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Really, was there any need for this? The main issue I have with Microsoft is they have been a pretty horrible company in general over the years. Rolling back on the limits they were going to place on the Xbox One only happened after the internet reacted with a massive case of 'do not want'. It still remains to see what happens a year, or three years down the road. It is entirely possible that these policies will be reintroduced. Bear in mind that this was the company that brought us the phrase 'embrace, extend and extinguish'.

When I was in school I had similar thoughts - why do I need to learn X, I've no interest in it, and I'll never use it etc. The fact is, though you may have a fair idea where you want to go in life, you really cannot predict where life will take you, and gaining a broad knowledge base is probably more useful to you in the long run than learning everything there is to know about one specific subject. I agree wholeheartedly that there are probably better ways to teach though. A lot of teachers are great at the actual teaching part, but extremely bad at illuminating why someone might care to learn any of these things they are so intent on ramming down your throat. About the age of most computers in schools, I can certainly relate. I went to a fairly decent school in the 90's, we had three sets of computers, an Apple Mac network, a 286 network, and (i kid you not) a BBC Micro network. The problem as I saw it was, any exposure we had to these machines was being taught to use spreadsheets. Just spreadsheets. Even today I gather that this is basically the case - learn to use MS Office, and if you're extremely lucky some HTML. I felt terribly let down by the computer 'education' I got in that school, as it was the only subject that genuinely interested me at the time. I actually got into trouble for finding out that on the BBC network we had there was a command for viewing the screen of another computer, and used BASIC to run this in a loop, so I could play about programming, and if needed, pull up some other student's screen to make it appear that I was following the class. It took some arguing, but eventually they did see my point of view that this probably demonstrated ability beyond what they were trying to teach me, and considering every single essay I turned in for every class was word-processed, on balance I probably knew what they were trying to teach me. (My handwriting is terrible incidentally.)

The major pro of Dwarf Fortress is it's being developed by a two-man crew who are fanatically developing the game that they themselves always wanted to play. The major con of games like Gnomoria, Towns, and Game of Dwarves, is that they're commercial attempts to cash in on the genius behind Dwarf Fortress.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_video_games The only title on that list that I've actually heard good things about is 'Oregon Trail'. Unfortunately Squad seem to be in an extreme minority of games companies have even the remotest idea of how to make education through gaming a compelling thing. Outside of that, my other suggestion would be to look at the Raspberry PI project. www.raspberrypi.org Good luck with your endeavours, you're the kind of teacher I think we all wish we had.

This would make my day.

Considering that a water supply would be a prerequisite, I would think that you'd design your habitat with an inflatable outer skin, and fill it with enough water to block the radiation. Or just cover it with local soil, assuming that the soil itself is not radioactive.

ZX Spectrum: Manic Miner Jet Set Willy 2 Arkanoid Rainbow Islands All of the Dizzy games... and most anything else that the Oliver twins made for Codemasters that had the words 'Advanced' and 'Sim' in the title. Commodore Amiga: Frontier Secret of Monkey Island 1 & 2 Eye of the Beholder 2 Syndicate SNES: Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Mario Kart Secret of Mana Street Fighter 2

I'll add a few of my personal favourites: Fiction: Arthur C. Clarke - Rama Series (Personally I enjoyed it more than the 2001 series, which he's far better known for. A movie version has been in development hell for at least a decade.) Neil Stephenson - Snow Crash, The Diamond Age Robert Anton Wilson - The Illuminatus Trilogy, The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy William Gibson - Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero Phillip K Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (I keep meaning to read more of his stuff) Non-Fiction Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff There's a lot more, but that's a few off the top of my head.

I think what you may be looking for is something along the lines of the diamond-square algorithm. Basically take your 512x512 bitmap, imagine laying it out on a 1024x1024 grid so you have a data point, a space, a data point, etc. Then to find the mid-point between the two data points, get the average, and add a random amount of say -10% to 10% of the mid-point value to the average to get the final value of the midpoint. http://www.gameprogrammer.com/fractal.html explains it much better (and with picture examples) than I'm doing right now.

Another long-time lurker, been meaning to register for quite a while since buying the game, but the forums are open and I didn't particularly have much to say till now, so here we go. Pity to see you go, would hope that a break clears the mind, and hopefully you'll visit again. I'd hope that whatever remains of the project could get handed off to someone willing to take the project on, it was a mod I was very much looking forward to seeing, I think it's pretty evident I'm not the only one.