Although I made a long post about how I needed to do more game making rather than playing, I still caved in and installed Civlization IV; I'm so weak. I really wanted to see what Civ looked like in 3D. I've only played through the instructed part of the tutorial and then had a look at the leaders, but it looks rather nice and the gameplay additions look interesting. My only gripe from my brief look at Civ IV is in the unit's audio confirms everytime you give them an order; it doesn't seem to work for me when an ancient warrior speaks a modern language. I guess I have to play nations where they speak a language I can't understand; given they've retired Babylon I might have to play as Saladin instead (when I actually can get to play a full game; darn addictive Civ being too long to budget time for [grin])

Things are slowly moving along with coding. It's taking me ages to get used to the Xcode environment. Setting everything up seems to take forever and there's a whole bunch of annoying linking errors that are infuriatingly frustrating to sort out, even for my nearly empty starting project. I was stuck for two hours trying to figure out why one header file (signal.h) kept having parsing errors even when nothing included it; turns out that it was clashing against the standard C header file of the same name, darnit.

But now I've got SDL up and running and hopefully Boost soon. I haven't used Boost before so this is a good excuse to use it. I'm planning on basing Diagonal heavily around signals (or events or messages; I still don't know which of those three terms is the most appropriate), so it makes sense to try to use boost::signal to start with. I'm a bit concerned it might be overly feature rich for what I need, and there might be performance issues if it's core to the whole system, so I'm going to encapsulate it into a signal class of my own. This will also give me a chance to play around with templates and operator overloading again, which I'm still not that comfortable (I'm a C coder at heart, although one that likes OO design).

In other possible interesting news I accidently stumbled across Dan Marchant a.ka. Obscure's blog post earlier today about Grand Theft Auto Syndrome and found it both interesting and something I agree with. Just putting in a plug for Dan's insightful blog.

Additional:
I just noticed that my journal has broken the 40,000 view mark. Huzzah! I wonder how many of those views were from me checking for comments...