Games, Floors & Development

I've recovered a little, and managed to please the wife by laying a new floor in the front room.  As a reward I got two things, first I've ordered the C++ Tour book by Bjarne Stroustrop, so you'l be hearing what I have to say about that when it arrives.  From reading I've done a head of its arrival it appears to be a good introduction to the information in the C++11 language, and as I've already got that book I hope this new smaller volume acts as a gateway to knowledge from that the main tome.

The floor laying itself was a bit of a pain, the property is a 1920's built semi, 1928 to be precise, and taking up the 1990's carpet I found 1950's underlay - which had turned to powder - so that all got cleared, revealing what initially looked like really nice cherry wood floor boards, but which on closer inspection showed a bit of rot.  The rot came in the form of water permeating under the front door and along a seam by capillary action into the board ends, rotting them.  So they for chopped off and new board spliced into place, and a small area shaved to level it... Hang on, I hear you cry, why not replace the timer joists?... Well... There are none...

In the strangest turn of events the cherry boards are laid directly onto a flat(ish) bed of concrete... I know, crazy as that sounds, the father-in-law, a builder and trades man of 47 years was a little stunned when I said boards laid straight onto bitch-amen and then on concrete; so much so he came to look.  So there you go, no rotten joists to deal with, sealed the cracks and done...

I then laid a damp proof membrane in plastic, the 3mm thermal levelling board on that and then a half decent laminate on that.  Quite proud of the job I did, its not perfect, only the second laminate floor I've laid, but there's no major bodges and I even cut it in and around two door frames really nicely, so the floor is contiguous through into the hallway down to the front door.

The other reward I got for this was Endless Space... in the Steam winter sale...

I've had my eye on this 4X game for a long time, and my initial thoughts were... this is SPACE!  Not a difficult leap as it is a 4x galactic expansion game.  Now I've not played GalCiv, so I can't compare there, but this was so much like Space! that I got a little bored of it...

Until, that is that I pushed past the caring level and kept on going.

Now, its not perfect, the interfaces are not informative enough, the tutorial sucks really badly, and really the game is very very very like Space!... The cut scenes are okay, but repetitive, the AI fight back on the old rock-paper-scissors... or should I say.... Missile, beam, projectile ordering is very annoying, just as you've created your class if vessels defending against their one attack, they switch, that's cool... you switch back, or balance your fleets... only for them to... wham... change almost instantly... and come back with a huge number of ships.... Making me wonder whether the AI cheats.

But 4X space has been on my mind, for a while, I really want to make a very detailed economic model, and research model, and military model and make it pretty, and cross platform, and an MMO.... 4X MMO... in space... persistent world for people to fight games like this in... Now, if I can make it as pretty as this I'd already be a millionaire, which is to say, I can try but would fail without artists to help... But I could make my idea more informative, having seen this game I know I can fix some of the bugs in it.

I might have to start just such a project...