How to turn a fun game into a competitive battle

I was on BZFlag for a few minutes today, and one guy genoed his teammate on accident.

He then said "lol".

That simple phrase set off an argument about whether laughing at your own mistake is ok or not. I was for it, Evil Bob, an administrator at the server, was against it on the grounds that it means your a cheater or an intentional tk'er.

Here's a screenshot of part of the argument. I'll get some more up shortly.


Update: I accidentally deleted the rest of the screenshots, so they won't be forthcoming. Oh well. See if you can get in touch with Winny and ask him for the server logs if you want the rest of the conversation.

Javascript Ray Tracer

So I just ran into a Javascript ray tracer:

http://www.slimeland.com/raytrace/

It's incredible that the whole ray tracer can be done in Javascript. Admittedly, it's a bit slow (it took around 5 minutes to render a 250x250 image of a flowerpot), but it's still way cool. If I can't find any raytracing algorithms out there in Java (which I haven't been able to yet, but maybe I'm just blind), I'll probably see if I can port this one. I have quite a few ideas that I'd like to use a raytracer for.

Hmm, on second thought, maybe I should just use POV-Ray.

%* in batch files

So I was reading through the compile script generated by GWT, and encountered a really random string of characters: %*. I did a Google search, and it turned up 0 results. Does anyone know for sure what this means? From where it's positioned and from the docs on that particular script, I think that it evaluates to all of the arguments passed into the batch script. If this is true, it would be really nice, since it would make it so that I could avoid doing all of this shift and %1 stuff in a batch file to get a list of all of the arguments.