Thanks! I'm curious, I've heard a few people mention that it feels off balance a bit... what do you think?

I like your flower. It's simple and has good style. Nice job.
Thanks for telling me about your programming.
CG

I just wanted you to know that I visited here. I hear good things about how you're doing with your classes and your computer "stuff." I'm happy to hear these good things. Love, Corry Grandma

That machine sounds awesome. I wish my laptop that good -- hey, I'd be more than happy if it only had a real graphics card... is there a law that all tablets have to have crummy graphics cards?

hmmm... for all my complaining about this tablet, I still can't wait to get my hands on it...

BTW, do I smell an Intel chipset? I didn't know you had it in you, switching to Intel and ATI at the same time! (Just after ATI was acquired by AMD, nonetheless...)

Yeah, most manufacturers put lots of junk on their systems; its not just Dell, but Dell does seem to have the worst reputation. The first thing I'd do after buying one of their computers is reformat the hard drive, just to get rid of the garbage they put on it. Of course, they make that difficult to; often they don't supply an XP install disc... of course, that's not an issue if you're planning on installing linux. :)

I heard about XNA studio. It seems pretty wierd. With this software, you will be able to write games that will run on a '360, but in order to actually play the games, you'll have to pay an anual subscription of $99. It makes sense, from a pragmatic standpoint; Microsoft feels that it has to protect its revenue stream, but still, for them to demand that I pay them extra, in order to run arbitrary code on my machine...

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is, that you will be able to easily mod your '360 for one hundred bucks. How many people will avail themselves of this option, remains to be seen.

I have resurfaced. I could never make a game because I'm addicted to realism. If anything, I'll be stuck making art and not animation (I hate rigging). Blender is awesome..... But it lacks some tools (maybe a few more merge options?)but overall it's the best free tool.

It's an Acer Aspire 5670, I got it for $900, last one the store had ;)

What's the laptop brand/model?

I did my houses in blender, and then exported them into my own custom file format. From there I import them from my engine, much like the static meshes in Unreal.

What are you making the houses in? Are you building them in your engine, or building them somewhere else and then importing them?

oops... I put the windows in this morning. Mebbe I should replace them with penguins... ;)

Cool! The door certainly improves the overall quality of the building. Extra points for the fence, and the lack of windows (we don't need nasty Windows...)

Civilization has been lurking around the corners for about a month or two, I just never sat down with the time to make models for it ;) I've spent alot of time this week on computers that aren't set up for DirectX programming...

Thanks for the comment!