Granted, the back and forward motion of the tank is also left and right accross the screen, but I still think it would be far more intuitive for the arrow keys to be reversed. My problem is that I just can’t get my fingers to learn that half the time the up arrow key moves the gun on the turret up, and half the time the up arrow key moves the gun down. When the gun is pointing straight up, the up arrow key moves it down, but when it is pointing right, the up arrow key moves it up. And when the gun is pointing left the up arrow key does nothing. When the gun is left, the down arrow key moves it up! And when the gun is up, both the up and down arrow keys move it down, each in different directions.

Since the gun only moves left to right, it makes much more sense to have the left and right arrow keys control the gun. I hate having the up arrow key move the gun down half the time and having the down arrow key moving the gun up half the time. With the left and right arrow keys instead, the left arrow key would always move it left and the right arrow key would always move it right. Much simpler.

Your first problem is undoubtedly a caching issue, as the earlier version didn’t have the high score screen. As far as performance issues go, there is a fixed 30 frames per second rate. It’s just that flash is pretty slow and some machines can’t keep up. If I could be sure everyone had flash 8 it might help a little. Reducing the framerate would indeed do what you’re talking about. Alternatively, I could adjust the game detail to default to the “medium” setting. Finally, I could couch the entire game in an HTML page to fix the aspect ratio to a smaller resolution (thereby increasing the performance). But ultimately we’re not giving out prizes for higher scores, and I hate for the people with fast machines not to get the full silky smooth experience they currently have.

Interesting. On my home computer the high score stuff didn’t appear (or I didn’t notice because I was in a hurry to leave the house when I was playing but all the new pandas did. On my boat computer (which is newer and quite a bit faster) the new pandas and the high score dialog showed up at the end.

What’s really interesting (and I haven’t yet checked to see if it’s a caching of an older version of the game problem) is that the game plays probably 5x faster on one computer vs. the other and my scores are WAY lower on the faster machine. Relatively speaking I have forever to react and line up shots on the slower machine.

Amongst my other experiences in the computer world I was a game programmer for an oddment of years during the past decades (my first games were written around 1980 for the Atari 2600 VCS and some other early machines and my last were massively multiplayer internet based circa 2000).

Anyhow, the speed problem was one we’ve had to deal with since the old days when we were doing arcade game knockoffs on home console systems. The home consoles were slow compared to the arcade hardware so we had to cut corners somewhere to get the game speed more or less the same so the home experience was similar to the arcade. Sound and graphics detail was what got cut in almost all cases. There’s a very similar problem today when writing games that can run on many different platforms. You might want to compromise a bit by throttling the speed Pandamonium runs on fast systems so it’s similar to what slower machines can achieve. I’m not really familiar with the development environment you’re using (I’ve only used VC++ to make downloadable executables) but I should think you have access to (at least) a millisecond resolution counter/timer that can be used to make the game run are more or less the same speed on computers with substantially different CPU and graphics throughput.

Just a suggestion.

As far as arguments, I don’t recall either side hitting a homerun, but Johnson held his own. I definitely felt that Johnson had a more sympathetic personality—Provine was kind of condescending, but I don’t suppose that should come as a surprise. The video’s available for sale at http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/videos/v004sk.htm.

What you are speaking of is theistic evolution. I would say that most ID’ers would _not_ hold to theistic evolution, and here’s why:

The whole notion of Intelligent Design is that Intelligence is a causitive force _now_, not before the earth but right now, and is visible even in everyday life. Since people can make directed, intelligent choices it is an observable force, therefore scientifically studyable. If it occurred _before_ the beginning of the world, it would not be an observable force.