type of font system that is compatible with DirectX 9 (we’re not using DirectX 10 or 11 and won’t be until Windows XP is very legacy).  Ironically, DirectX 11 has a pretty decent font system but few cards support it.  But the font system we’re doing will let us have really cool alpha blended fonts on a variety of textured backgrounds.  If you look at most PC games, they either have few fonts or have them on a black background. But we want players to (optionally) be able to read a lot of information on the world they’re creating. Each game will play very differently.

The beta version should be ready in around 60 days. Hard to believe that we’re finally getting close after all this time.  Players who pre-order it will get access to the betas and qualify to have access to the alpha version.

More to come.

Only a couple hours and I am out of here until next week! W00t!

Of course, my friends at Stardock and Gas Powered Games will still be around and they’re cooking up so many different things that it’s agonizing waiting for it all.

Lots happening around here. I have to write 60,000 words between now and July 31st for a book I’m writing to make the publisher’s deadline. There will be a lot info on that later this Summer.

The Impulse team is about to put out a massive 4th of July sale.  Over the last couple of months people may not have noticed that Impulse has started getting the rest of the major publishers on board. Activision is on there with Prototype and Call of Duty 4. Ubi Soft is on there with Prince of Persia, Farcry 2, etc.  Other titles are arriving as fast as the team can get them up.

With Demigod, we continue to formalize our the plan with developer Gas Powered Games on what additions and changes to make to the game over the coming months.  Pretty much every significant item that’s been brought up is on our list. Other journals talk about plans for v1.2 and beyond so I won’t spend time on that.  In the near term, v1.1 updates are the focus.

With one of the upcoming v1.1 updates, we are looking at having a tournament week once we’re happy with the robustness and fidelity of the stat system in the game. What we’d do is email everyone who has the game and let them know about it and have live updates on how it’s going.

Really though, that’ll be a warm up to what we are likely to see with v1.2 since 1.2 will have robust replay viewing support and such and then people can post the results from different games and such.

Anyway, I’ll be out of touch for a few days. Don’t burn the place down while I’m gone.  Have fun!

Gas Powered Games has a new update brewing. While v1.1 has been a success feature wise, there is a subset of players who are experiencing crashes and random disconnects along with some funky behavior with the statistics and favor items.

As old as “works on my machine” gets, the good news is that we have identified the causes of each of the issues involved and GPG has already internally fixed most of them.

To recap the issues:

1. Random disconnects in MP. Cause: LUA crash when someone tries to upgrade their Demigod while dead under certain circumstances.
2. Random crashes in MP. Cause: Same as above either from doing it or being on the receiving end of it.
3. Favor items not saving. A fix to a fix to a fix from earlier. Should be resolved by this next update.
4. MP Stats not storing right.  This one we’re still working on.  You’d think that this would be straight forward (as a non network guy, that was my view anyway) but it’s actually remarkably complex to get the data to the server in a secure way at the end of the game but before people quit because the game is over.

No ETA yet, but hopefully this week or early next week.

For the next FAQ, I'd like to respond to questions from the forums.

Do you guys have any questions?