This week has been rather busy. We posted another beta last week, so we had the usual upsurge of activity on the forums. We've had very few new bug reports, and people are very pleased by the beta. One thing that is confusing them is that most of them have turned off their prompts so that they don't realize that they are spending money when they automatically build a starbase. A few people have been having problems with saving scenarios they make with the scenario editor. One of them ...

We have a new rep from SPA (they are the people who print CDs and stuff if we need them- which isn't very often). He stopped by to say hello and try to sell something. He handed me a CD and said: "It's currently a PDF, but we plan to do something better with it soon." By the end of the conversation, he didn't sell me anything, but I am pretty sure that he will be buying the DesktopX auto-run/application presenter when we get it ready to sell. Life is funny that way.

What a day.  So I got the the 9 missions for the Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy campaign completed today. That meant both the maps and scenarios. I have to say, it's going to rock. Anyone who's enjoyed GalCiv in the past is almost certainly going to like having the ability to play specific maps and scenarios as well as a campaign. And I also think those players who found GalCiv to not have enough "depth" will find the scenarios to bring in enough strategic and tac...

Alright, I know it has been said already by Brad, but the sub forums are up and running. Although starting out small for now, each Category can potentially have X-amount of "Sub-Topics" to post under. So, take for instance Politics. When you are posting you will see two drop down menus. If you have selected the Politics Category, then the page will refresh with a second drop down menu displaying the following options: Topic: [General Discussion] Politics->Democrat Politics->Democr...

Enhancements --Added a Date form field (M/D/Y) to the sdnet_login page on stardock with form JavaScript validation for those who are not 18 years of age or older. Will be testing and uploading tomorrow. --Added Quote system to the Article Reply area of JoeUser. Now you can reply to an article and quote from that page. --Added Google advertising to JoeUser.com Fixes --Minor Layout fix on Political Machine.com for adding spacers to the full width of the page for better support and to pr...

To organize the site better for future growth, we have implemented topics (sub-categories). There will be nested sub-topics as well.What we want to do is decrease the # of channels overall and instead let users post into those fewer channels on a wider range of topics. Users interested in those topics will be able to delve deeper and deeper into that category by going to a particular topic.Let me give you an example:Let's say you're really into history. You click on the history forum or channel ...

Well, today was productive as usual. Here is a list of all the updates that were worked on. Updates / Fixes: --Replace the old JoeUser splash logo with a new high-res image. (thanks Paul for the .png ) --Fixed the Political Machine intro page where it wasn't filtering HTML completely. Grrrr Regular Expressions are buggy! --Fixed the small tabs under the main forum sections on the Political Machine message board (test server). Design --Worked on a concept design really quickly for...

My management prof tells us to be effective readers we should read the intro; scan the subtitles; read the conclusion; then read the whole article. I'm so tired I read the conclusion and then saw the end notes and got excited thinking that I had read the whole article..... Back to page 1 of 32.....

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...

i get jealous of all this activist left wing type groups you get to be a part of being in ottawa and all. seriously i've looked and found nothing here. there's going to be some sort of socialist talk on tuesday about the whole banning of religious clothes in france but i have class then so i can't go. kristen wilkinson, you're too cool. i will definitely play the role of nerd and read your human rights handbook over the summer... i can TOTALLY picture vicki doing things just so it will look g...

I can't say I'm happy overall with the company's progress. It's no one's fault. It was just so many things are interconnected that it was bound that things would get off track. We got IconPackager 2.5 out which has the smarter packaging in it and the encrypted format so that we can protect our intellectual property better from quasi-warez companies. We then followed that up with IconDeveloper. Which we followed up with BootSkin. But it has bene DesktopX 2.1, the hugely ambitious upd...

I always seem to end up a day behind in my blogs, so hopefully I can catch up today. This is what I had planned for yesterday: *Check to see what happens when you try to increase the difficulty from the race setup screen and not all the alien races are enabled. *Show saved games from the campaign on the Select Campaign window. *Make sure that the default text works for missions winning + losing without victory/defeat text. Well, I did check to see what would happen when trying to incr...

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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.

Yesterday and today I spent working on the campaigns. I had most of the code in place, but it was jury-rigged with #ifdefs in the old screens, for testing purposes. So I had to move that code into the new screens where they belonged, taking it out of the old screens, and make sure that the code worked. I also made a test campaign, which had the additional bonus of testing the editors. So now on the new opening menu, you click on Start Campaign, and it brings up the Select Campaign window. ...