Rant: the passage below is purely my opinion, feel free to disagree in the comments….

Yep you heard right, im one of those godless people bent on destroying the human race.

All jokes aside, I really cant understand what the big deal/social taboo is about Atheism. From my experience, Its very rare you come across someone who will openly call themselves an atheist, even in fairly unreligious countries like Australia. Its not like I wish harm upon anybody, or harbour hatred of other religious beliefs…. actually all i really hold true is the thought that, even if there is some form of supernatural force, what's the chances we know exactly who they are? Still i do not condemn the ideals, virtues and holy relics upheld by specific religions, i just treat them from a scholarly perspective…. to me, they are artifacts designed to teach from what was learnt in the past, not words from the gods themselves.

One effect the declining numbers of "church going" people in western countries have caused, is that the extreme faithfuls now have greater power over their particular sect. This has lead to greater animosity between paricular religions, and increased extreme acts of faith.

I remember in high school a teacher once telling me you've got to really smart and sure of yourself to be an atheist…. I replied "Probably less sure of yourself than to explicitly follow a single religion". What makes one religion more probable than another? Especially since they are generally based on supernatural occurrances and beings, so we cannot use past "natural" experiences as a yard stick.

Life:

Just got off uni (which is really cool, by the way) for 2 weeks break, but i've still got 2 assignments which sucks, especially since one is a group assignment AKA one person (me) ends up doing all the work. Just discovered that my Aunty converted to Mormon-ism which finally tipped me over the edge and made me write the rant.

GameMaker:

Done a little work on Tribal, mainly makes sprites and backgrounds so i can develope a consistent artistic style. Just discovered why i never made high res games in the past…. animation. Making the textures is fairly easy but animating it is a real bitch…. so ive developed a simple skeleton based system (single object though) for the humans.

Also made it so you can change the lighting quality on the fly…. which is having a wierd build up of video memory usage which i cant quite pin down (maybe another bug to add to the tally). Implemented a super secret smoothing techniques and a blur to the lighting so scaled surfaces dont look as bad. The super secret part refers to drawing them at 0.5,0.5 pixels instead of 0,0 because if you have linear interpolation on it will do a hardware accelerated 2x2 box blur…. neat.

Also moved back to GM6…. I know yoyo blogs are banned but i gotta say GM7 is really shitting me.

Heres a few good quality picture of tribal with new, more consistent sprites and showing what difference changing the light quality has:

<a href="http://img243.imageshack.us/my.php?image=tribal02007041113375314cf5.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/952/tribal02007041113375314cf5.th.jpg" border="0" /></a><a href="http://img149.imageshack.us/my.php?image=tribal02007041113375871wa2.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/521/tribal02007041113375871wa2.th.jpg" border="0" /></a><a href="http://img149.imageshack.us/my.php?image=tribal02007041113380301ry9.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/6259/tribal02007041113380301ry9.th.jpg" border="0"/></a>

Cheers,