I remember the days of line-by-line programming in BASIC. So for me, the introduction to Visual Studio as an IDE when I started work in C# was like going from horse carriages to spaceships.

Now, I am tasking myself in creating a full-blown IDE for a game (sim) called Armed Assault. Usually, games only seriously interest me when they have one of two (or both) qualities: A) good editing capability to extend the entertainment beyond the original program's design B) good simulation of real-life problems. Now, the latter sounds very broad and very “realistic”, but that is not my intention. Not many games/simulations properly reflect a decision system which mimics the dynamics of real life. I could dive into a huge pit of discussion about how ineffectual I think realistic strategy games (like chess or modern day computer strategy games) can be, but I won’t!  ;)

No, the focus was a ... Read More »

This is partially a rant and partially a duck. It's like that odd animal with a duck-bill and looks like a beaver... what was that again? oh yeah.. Dana Carvey.

Ok back to my rant.... as a software programmer, I get alot of UI questions. The most horrendous and annoying questions ever asked of me usually involve typing. For some reason, somewhere along the line, the idea of "typing" words into the computer became standardized somehow to include the following:

• ONLY CAPITAL LETTERS
• Occasional Missing Vowls
• Excessive - uses of the - dash instead of - oh I don't know - using perhaps a paranthesis - or a colon - or some other punctuation mark

It might be that every person who works for my company types with two fingers. It might be the fact they have never heard that one can change a font size, shape, color, etc. Whatever the reason might be, it gives me great pain in my head reg ... Read More »