Steam is doing some pretty amazing things this week.  One of the new features I really like is the Steam User reviews that has some real promise if it can avoid the fate of user reviews elsewhere (where a passionate minority can totally mess with the score).

So far, it’s very interesting:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/printablegraph?ec=1.12&soc=-3.33 

One of the less glamorous but absolutely crucial parts of game development involves building tools to support content creation.

For GalCiv II, we used MFC.  In Elemental, we used WinForms.  Now, we’re making our editors using Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon aka WPF).  It’s amazing how far things have come.

Internally, there’s a lot of debate on whether we should be using WPF vs. WinRT for this purpose.  I’m curious what others think on this in terms of building good tools.

Typical conversation regarding a certain lawsuit goes something like this:

1. What about <Allegation 1>? They made it up.
2. What about <Allegation 2>? They made it up.
3. What about <Allegation 3>? They made it up.
4. What about <Allegation 4>? They made it up.
5. Oh come on, you’re saying they made it all up? Yes.
6. Can you prove they made it up? Yes.
7. How? Because their own witnesses claimed she did or she directly admitted to doing so during her deposition.
8. That’s impossible. She’d get in so much trouble.  Yes, that’s why she had to publicly apologize.
   Talk to a lawyer who’s tried cases and ask them what it means if someone got nothing other than
   having to apologize to the accused.
9. I don’t believe you, she wouldn’t have filed the suit unless it had merit…

And so on. 

Ironically, from the Cracked.com comments sections:

1. A woman is suspected of sabotaging a charity event with feminism as her justification, even though the event supposedly aimed to support female developers.
2. A more or less reasonable group of people get upset about this, and make the issue somewhat known.
3. An ex decides to share information about this woman's sex life, which picks up popularity because of the aforementioned scandal.
4. A crazy guy builds a conspiracy from this sex life, which may have started with a kernel of truth, but quickly gets out of hand.
5. Misogynists pick up on this conspiracy and go nuts with it, attacking the woman in typical internet fashion.
6. News sites, always eager to paint things in black and white, ignore the concerns raised by the reasonable people and make the issue about feminism versus misogyny, grouping all people who don't praise the woman in the latter category.
7. The aforementioned reasonable people, having been lumped together with misogynists, become resentful of news websites who use the "feminism" debate to cover their refusal to address real issues.
8. Misogynists start backing up the reasonable people. The reasonable people don't notice, being too focused on their new enemies.
9. An unusually high number of comments, videos, and forums posts are deleted en masse for siding with "gamersgate", regardless of whether they fell into the reasonable or misogynist categories.
10. A portion of the reasonable people begin thinking there's maybe something to this whole "conspiracy" angle, and start becoming indistinguishable from the crazies.
11. Repeat steps 6, 7, 8, and 10 until the whole world's gone crazy and everybody is convinced that everybody else is a mis[ogyn/andr]ist and that there are absolutely no mis[andr/ogyn]ists on their "side".

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-i-learned-as-internets-most-hated-person/#ixzz3DU3PU3aN

Greetings!

Today I would like to ask you guys some questions about strategy games.

1. What specific features of diplomacy do you traditionally like the most? I want you to be as specific as you can be. Which parts of diplomacy from any game do you like the most? What parts do you remember long after playing the most?

2. Looking back, how many turns do your favorite games last? This is important to know the specific number of turns the game in Question lasted. 

3. Consider all The 4X strategy games that you have ever played. How do you define what is a good strategy game or a bad one? To you what makes one strategy game good fand another one bad? Consider different memories you have of those games can you remember the parts that made you enjoy that game the most?

Thanks!

Forever now, I’ve been naming my PC’s “Frog-<Year purchased>”, Toad for my home machine and Turtle for my laptop and then benchmarking them.  My

Here’s a brief history of their Passmark scores:

The Founder's Vault has been updated with a lot of new screenshots as we start to get pretty close to announcement.