New Pages
For web site developers a number of new pages have been added demonstrating useful drag and drop, saving and retrieving data. In addition we have provided an Adjusted Cost Base calculator for anyone needing to determine capital gains or loses for tax returns. A super listview control with editable cursor control like Excel or Works.

Very useful for one of our staff was the tablet translator. Basically this provides sound and meaning information for each glyph on a tablet. Each glyph must have a gif. A dictionary is required to tie each glyph to a set of meanings etc. Should save a lot of time in decyphering cryptic items.

All the above can be accessed from the UPDATES page.

Also note that the Caregiver page has been updated; discontinued links are gone and some new links added.

Popular Pages
Monitoring the traffic thru the site has revealed that the Saddam simulations and the Caregivers Page are the most popular with Wine a distant third. We have added a few more links to the Caregivers for those looking to hire people locally or internationally.

We hope that traffic will double next month as more search engines pass thru our pages.

Due to the amount of outside work it has not been possible to deliver the Civil War and Galactic Imperium games on schedule. They are on hold until the Christmas season when it is hoped business will slow down.

New Game - Imperium Romanum
This latest game simulates the empire's fight to survive the barbarian invasions and remain intact. It is available via the Gamers Page.

It still has a few rough edges and is there mainly for our testers to find the bugs and suggest how to make it more playable.

Games are Us
It looks like we are rapidly becoming a games and simulations site instead of a provider of free HTML and Javascript source. The War In Iraq simulation is the latest in a series of games centered on the Middle East and we hope they will draw a lot of traffic thru out site.

The next game will probably be based on the reconquest of the Western Roman Empire by Justinian's generals.

The Search for Saddam Hussein
Continuing with the theme of the middle east we have designed, written and loaded a new simulation all within 3 days. Building on our Ancient Empires experience helped in rapidly producing this new game. As with all our products there is an emphasis on education.

The focus of this game is evident from the title. You take up the reins and try to find Saddam with the least cost in lives, money, prestige and popularity.

Ancient Empires
The save and load game routines are now in place. They will need some more work as some more exotic elements are not yet included. But key data from states, armies and cities objects are. At load the timeline must be run from game start to the date at save time. This is because many objects are created and deleted and to hold all this data in cookies is asking too much.

The city and state statistics need some more investigation. Most cities start with a defensive factor of 10%. Tax rates etc also need to be tailored to the individual empires. This will come with time. Nineveh was't build in a day remember.

The Help or Rules now contains basic explanation of the screen geography and the functions available to you the Human Player.

I have been working on some images to replace the coloured thick borders but I now realize the armies and cities at 10 pixels are too small for good pictures. Maybe I will just create some simple images based on standard games pieces.

If you grab the code and begin working on your own game drop me a message and a URL when ready and I will add a link to it on my games page.

Ancient Empires
The Timeline is now finished running from 1490BC to 539BC the Fall of Babylon to Cyrus the Persian.

The Rules button will now pop up a help screen though the contents are still to be provided.

Given the time frame and the number of turns (6000+ for month moves), the Game Save and Restore logic will be the next important piece of code to be delivered.

Ancient Empires
The last couple of days has seen enhancements to the diplomacy routine.

Within the city panel you can now improve city defences and morale but not for free. Once morale is high enough the threat of rebellion diminishes.

A Next Month button now lets you play in month turns if you do not want to micro manage your army. just click on the army then on the city to be attacked and the computer will do the rest.

The timeline has a few more entries basically the appearance of new states and the historical disappearance of others due to barbarian invasions. However a lot more events need to be included here but the functionality is now complete.

Ancient Empires
Was busy last night adding the diplomacy routines. You, as the Human player can now make treaties of peace or friendship, trade or declare war on the other powers. A new relations object was added to the state object to help track international treaties.

Ancient Empires
Over the weekend more work was done to make the game code more OO oriented. Coordination between human controlled movement and computer players was put in place. Now when you click on the compass the human unit's movement instruction is put in the queue and the next turn event is triggered for all players.

The centre button labelled NT is a duplicate Next Turn button. When a movement concludes no action is taken (except for battling other adjacent armies.

If you land on a city you cannot lay siege until the following turn (preparations etc). This NT button easily lets you change from giving movement directions to an assault on the city.

Alternatively you can simply click on your army then click on the city you want it to take and the computer will ensure your army gets there and launches at least one attack providing the army has the strength, supplies and morale to perform the attack.