I'm in the process of making a game with another developer. We've been at it a couple months now & the game is a racing game. Instead of cars though, we chose to make an aircraft racing game. I've working on the controls and the AI that pilots the NPCs. I thought I'd share a few observations that have come up in trying to balance realism and game play.

I happen to be a pilot and have enjoyed pleasure flying. It is very exciting when you are actually at the controls performing a loop or a roll, or flying 10 feet off the water a few hundred yards off the beach. Very, very exciting stuff in real life. It's a real adrenalin rush. Performing the same maneuvers in a flight simulation program is about as boring as watching the grass grow. Sure, you can do a roll or loop or fly a few feet above the terrain in Flight Sim, but believe me, it ain't the same. And, after you've done it once or twice in Flight Sim, neh, been there, done that. In a real airplane, it never gets old.

I think the type of people who buy Flight Sim are the type who want to learn about all the gages and knobs and navigation. I don't think Flight Sim is sold on the basis of making the gameplay experience exciting. Most mainstream video games, however, strive to give that excitement. Like in a car game, for instance, you can bash into a guard rail and have a 50G impact and bounce off and still drive away. Not realistic but very, very, exciting. In the same game, you may drive off a cliff and fall hundreds of feet and not survive it. That's probably a  realistic part. So for each game, there is a balance between realistic and 'not so realistic' things that make the game play what it is.

Lately I have been working on that balance in the game I'm working on. I tend to want to gravitate making things appear and behave realistically. I love physics even though I have little formal education in it. I tend to feel satisfied when I create code that accurately depicts motion or rotations as they would happen in real life because of real physical forces. Usually though, since I am making a game whose priority is exciting game play more than realism, I inevitably realize that the game play is suffering so I go back & embellish the forces or physics or cheat with them some in the interest of more exciting game play. I always makes me feel like I've somehow “given in” even though I understand it is a priority. For the gamer, exciting game play is a higher priority than realism.

So,, it the end of March 2008. A few months ago, right before Christmas, I stepped on a scale and it topped 190 lbs. It must have been one of those threshold numbers that clicked in my brain because at 189, I couldn't care less about my weight. At 190, I went into a mild shock about how fat I thought I was getting. Anyways, I decided to take action.

I've never given much value to all the fad diets going around. The engineering 'left brained' part of me always knew they were more show than go. Ultimately I subscribed to the "eat less,, move more" philosophy. So I started eat less and to go to the gym.

What I'm amazed with that it's 3 & 1/2 month later and I'm still going to the gym. I've reach that point where if I miss a few days I feel like I really got to go.

Right now I weigh 170 and I'm still dropping pounds.

About the eating vs exercise. I really haven't cut down too much on eating. I do avoid the obvious high sugar/fat stuff like cookies & cake & bacon and fast food. But not completely. I still have the occasional cookie at work or dessert when Terry & I go out. But other than that I haven't cut back that much. I am developing this theory that the majority of my weight loss is in the exercise part. I've always lived a mostly sedentary lifestyle but I'm really liking what regular exercise feels like. I'm giving exercise at least 70 percent & eating changes 30 percent of the credit for my 20 lb weight loss. In my opinion, if you want to lose weight, it's all about the exercise,, dieting is the minor part of losing weight.

I revised KeepAlive today. The addresses in the text boxes were being loaded properly from the settings config method. The pinger class has to be re-initialized after the values are added.
So, The revision is complete and tested. Click the "Check fo Updates" menu item to install the revision.

Not exactly xna info but... KeepAlive2.0 has been released and can be downloaded at www.s-hazen.com
This is a little .net app that is designed to assist users of Swift64 systems in corporate aircraft. It reduces the number of what appears to be inadvertent disconnects and can save substantial connection costs.