Faith Based Games

With all this ruckus about Grand Theft Auto leading children in the land of inequity, and a cry issuing forth from the faithful for Faith Based video games, one would think that I might be feeling a bit alarmed about the future of gaming. This could not be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is, that a nice mix of Faith Based video games, and a good Literal Interpretation of the Bible will make for some real serious entertainment.
The next video game I want to see Rockstar Games put together should be a real retro piece, about ancient Jerusalem. Basically, you start out as a youth, torn between the allure of the big city, and following the word of God. The city is a rampant hot-bed of sin of course, and then there are all the enemies of God just waiting to be slain. Basically this game has sort of a Jedi Knight approach. If you follow the path of the Lord, you become sort of David like. If you choose the wicked path, you are left to fend for yourself.
David's path is a holy one, killing sinners, maybe even with some competition thrown in to keep things fun; sort of a mini-game approach. Of course, God's servants need to do more than just kill sinners to gain his favor. One fun level could be made up of an armed assault against the Philistines, where the player has kill 200 uncircumcised men, then lop off their foreskins in order to buy a wife. To really appease the Christian right, we are going for a straight up literal interpretation here, so the graphics and viscera need to be real good. Of utmost concern, is the collection of foreskins, which should be as realistic as possible.
Even the very faithful get bored of killing and foreskin collection from time to time, so perhaps we could mix things up a bit with a few Sim type levels. Using the spoils of holy war, one could buy land, and slaves to work on it. Balancing a kingdom and all of the financial details of being a land/slave owner can get tricky at times, so maybe some occasional beating would be necessary to keep the slaves in line. The Bible provides guidance on how handle slaves, including how to beat them to death if need be.
Another thing that a budding new leader needs to consider is progeny. David was certainly serious about his. Points would be rewarded based on the number of wives one accumulated, and at higher levels, the option of using one's kingly powers to send soldiers off to their deaths in order to steal their wives would certainly be available. The point system in this part of the game might be a bit difficult, but with a little ingenuity something could be fleshed out.
The successful leader and follower of God would be need to balance war, finances, and procreation with a firm and righteous hand. This would certain provide a challenge to todays young gamers.
Taking the path of wickedness provides a much more complicated situation for the game designer. The Bible provides a straight and narrow path for believers, but sinners and heathens seem to be cut loose to pursue whatever ends they desire. Perhaps those who chose not to follow God could become merchants, or even join up with the enemies of the city, and try to defend the women and children of their villages from the rath of the righteous. Getting captured and sold as a slave would certainly be a concern, as would death by stoning. In fact, choosing the path of wickedness might lead to more of a survival and escape sort of game. Obviously all the details haven't been worked out, but come on Rock Star, get to work!

Gigabit!

Gigabit used to be an expensive, and far away dream. Newegg.com now has gigabit cards for $10 (vs the $60-$100 they used to be) and gigabit switches for $50 (vs $200+ previously!). Suddenly gigabit is fairly cheap! I did some research on the cheaper cards Newegg offers, and decided on the GE1000-AXP from GigaFast because Linux supports them fairly well. Three of these little cards arrived arived Monday, and today I got a few minutes to test them out. The GE1000-AXP installed on Mandrake 10.2 without ANY user intervention. I didn't want it using DHCP however, so I did have to assign it a static IP (about 10 seconds and 5 mouse clicks... Linux is just SOOO difficult I'm exhausted).
Normally one would expect about this much performance from the different speed ratings:
(eqn: (10mb * 1,000,000)/(8*1024*1024) or 10 million bits with 8 bits per byte, 1024 bytes per Kilobyte, and 1024 Kilobytes per Megabyte)
10mb = 1.2 megs per second (10.2 minutes per full CD)
100mb = 11.9 megs per second (1.03 minutes per full CD)
1000mb = 119.2 megs per second (6.2 seconds per full CD)

In real life, these speeds are not actually attained. The 100mb interface on my main windows system can do about 8 megs per second, and the 1000mb interface on my Linux workstation can do about 20 megs per second. This is about half as fast as some of the results obtained in this benchmark. I don't know if this is because of the cheapness of the card, switch, or network cable. I am using genica cat 5 (maybe e?) cable, with ends I put on myself, and an eight port Netgear GS608 gigabit switch. Apparently there is also a bottleneck in the PCI bus which limits speeds to well below true gigabit, but some things I've read suggest that this is in the 400mb range. None the less, 20 megs per second is pretty dang fast, and twice as fast as my old network. Interestingly, if I copy files from the server with two systems at the same time, the total bandwidth is about 26 megabytes per second... hmmm.