0x10c no doubt has fans from all kinds of backgrounds. Some people seem to just be hoping on the ability to jump aboard someone elses ship with a gun and kill everyone on board, some just want to cruise the universe in style, I want to program (and a little of the other 2 aswell)

Let's face it, the whole point of space exploration is a hope that on one planet you will find an ancient race or some ruins with awesome machines or some old fleet of abandoned alien ships that will let you rule the galaxy... If you know all you can find are just different geological formations (no matter how unique) with different biomes (no matter how green) and resources (no matter what quantities), what's the point of exploring?

Check this, it's quite interesting: http://www.java-gami...26010/view.html (random universe generator with random alien races and artifacts and history generator).

That SpaceGen java applet entertained me far more than I thought it would. I had a fit of laughter when the enslaved antoids declared independance from the empire of immortal depth dwellers, entered a civil war, and then used a time machine to wipe out their former oppressors.

A history generator like Dwarf Fortress or this particular program could spice things up a lot. But the computation time for the sort of scale I am thinking of is ridiculuous. The latest verson of Dwarf Fortress for a medium world takes a full day to run on my computer.

This is getting my creative juices running though.

The latest verson of Dwarf Fortress for a medium world takes a full day to run on my computer.

As much as I can't play it (never worked it out even with tutorials) I do find it somewhat hilarious that it is capable of being slow on some machines when it must spend no time at all rendering. It just has so much going on "under the hood". Why they had to simulate dwarves having broken arms, severed femoral arteries or some ridiculous level of damage simulation for an object represented with a smiley or sad face will forever be beyond me.