Sorry I did not respond to the latest Posts sooner. I was off the computer due to family problems. My uncle Mack on my father's side died, and I had to attend the funeral in Louisiana. To make up for connection withdrawal symptoms I have been reading the latest science fiction book by David Weber and John Ringo - "March To The Sea". It is the sequel to "March Upcountry", so unless you read that one too you would lose a lot of the references to previous background data. Another book I would like to read again is "The Number Of The Beast" by Heinlein. No telling what that old geezer could have done if he had been a software developer rather than a fiction writer. I suppose that writing software was too structured an activity for his appetite. Too bad he died Last decade, he probably could have contributed even more ideas that would have made games like SE IV even more interesting.

Now that we have a MUCH bigger house we will be able to buy bookshelves and unpack my 60 U-HAUL cartons of science fiction. I have over 4000 titles and 1000 months of pulps, mostly Astounding/Analog and F&SF. I collected them and read about half between 1979 and 1989. Then I got an out of town job and they went into storage for 12 years. It cost me about $20,000 for them, so by now they are worth over $100,000. Anybody interested ? Lots of them are first edition or in really good shape bought new or both.

After I apologized I spent a lot of time reading various things posted by the forum members. I am just beginning to appreciate the abilities of those who are deeply involved with the game, particularly the modders and game site owners. I never visited the forum until the day I posted my first article about research strategy and my first hack at map creation. Compare map3 to map10a and ROFLMO if you like - I did.

As I mentioned in the OT .... business thread, I have written over 5000 pages of software. But my Last job in 90 got me FIRED for "excessive absenteeism". It was a really big company with clout in the computer industry, so since nobody was even willing to INTERVIEW let alone HIRE me after that, I have to presume I was BLACKLISTED. I have been toying with the notion of going back to work now that computers have become really powerful. One of my greatest frustrations early on was that 64k address space, then with overlays the few megabytes of hard memory available. Virtual memory was just becoming practical with higher disk transfer rates when I quit writing software in 93. With the latest drives and 32+ bit address spaces there is room enough now for 3d and virtual reality applications even on a modest home pc. Once I do what I can to help Aaron with his execution time problem and maybe even his engine AI, I will be looking for a JOB instead of just PLAYING games. If nothing comes through, I will just start reading my old Favorites and some of the better titles by new authors. There is a lot to wade through because back in 86 I made a list of my 300 Favorites and another list of over 1700 good ones worth reading over again at least once. I published those lists on disks for Amiga Users as Freedom Computing Publications Hotdisk #1 and #2. There never was a 3 because I ran out of money. Anybody ever seen those lists? You needed the Scribble! utility to read them, a fatal error on my part. I sent out 300 of #1 but only a dozen of number #2 due to lack of feedback....

If Schrapnel can tolerate it, it would be interesting to see what other people think is the best science fiction book ever written, and give their generation as well as when they started reading sf ?
Edit : Typos

[This message has been edited by LCC (edited 10 August 2001).]