Maybe you’re right that voice control isn’t quite there yet. If the interactions were fairly codified with a specific vocabulary (“Permission denied!” “Engage!” etc.) it might be tractable in the near future.

Thinking about non-combat space gameplay: I wish somebody would evolve trading beyond the buy-low/sell-high model. I haven’t got any solid thoughts on it yet. Maybe if the assets were not easy to value relative to each other (more of a barter model, in other words, as opposed to a model where everything can be liquidated to cash). I’d love to see a game built around negotiating deals and writing contracts (as opposed to just buying and selling stuff in markets). Also maybe there’d be a model where the high-margin markets are inherently limited in volume, so that as you rise in economic prominence you move through distinct niches of service. For instance, you might fly diamonds through blockades when you’re small, but as you get bigger you lose the ability to do that and have to switch over to hauling commodities in bulk for less margin. It’d be sort of like the RPG experience-per-level curve.

But I found that I can mostly enjoy I-War using a 360 gamepad and keyboard. And playing it at a ludicrously high resolution through a glide wrapper takes a little of the sting away. But I’m sure that using my old joystick would be infinitely better than the gamepad. If only I could plug it into my current computer.

As for using Kinect to give commands to crew members, I’m not convinced that the tech is quite ready for that level of interaction, yet (particularly across languages and accents) But it’s only a matter of time, and it’ll certainly be a killer app when someone does work out how to make voice commands as flexible and reliable as a physical interface. I think that Apple’s new “Siri” system on the iPhone 4S demonstrates both how amazingly far we’ve come in this regard, and also how tremendously far away we still are from achieving a truly usable system.

The Star Trek/Wars visions of starships are heavily based on World War 2-era (or earlier) naval ships, aren’t they? Lots of people, lots of oral communication. Touring old battleships always amazes me with the quantity of manpower that was involved in running them. Modern ships pare that back a lot. I’ve read a fair amount of fiction that follows the navy model as well (David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, for instance, or Elizabeth Moon).

You could have some fun with the Kinect, I think, making a starship captain game with voice recognition and pointing.

Anyhow, I will note that while Dwarf Fortress doesn’t ask for donations within the game, it does request them in the accompanying documentation. But if people prefer to think of what I’m predicting as “donation-supported freeware”, then I won’t object too strenuously. But my real thinking was “a pay-what-you-want purchase where you can make the purchase after downloading and playing the full game for as long as you like.” Which amounts to a similar thing, but with a very slightly different mental emphasis.

Why #CPU+1 threads ? I’d have instinctively thought that it would be #CPU-1 so that the OS could have a CPU. Is it so that there’s always one waiting to go or something ?