More bug fixing based on Alex's input. Added API for Activists, Political Opportunities, and Interview access. Fixed a bug in the votes equation. Added lazy evaluation for votes. Fixed another but in Movie Producer Fixed a couple of bugs in the Anchors.dat file. (VT->VA and MD->ME) Tweaked the keyboard input system more. Not perfect yet. There's more that needs to be done. I can't believe that there already isn't a proper solution in Pear. What did GalCiv do? Fixed a bug in the MainU...

Cleanup for the Encore demo... Checked in updated vote calculation. Added new event images from Scott. Fixed TV window. Added Kill Ad button. Fixed Lawsuit so that you don't go negative. Changed travel expenses to 25k instead of 50k. Changed operative travel expenses to 5k instead of 10k. Media Darling no longer deletes herself. Default domestic status is peace instead of rioting. Changed "Ghopher Speed" to "Gopher Speed". Fixed a bug where the Movie Producer was lowering the opp...

Tonight my wife, pregnant 7 months, pointed me to an article on her "pregnancy board" about the Quiznos sub comercials featuring the "Spongmonkeys". The article and the 34 replies were all women who couldn't stand the little buggers. However, the majority of husbands found the comercials hilarious and quite catchy. They'd even go around the house humming the tune and saying "They got a pepper bar!!". I fall squarly this category of husband. Luckily for me, my wife finds the commercials amusing...

Content generators generate content. Right? Spent the last few days coding up the Political Machine Editor. It took a while, but it's finally done. Really complex stuff. At least we don't have to type them in by hand Here are some screens: The main question tree shows the flow of the conversation. The "Main:" section is the questions that the users will see. The "Pool:" section are the questions that are available as counters questions from responses. &n...

Last night was the first official meeting of the unofficial Stardock Board Gaming Group . It was a blast! Paul was blasted and everyone had at least 5 (count em' 5) good laughs. Amidst all the counter striking going on in the office, a core group of 5 adventurers set out on a quest to play non-video games in an office that makes video games. Ooooh.... Attendees: Angie - "Move that here..." Jeff - "I'm so confused..." Paul - "What was that again?" Ste...

Daily for the last couple of days. * More work on getting political machine up to spec. * Interrupted by a big PM Machine. * Pumped out the issue editor. * Got sidetracked a little to help out on the GalCiv editors. * Started the Question editor.

* Spent the last couple of days shaping and molding political machine to fit the spec. There's more work than I initially thought. The game has changed quite a bit from its first incarnation. It'll probably take me the rest of the week to do. It looks like a fun game though as soon as we get everything in. * Brainstorming about Issues and Questions. I'll have to create editors to make content generation easy.

p>A very busy day today. * Finished converting the network code to work with our new screens. The only thing left to do is add code to handle the case where the host opens, closes and kicks a player. The host can open and close the game repeatedly if they want. This can cause a strain on our network startup/shutdown code. * Added the new Korx and Drath graphics to the MapEditor. *Also cleaned up the Scenario Editor interface. * Gave the latest editors to Cari for posting in the n...

Not so much to show today. Spent the entire day reworking our networking code so that it can hook up to our new screens properly.

Fun day. * Checked in the multiplayer political machine so that Scott could start adding screens. It should work for everyone. George and I were able to play a mock game. * Wrote the streaming operators for most polmachine objects. We can use them to stream to/from a file for saving and to/from a buffer that we send across the network to make sure that the games stay in synch. * Spent some time with Scott and Paul tweaking the PolMachine UI. Tomorrow I should get some real multiplayer sc...

Microsoft conspires against Howard Dean. How's that for a catchy headline? Google is going to eat this up I played the Howard Dean For Iowa game for a good 15 minutes today. Only 15 hours until the election where it looked like Howard Dean was going to take Iowa by a landslide, Microsoft intervenes. Go figure. Poor guy didn't even have a chance

Ever wonder what a programmer does on the weekends? Here's our trip to the Porcupine Mountains (Porkies) in Michigan's UP. By the way, the local food is the Pastie. It's pronounced "paasty" not "pasty" and the place we stayed at is called "Ont'noggin" not "Ontonogan". Get it right. Enjoy Steff and Joe