cephron wrote:
I have played with Meccano and Kinex in the past, but neither really caught on with me.
I think both Meccano and Kinex are more recent than what I'm thinking of, and at least Kinex is aimed at an older age group than what I was then.
cephron wrote:
They're great for building contraptions, but one can't really flesh out a character or a world or story with them--these being the backbone of my lego play as a kid. Ah, except spaceships. I did make lots of spaceships, and Meccano/Kinex isn't too bad for those.
At that age, I was most interested in building spaceships (and, more often, "war machines"); for creating a world, I'd draw a map (badly), and for creating a story or a character I'd write. (And I think I started to turn from building machines toward worldbuilding more generally only as I was growing out of the construction-kit toys.) In any case, I've folded most of the more memorable machines into either my secondary-world or (mostly) my strategy game.
cephron wrote:
I can program in Java (a lot), C/C++ (with lots still to learn), and C# (with a few tabs open to remind me how lambda expressions and delegates work -_-).
I started in Basic (QBasic in my childhood, then Visual Basic in high school), then moved to C, then to C++. After learning Java in college and using it for most of my courses, it's become my primary language (though I have hopes for the newly-released language Ceylon).
cephron wrote:
I've written a couple trivial games, and started code bases for a space combat simulator game (involving n-body simulation!
) and a generic RTS. While I imagine the RPG is the genre most conducive to glorifying God (because of the story-telling aspect), I'm certainly interested in other genres. Ironically, the only RPG I've actually written so far is a small, old-text-based-style RPG.
I've tried my hand at writing text adventures (and still want to try again ... one of these years ...). I think that interactive fiction (text adventures) is the genre most conducive to glorifying God through story-telling, but I think that nearly any other genre can be turned to his service---a RTS or turn-based strategy game in which the player was encouraged to follow the ethics of just war is one example that's quite interesting to me. The reason I questioned about RPGs is that there seems to be such a glut of mediocre-at-best "RPGs" nowadays, and telling a story
well in an RPG requires a
lot of work---and that's just on the story, to say nothing of the design and programming on the presentation side.
cephron wrote:
And to conclude...
*high five for self-consistent cobha physics!*
What I find particularly interesting are a) unusual ways of applying a new feature (such as: if you have the ability to establish permanent portals connecting possibly-distant points, and they don't have a minimum size, you could use the to vastly speed up computer networking!), and b) reasons why a "magical" solution hasn't put all the more mundane ways of doing the same thing out of business (my usual rule is: fast, effective, cheap, choose at most one).
cephron wrote:
And...
Pelagian controversy!?
Where!? *Runs off to look at Reiyen's Red World subforum*
Well, not so much the
controversy as that I found its metaphysics of the nature of man (and other beings) troubling and far too close to Pelagian notions for comfort. But we've agreed to disagree on how close to the heresy it actually is.
Well, people are gifted in different ways, I do agree with that. 
(Oh dear, two Lukes, my brain will be messed up soon. 
), which is a start. I bet having people to share one's work with makes a big difference, motivation-wise.
I know 