RTFE

Would you notice this if it were in the EULA (End User License Agreement) that you click through when you sign up for an account on a website, or install software, or, say, login to an online game?

By accepting this agreement, you admit your public support for and endorsement of the following statements: "baby seals should be clubbed," "puppies and kittens are for eating," and "Wookies can't dance,"as well as other statements that we, in our sole discretion, decide to attribute to you in the future. You furthermore consent to have your name, likeness and personal information (and that of your immediate and extended family, existing now and as may come into existence in the future), including but not limited to your address, personal email, phone number(s), place of employment, income tax statements, social security number, spending habits, itemized list of all pornography purchased, borrowed, stolen, downloaded or otherwise viewed, all credit cards and bank accounts, sexual preference, blood type, criminal history report, history of illicit drug use, personal sexual history (or lack thereof), and personal hygiene and grooming habits) made public in any form existing now or that may be developed in the future, including, but not limited too, town crier, hand bills, car windshield flyers, book form, displayed on the side of a large building in l0 foot size letters, silkscreening on t-shirts, painted on coffee mugs, shown on massively huge tv screens at sporting events, television scolling text 'crawlers', read over loudspeakers at places of public transportation and aboard airplane flights, inclusion in fortune cookies, emailed to everyone in the world, displayed on orbital blimps, laser-painted on the face of the moon, spelled out in asteroids or transmitted into the aether via Morse code).

No. Probably not.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Support flood ebbing
I'm cresting the hill of support issues as a result of our annual December patch crisis and all its follow on. Still some slogging to go, but should be back to normal very soon.

Damn Ghosts!
There's a fix test for a memory leak from the corpses now (damn ghosts!) in open test now: see the Production Notes.

SSE2 is the way
Looks like very, very few players (much less than 1%) are still on non-SSE2 processors. So don't be surprised if we soon stop supporting them entirely. Doing so will let us save some time on creating multiple architecture executables and, much more significantly, fixing things when they break for one but not the other (to say nothing of diagnosing correctly which one a player was using when they encounter a problem).

Idea for next MMO: You buy the box, the game is free.
You pay us $2000. We ship you a good box and give you access to the game for at least 4 years. You install any other hardware - your deal is void and No Refund. You can install approved software only.

The box itself won't be the $2000 cost, we have to cover the costs of game production of course. We'll open it up for people who don't buy the box, after release, but if you want support, that's extra.

Overtime, we could probably decrease the cost of the box+game, or upgrade the box.

Actually, for $300 year, we'll send you a new video card every year.

Blogger's idea of bold is strange
Select some text in blogger and press the b button, and in the HTML you get

[span style="font-weight:bold;"]this[/span]

Yet [b]this[/b] works fine if you enter it manually. Neat, huh. (No, not really).

And the [pre] function does not.

Aside: Reading I Should Have Done
I picked up Melville's Moby Dick the other day and started it. I think I heard someone talking about this on National Public Radio not too long ago, and how it was very innovative, etc.

Fart jokes and mentions of bloody fighting in Afghanistan in the first short chapter! Who knew? Some phrases that catch my mind:

...[I]t is a damp, drizzly November in my soul...

With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

...[A] purse is but a rag unless you put something in it.

...I always go to sea as a sailor.

Hello, Kungsbacka!

I occasionally check my Google Analytics report on viewership of this here pseudo-blog.

According to it, most of you few who visit here, at least recently, have been here before and are coming via Toto's blog (Chamfering). At least most of the visits.

Kungsbacka, Sweden is the top visitor at 16%, followed by Vancouver, BC. Then it drops a lot, but Scandanivia (26) beats out the USA (23) with Falun and Sundbyberg Sweden, Tromsø, Norway and Kuopio, Finland. Sweden alone ties America, so I'm gonna call that a win for Sweden!



I think Bangkok, Thailand is most distant but Gladesville, Australia and Palmerston North, New Zealand are also in the running given the flat map is a distortion of reality, and 'great circle arcs' and such make it hard for me to estimate (and I'm too lazy/busy-with-other-things to look it up). Rugby Union fans, I wonder?

I don't have much to post. We think we've fixed a few things with the game that should go out very soon, such as the ATI disappearing bushes and a memory leak.

Ugh.

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