LOLCHRIST

I'm not convinced pollution in the modern or industrial sense would add anything to a setting like Elemental, but poop in the streets? I'll second that!

I've mentioned this before and I still think it's a good idea. The editor will need testing too, and it will give people a chance to get their mods ready for launch.

"Kharak is burning." *sniff*

I don't hate EA, but I do think it's harmful to the industry for so much of the games publishing market (and by extension funding for development) to be concentrated in just a few huge companies. Then there is obviously the whole ea_spouse thing and their overwork practices. Not much more to say on that. And digesting Bullfrog, who made so much awesome, is pretty unforgiveable. So many unique game series ended: no more Dungeon Keeper, no more Magic Carpet. What if I never

It's sort of sad throwing away old computer bits. "But this 500mb hard drive cost me £200!"

Normally I don't give a stuff about event movies: they get old and I turn them off. The crusade videos from Medieval 2 Total War get my history sense tingling though - very atmospheric.

I predict that the new cards will be excessive in terms of power draw, heat output and price, and that only people with more money than sense will buy them until at least after Christmas.

Oy! Programmers are not lazy! The term is 'constructively idle'.

"Imagine there's no countries." I guess that at some level these are the early signs of the replacement of national governments with an internet technocracy. The next steps are: 1) Move increasing amounts of government and bureaucratic functions online for efficiency gains. 2) Translation software good enough to genuinely bring down the language barrier. 3) Increasing automation of processes. 4) Develop AI. 5) Fight the great AI war of the 2100s

I was going to jump in with the ancestral throwback stuff, but other people have gotten there first, and with much better detail than I would have been able to provide. Thanks for the education guys.

George III was the Kwisatz Haderach, and the British Empire was his golden path :D

Well there's a discount on it in the sale this weekend, so I was going to buy it, but the discount doesn't seem to be available in the UK? In fact it seems to be quite a lot more expensive than it should be at the current exchange rate even ignoring the discount.

Somehow I figured this thread would be about what the US should do with the health system. Oh well, head above the parapet. I develop medical software for hospitals in the UK (not anything to do with the national program for IT/connecting for health, before people start throwing fruit...), and I have to say the National Health System here really does meet all the bureaucratic stereotypes. Everything is slow moving and tied in red tape and paperwork, and you frequently have to dea

You may wish to Google for Game Theory. It is rather good.

I enjoyed the demo too, may be picking this one up, depending on how healthy the bank balance looks.

Elemental might be set in the wrong time period for this sort of thing. If we're talking the Middle Ages, banking was very very limited. Transport networks were too poor to support any significant free market: early experiments in removing tariffs and restrictions on movement and sale of goods, for example, lead to hoarding, famine and rioting. Most trades happened outside what would today be the taxable economy, through barter and obligation rather than currency. The fundamental unit of weal

Master of Magic was made by SimTex, as was Master of Orion. I do wish that someone would give the Gollop brothers, who made the first few X-Com games, a dollop of money to go and make cool stuff. Laser Squad Nemesis just doesn't really do it for me: I need campaign map stuff, can't survive on tactical combat alone. I mean really, how many 'best games ever' lists has X-Com been top of? Bit of investment here people.

I played Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. Which I've been meaning to get around to for some time now. As per the reviews, the game mechanics (combat, some inventory stuff, light puzzling) are pretty pasty, but the story was good enough to keep me sucked in all of Sunday, and leave me bleary eyed for work today.

I watch the trailer once and then always skip it. I think Dawn of War probably got a bit of a review points bump for its intro, but generally don't people just want to get into the game? Making a cool menu screen like Civ 4's could be nice though.

SoulSprit, I wouldn't go overboard with the 'final' in Java, as it can clutter your code. It's also just a bit too defensive for my tastes: you need to think first do you really mean that no-one should ever be able to extend this class? Having said that, it's very useful if you want your objects to be immutable for thread safety purposes (data that can't be changed doesn't need to be locked). Reference counting doesn't apply to Java. Java has garbage collection to clean up unused obje

I'm not looking to move at the moment, since where I am is quite interesting/challenging, but I am curious, so... What would you look for in a website for someone applying for #6: a .NET job. I ask this because I am a pretty major techy, and artistic work tends to drain the enthusiasm out of me. So, while I nominally work for a web development company at the moment, I've asked not to be put on any GUI stuff, and they mostly have me doing databases, services and deployment instead.

I always get a giggle from Civilization's scoring system, where you get a title "the Terrible", "The Conquerer", "The Pathetic" excetera, based on your score.

Sword of the Stars can be quite fun, you could give that a go. Or there's always the ourdoors.

I would tentatively suggest: Don't use magic numbers: significant values should not be typed inline, but rather defined somewhere obvious. Program to the interface, not the implementation. If you rely on the internals of someone else's class then you have no guarantee that it won't arbitrarily change. Write unit tests for any core functionality, for components which you intend to share or reuse, and for complex state machines. Small commits, frequently. Don't k

Twiglet of the Arnor had an increased beta period and that worked out really well in my opinion. Go for it, and make sure we get the modding tools during the beta.