Promising God

Don't do it! In the Christian context, the bible teaches us that when we make promises to god, they can be used against us. James 5:12, of The Message translation, declares that we shouldn't emphasize statements with tag lines like "I swear to God", try to speed God up by bargaining with him, or tempt god with anger against us, as we may fail and then have lied directly to god!

As a person, I have an understanding of the universe that is limited by what I am able to see and comprehend. That means I may not be thinking of every possibility when I say something. As well, some situations are outside of my control. When then should I, or anyone else this applies to, make a promise that can be unforseeably hard to keep or, worse still, impossible to keep? Why should someone voluntarily risk being called a lier to his or her god?

Making promises to god creates red tape. They needlessly complicate what someone can or can't morally do. One who makes such a promise has to continually think about it to ensure that it's not being violated. The promise should probably even be written down if it lasts a long time. What if the promise keeper were to forget about it?

Not keeping a promise to god is as good as actively committing a crime against someone else. A feeling of immense guilt may arise because in the back of one's mind, there are two basic choices carry it through or shirk it some more. This is in opposition to having wronged someone in the past as it is in the current tense specifically. If one no longer wishes to carry through on a promise made to his or her god, he or she had better hope that his or her god will release the promise out of mercy. Not following through with god's wishes would create a situation where one is opposing his or her god and, by definition, god never ever loses a power struggle. His reputation can't be compromised at any cost.

An RPG Coding Quest: Simple Shooter

Wahoo! I've finished programming a small game I call Simple Shooter! It all started with a three hour crash course in C++ programming for my friend who hasn't programmed in years. Those initial 3 hours I spent tutoring my friend turned into about twenty as I continued to work on it after. Now, I'm left with a side scrolling space shooter with two enemies and a scrolling background! Mad props to my friend Peter who created the ships using Blender! Although this game is very simple, I have learned a few things about programming in the process:

Every module of a program should be segregated, by class for example. If the sprites were isolated, they same code, with minor changes of course, could be used in nearly any two dimensional game.

In gaming, giving the effect of something as opposed to actually providing it can be just as good, if not better. The ships could have been programmed to move really fast with the camera following them and the background could have been still but just appeared to move, due to a changing viewpoint, but that would have only served to complicate the code, introduce errors, and provide no noticeable difference in game play.

Programs don't have to be perfect! It took about twenty hours to program this game. Granted, I haven't programmed my own game in years before this, however it still goes to show that programming for a particular situation without caring about future expandability and caring about code that follows coding guidelines and the standards set forth in other areas of the same code is enough to think about. The important thing is getting the job done and still easily being able to understand what is going on by looking at the existing code at a later point in time.

If you know me in real life and would like a one-on-one tutoring session that results in a similar game, please let me know!