Procedural Genrated Universe

[martin]

carrying on with the "how best to learn programming" debate, I started off with flowcharts in school - which gave me a goo basis for understanding problems broken down into their very smallest tasks; then I messed around with C++ and VB for a couple of years, got bored, gave up.
Then a year later my interest was revived by a game called roboships (http://roboships.sourceforge.net/) which I played, beat most of my mates with some programs, and gave up again. However I'll always have an interest in programming from that point onwards because now I've started seeing everything broken down into the smallest tasks.
Then I'm here now, I go to college where they teach visual basic, my previous experience with thinking in a programming way (if not actually using a real programming language) means that I (and a friend of mine who also played roboships) rush ahead of the class, develop lots of arcade games, build half an MMO:RPG (then realising I should plan things before I build them ) and finally move on to developing a 3D version of roboships with my friend (it uses spaceships for combat) - which is what I'm doing now.

[R.Reagan]

funny, thats almost exactly what i had in mind to start with, also in a 3d enviroment. i don´t think a good battle have to be visual delight, with small icons you have a much higher limit of (different) units.
embedded in a mmorpg a small program for creating inimitable ships and change weapon-and-stuff attributes would be nice. then the user could create a few expansive prototypes, give the front of the ships more armor, the left side some rocketslots, engines for fast acceleration and medium fast end-movement and a laser-turret on the top (and so on) and a small fleet of medium fregatts are ready for a manoeuvre. if they fit in the users plan he/she can produce them in series. scanners would inform the player about the enemy ships flaccidities(?).