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Jon Shafer
Jon Shafer is an American designer and programmer of computer games. He was the lead designer of the strategy game ''Civilization V'', developed by Firaxis. Currently, Shafer is the president of Conifer Games, a video games development company he founded in 2012. The studio's first title is ''Jon Shafer's At The Gates'', a 4X strategy game similar to ''Civilization'' in which players command a barbarian kingdom with the goal of defeating both rival tribes and the waning Roman Empire. The budget for developing ''At the Gates'' is primarily made up of funds raised through a Kickstarter campaign held in February 2013. Life and career Shafer was born and grew up in Aurora, Colorado. He learned to program when he was 8 years old from his father, and as a child also cultivated a passion for history. These interests led Shafer to Sid Meier's ''Civilization'' series. He developed fan mods for ''Civilization III'' while in high school, and became a beta tester for the ''Civilization ...
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Aurora, Colorado
Aurora (, ) is a List of municipalities in Colorado#Home rule municipality, home rule municipality located in Arapahoe County, Colorado, Arapahoe, Adams County, Colorado, Adams, and Douglas County, Colorado, Douglas List of counties in Colorado, counties, Colorado, United States. The city's population was 386,261 at the 2020 United States Census with 336,035 residing in Arapahoe County, 47,720 residing in Adams County, and 2,506 residing in Douglas County. Aurora is the Colorado municipalities, third most populous city in the State of Colorado and the List of United States cities by population, 51st most populous city in the United States. Aurora is a principal city of the Denver metropolitan area, Denver–Aurora–Lakewood Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) and a major city of the Front Range Urban Corridor. History Before European settlement, the land that now makes up Aurora was the territory of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute), and Očeti Šakówiŋ (Si ...
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Sid Meier
Sidney K. Meier ( ; born February 24, 1954) is a Canadian-American programmer, designer, and producer of several strategy video games and simulation video games, including the ''Civilization'' series. Meier co-founded MicroProse in 1982 with Bill Stealey and is the Director of Creative Development of Firaxis Games, which he co-founded with Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds in 1996. For his contributions to the video game industry, Meier was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. Early life and education Meier was born in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, to parents of Dutch and Swiss descent, giving him both Canadian and Swiss citizenship. A few years later, the family moved to Michigan, US, where Meier was raised. He studied history and computer science, graduating with a degree in computer science from the University of Michigan in 1975. Career Following college, Meier worked in developing cash register systems for department stores. During this period ...
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Programmer
A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates computer software or applications by providing a specific programming language to the computer. Most programmers have extensive computing and coding experience in many varieties of programming languages and platforms, such as Structured Query Language (SQL), Perl, Extensible Markup Language (XML), PHP, HTML, C, C++ and Java. A programmer's most often-used computer language (e.g., Assembly, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Lisp, Python, Java, etc.) may be prefixed to the aforementioned terms. Some who work with web programming languages may also prefix their titles with ''web''. Terminology There is no industry-wide standard terminology, so "programmer" and "software engineer" might refer to the same role at different companies. Most typically, ...
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Beyond The Sword
''Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword'' is the second expansion pack of the turn-based strategy video game ''Civilization IV''. The expansion focuses on adding content to the in-game time periods following the invention of gunpowder, and includes more general content such as 11 new scenarios, 10 new civilizations, and 16 new leaders. Gameplay ''Beyond the Sword'' offers several new features: *Corporations: A new gameplay feature, similar to the "religion" feature, allows players to create corporations and spread them throughout the world. Each corporation provides benefits in exchange for certain resources. *Espionage: Now available much earlier in the game, this expanded feature offers players many new ways to spy on opponents, stir citizen unrest and defend their government's secrets. *Random Events: New random events such as natural disasters, pleas for help, and demands from their citizens will challenge players to overcome obstacles in order for their civilizations ...
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Warlords
A warlord is a person who exercises military, economic, and political control over a region in a country without a strong national government; largely because of coercive control over the armed forces. Warlords have existed throughout much of history, albeit in a variety of different capacities within the political, economic, and social structure of states or ungoverned territories. The term is most often applied to China in the mid-19th century and the early 20th century. The term can also be used for any supreme military leader. Historical origins and etymology The first appearance of the word "warlord" dates to 1856, when used by American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson in a highly critical essay on the aristocracy in England, "Piracy and war gave place to trade, politics and letters; the war-lord to the law-lord; the privilege was kept, whilst the means of obtaining it were changed." During the First World War, the term appeared in China as ''Junfa'' ( 軍閥), ...
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Internship
An internship is a period of work experience offered by an organization for a limited period of time. Once confined to medical graduates, internship is used practice for a wide range of placements in businesses, non-profit organizations and government agencies. They are typically undertaken by students and graduates looking to gain relevant skills and experience in a particular field. Employers benefit from these placements because they often recruit employees from their best interns, who have known capabilities, thus saving time and money in the long run. Internships are usually arranged by third-party organizations that recruit interns on behalf of industry groups. Rules vary from country to country about when interns should be regarded as employees. The system can be open to exploitation by unscrupulous employers. Internships for professional careers are similar in some ways. Similar to internships, apprenticeships transition students from vocational school into the workforce. ...
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Game Programming
Game programming, a subset of game development, is the software development of video games. Game programming requires substantial skill in software engineering and computer programming in a given language, as well as specialization in one or more of the following areas: simulation, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, physics, audio programming, and input. For multiplayer games, knowledge of network programming is required (the resultant code, in addition to its performance characteristics, is commonly referred to as the game's netcode by players and programmers alike). In some genres, e.g. fighting games, advanced network programming is often demanded, as the netcode and its properties (e.g. latency) are considered by players and critics to be some of the most important metrics of the game's quality. For massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), even further knowledge of database programming and advanced networking programming are required. Though often engaged in ...
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Python (programming Language)
Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. Python is dynamically-typed and garbage-collected. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including structured (particularly procedural), object-oriented and functional programming. It is often described as a "batteries included" language due to its comprehensive standard library. Guido van Rossum began working on Python in the late 1980s as a successor to the ABC programming language and first released it in 1991 as Python 0.9.0. Python 2.0 was released in 2000 and introduced new features such as list comprehensions, cycle-detecting garbage collection, reference counting, and Unicode support. Python 3.0, released in 2008, was a major revision that is not completely backward-compatible with earlier versions. Python 2 was discontinued with version 2.7.18 in 2020. Python consistently ranks as ...
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Civilization IV
''Civilization IV'' (also known as ''Sid Meier's Civilization IV'') is a 4X turn-based strategy computer game and the fourth installment of the ''Civilization'' series, and designed by Soren Johnson under the direction of Sid Meier and his video game development studio Firaxis Games. It was released in North America, Europe, and Australia, between October 25 and November 4, 2005, and followed by ''Civilization V''. ''Civilization IV'' uses the 4X empire-building model for turn-based strategy gameplay, in which the player's main objective is to construct a civilization from limited initial resources. Most standard full-length games start the player with a settler unit and/or a city unit in the year 4000 BC. As with other games in the series, there are by default five objectives the player can pursue in order to finish the game: conquering all other civilizations, controlling a supermajority of the game world's land and population, building and sending the first sleeper ship to ...
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Conquests
Conquest is the act of military subjugation of an enemy by force of arms. Military history provides many examples of conquest: the Roman conquest of Britain, the Mauryan conquest of Afghanistan and of vast areas of the Indian subcontinent, the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire and various Muslim conquests, to mention just a few. The Norman conquest of England provides an example: it built on cultural ties, led to the subjugation of the Kingdom of England to Norman control and brought William the Conqueror to the English throne in 1066. Conquest may link in some ways with colonialism. England, for example, experienced phases and areas of Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Franco-Norman colonisation and conquest. Methods of conquest The Ottomans used a method of gradual, non-military conquest in which they established suzerainty over their neighbours and then displaced their ruling dynasties. This concept was first systematized by Halil İnalcık. Conquests of this sort did no ...
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Expansion Pack
An expansion pack, expansion set, supplement, or simply expansion is an addition to an existing role-playing game, tabletop game, video game or collectible card game. These add-ons usually add new game areas, weapons, objects, characters, or an extended storyline to an already-released game. While board game expansions are typically designed by the original creator, video game developers sometimes contract out development of the expansion pack to a third-party company, it may choose to develop the expansion itself, or it may do both. Board games and tabletop RPGs may have been marketing expansions since the 1970s, and video games have been releasing expansion packs since the 1980s, early examples being the ''Dragon Slayer'' games '' Xanadu Scenario II'' and ''Sorcerian''. Other terms for the concept are module and, in certain games' marketing, adventure. Characteristics The price of an expansion pack is usually much less than that of the original game. As expansion packs consi ...
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Beta Tester
A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help improve the software or fix software bugs still present in the software. There are several models for such a life cycle. A common method is that suggested by Microsoft, which divides software development into five phases: Pre-alpha, Alpha, Beta, Release candidate, and Stable. Pre-alpha refers to all activities performed during the software project before formal testing. The alpha phase generally begins when the software is feature complete but likely to contain several known or unknown bugs. The beta phase generally begins when the software is deemed feature complete, yet likely to contain several known or unknown bugs. Software in the production phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, as well as speed/performan ...
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