CariElf

CariElf

Joined Last seen Member # 43920
9 Posts 95 Replies 2,542 Reputation
Reply to Add Some Magic To Your Desktop with Abracadabra from Stardock Design! in Press Room JoeUser Forums

The separation of Church and state doesn't mean that we should exclude all references to religion from the public. It means that we aren't supposed to force people to conform to a religion. I also think that you shouldn't be required to represent all religions when representing one. As long as you're not defaming other people's religions, there shouldn't be a problem. If you're not secure enough in your faith or lack thereof, then maybe you need to rethink your beliefs. I believe tha

0 Replies 1,444 Views
Reply to Putting marriage first in Home & Family JoeUser Forums

JillUser, you made your point effectively. I was just inspired to add my own comments on the divorce rate. You are right about kids benefiting more from healthy marriages; the best kids I know come from happy marriages. I will keep your advice in mind if I ever find someone I want to marry. :)

6 Replies 3,741 Views
Reply to You don't have to slave to have a good Turkey in Home & Family JoeUser Forums

Last year at my grandma's house we used those heavy duty divided paper plates, plastic silverware and paper cups. My grandmother was agahst, but my aunts and mom (who usually do most of the cleanup work so that Grandma doesn't have to) were very pleased. The only stuff they had to clean up were the dishes and utensils used to prepare and serve the food. Since we have at least 20 people at Thanksgiving dinner every year, this was an immense timesaver. I think that last year we also

3 Replies 2,239 Views
Reply to "Bring Me To Life" in Music JoeUser Forums

KarmaGirl: Well since I have to keep hitting the play button, I have more incentive to just listen to music I have on my harddrive. :) When I get the CD, I'll probably play that in the car and at work for awhile, then just shuffle the tracks into my playlist. JillUser: I play the acoustic guitar. I'm not great, and I don't have a lot of music education, but I've picked up some of the terminology. :) Josh Grobin is an excellent singer, but his songs (at least the ones that I'm familia

5 Replies 3,888 Views
"Bring Me To Life" in Music JoeUser Forums

I first heard this song by Evanescence in the movie Daredevil, and it just stuck with me. I usually listen to soft rock stations, but I've started listening to a different station lately, in protest of my usual stations already playing Christmas carols. So I've been hearing this song more often, and the more often that I hear it, the more I like it. The music is a juxtaposition of a delicate piano arpeggio and a driving beat from the guitar, completed with passionate lyrics. <

5 Replies 3,888 Views
Reply to Putting marriage first in Home & Family JoeUser Forums

I think that another reason that 50% of marriages end in divorce because of 2 reasons: (1) it's too easy to get married and (2) it's too easy to get divorced. A lot of young people these days take marriage as just the next step in a relationship. If it doesn't work out, well, there's always divorce. I have a friend who was married for less than a year. He had doubts going into the marriage, and not just the cold feet kind. I had doubts about the marriage, although I didn't say anything unti

6 Replies 3,741 Views
Reply to Evil Plan Continued/Zion's Defenses Were Made By Fools in Internet JoeUser Forums

The reason that there weren't more ships with EMPs is because most of them were destroyed at the end of the second movie. That guy who was possessed by Agent Smith set off the EMP too early, alerted the machines to their presence, and the swarm of machines were able to take out all the ships except those that were out looking for Morpheus. Morpheus' ship was destroyed, and the one with the ship crew taking out the power plant was either destroyed or no one went looking for it. That left two

17 Replies 29,209 Views
Reply to Matrix Revolution in Movies & TV & Books JoeUser Forums

Mouse was annoying, but only in the sense that most adolescents are annoying. Given time to grow up, he probably would have turned out ok. I liked Tank and Dozer. These people were soldiers. Any of those people in the Matrix could be and were used against them as soon as one of the programs took them over. The programs used people still trapped in the matrix like terrorists strapping bombs on little kids. The greater good isn't pretty. It isn't fair. It isn't easy to see. And h

7 Replies 30,859 Views
Matrix Revolution in Movies & TV & Books JoeUser Forums

As I left the movie theater today after seeing the Matrix, I felt much the same as I do leaving church on Good Friday. It's rather like leaving after a funeral. Except that you have the added guilt of knowing that it's your fault, and the fault of countless generations before you that Christ had to die on the cross. (Catholics really get into the guilt factor on Good Friday). On Good Friday, I know that Easter is coming just a few days away. But I always ask myself, was it worth it?

7 Replies 30,859 Views
Write Code to Make Your Life Easier in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Our code library, Pear, has been around since 1995. It consists of the building blocks that we've used to create all of our games since Stardock started making games for Windows. There are parts that are outdated, and others that are just junk, but it has served us well and I've been updating it whenever I need it to do just a little bit more. One of the things that makes life easy for us is the library class. The library class ,and any class derived from it, can scan a directory given a mask

0 Replies 5,438 Views
Reply to Why Christmas drives me insane. in Home & Family JoeUser Forums

I love Christmas but I do agree that the stores do start too early. The day after Thanksgiving is plenty of time to start the holiday season. And I'm going to be sick of Sleigh Ride the first time I hear it. I usually stop listening to the radio once they start playing Christmas carols and play my own CDs.

5 Replies 3,701 Views
Fun with Operator Overloading in Software Development JoeUser Forums

No screenshots for this one; most of the work that I've been doing lately doesn't have any visible results. For the most part, I've been working on the Gal Civ 2 project. At first, we just made an engine that was separate from the Gal Civ code, so that we could muck about with the engine without screwing anything up. It also meant that we could get visible results more quickly. However, when the time came to start porting that into the Gal Civ2 project (which started out as just a

2 Replies 7,255 Views
Halo Isn't Angelic, Just Fun. in PC Gaming JoeUser Forums

I've always been against first person shooters for two reasons: 1) It's a game devoted to violence. There is no other purpose to play a FPS other than to wreak havoc. 2) The few times I tried playing the original Castle Wolfenstein at my cousins' house, I sucked. Not surprising, since I hadn't had any practice. The guys here at work all like to play FPSs, and they started playing them at lunch or after hours on the LAN. They asked if I wanted to play, but I wasn't really

2 Replies 31,777 Views
Fog of War Made Easy in Software Development JoeUser Forums

I'll admit it. I tend to overlook simple solutions the first few times I look at a problem. Take FOW. I had gotten to know the FOW code in Gal Civ pretty well in trying to get rid of some of its more annoying bugs. In GalCiv1,since it was 2D, we had to draw it with tiles and sprites, which meant that we had to calculate edges for the FOW, so that we would use the right sprite, and have those nice curved edges. This took three steps: first the ship moved, and updated the FOW counters

1 Replies 11,562 Views
No more 2 bit cursors! in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Since I started working on our 3D engine, I've found that there are certain subjects which a lot of people post questions about, which don't get good answers. There are tantalyzing half-answers, followed by people posting "Thanks, I got it working now", but I rarely find a definitive post that says "This is how you do it," step by step, with possible pitfalls. Yet it often turns out to be a simple answer, like in my article about how to compensate, using in-engine code, for the difference betwe

1 Replies 8,658 Views
Reply to Bigger and Better in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Paul: The planets spin, but they don't actually rotate around the star. They do have little moons that rotate around them, though. But you'll need to be able to click on the planets, so moving them would be a PITA for the player, and slightly less so for the AI's pathfinding. :)

5 Replies 10,201 Views
Bigger and Better in Software Development JoeUser Forums

The biggest thing that I got done today was modifying the star and planet placement code. I doubled the sector size from GalCiv1 (from 12 to 24 tiles across), and limited the number of stars per sector to 3 instead of 5. Each star can have up to 5 planets, and each planet cannot be further than 3 tiles away from the star. Here's some screenshots: <img src=

5 Replies 10,201 Views