0x10C (Notch makes Eve, but better)

[Sky]

I would call it an artistic style. That kind of shading is built out of awesome.

[Paelos]

I like the minecraft graphics.

[Kail]

I would call it an artistic style. That kind of shading is built out of awesome.

I've worked with too many amateur artists who use the term "artistic style" as a code word for "arbitrary choice I made a long time ago and don't feel like changing now no matter how bad it looks" to be able to read it without rolling my eyes.  An artistic choice I could get behind, like if I had the impression that Notch could do the game in a realistic style or had a variety of other stylistic options and he picked this one because it was the best, but I don't get that here.  I get more of a "I can't do decent models, textures, or animations, so here's the game without any of that."  The game can still end up with a style that works (as Paelos points out, some people evidently like the graphics in Minecraft) but it's not something I'd celebrate, since it's not something the author intended or had any control over.

I don't know much about Notch, maybe I'm reading him wrong, that's just the impression I get.

[Severian]

He recently tweeted

Going to have to find a good low poly modeller (who likes to work with people who doesn't know what they want yet) to replace that soldier..

He also tweeted this, which might help you understand his attitude towards graphics

Oh god this is porn to me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dattsmkfzhU

[Mrbloodworth]

Minecraft has great style. Its also completely generated ( All shapes, mobs ETC... )except for the one image sheet for textures ( Originally ). However Notch, like most programers, is a loner. Working with others, especially graphics people, is seen as a road block. MANY programers have issues working with others, especially graphics people due to the time it takes to make and integrate them into the program.

Just like that guy who made that "100% generated" MMO ( love ) with a blur shader. Also, when your slapping whole systems together in afternoons, in java (   ), you need that overhead and space for your less than optimal, never to be refined code.

I like how Phong shading has excited you guys. Because that's like, something no one ever users or does. 

[Sky]

I like how Phong shading has excited you guys. Because that's like, something no one ever users or does. 

I like how you infer that one can only be excited about something that no one ever users or does.

[tazelbain]

Its combo of leaving stuff to the imagination and freeing up the game resource for game play.

[UnSub]

Goddammit.  Well, my interest in this game nosedived.  You'd think that even if he personally can't do the art, with the fifty zillion dollars he made off of Minecraft he could hire someone to at least try to make it not look like shit.

According to the info published elsewhere, Minecraft has made Mojang US$80m since launch. Their earnings / profit in that time were only around US$13m. Yes, it's a lot of profit for an indie title, but where did about US$67m go?

Not sure where you're going with this.  Even if the game only made $1m, that's more than enough to hire an artist or ten.  I don't begrudge the guy his money or anything, I just wish he'd stop half-assing it with the graphics.

Sorry - was pointing out how much money Mojang had to play with. Although Notch could argue that Minecraft had the kind of graphics it had because that's what Infiniminer had it was a choice, it may end up getting in the way of interest in Mojang titles moving forward. And yes, they can afford to pay for better graphics.

[Margalis]

Do you guys even know what phong shading is?

[Paelos]

Do you guys even know what phong shading is?

I have no idea. Nor is it important to me in the reason I like the Minecraft graphics. Most games that try to push GRAFIX! on me end up breaking computers or focusing on some kind of facial bullshit I'll never notice.

I like the blocks!

[Samwise]

It's the same model (with the same set of polygons) in each image.  With the "flat" shading algorithm each polygon has a uniform color and you can see the boundaries between them.  The Gouraud and Phong algorithms are different ways of shading the individual polygons to hide the boundaries between them and produce differing levels of "shiny" (to use the technical term).

[Margalis]

Basically every game uses some variant of Phong shading and has since like the PS2 era. (Although many games these days rely on a bunch of fake-GI cues as well)

So to say "I like phong shading" is kind of like saying "I like how every video game works."

I'm a little curious what people mean when they say they like Phong shading, what you are responding to? The starkness of the images due to lack of GI / textures / fill lights? I guess that is a question mostly for Darniaq and Sky, what is it that makes you distinguish this Phong-style shading from the shading of most other games? (Given again that technically they probably use Phong shading)

Edit: As far as the actual difference for anyone who is curious, flat shading computes one color per polygon, Gouraud computes a color per vertex and interpolates the colors over the poly, and Phong computes one normal per vertex (normal = ray perpendicular to the surface) and interpolates that over the polygon.

Gouraud shading can't produce good specular highlights because specularity is a function of surface normal, viewing vector and light vector, and Gouraud shading doesn't compute or interpolate surface normals.

[Sky]

I think the shading should be like TOR and copy everything from WoW and Double Dragon.

[Margalis]

You know I was just asking a simple question without any antagonism.

[Furiously]

I think the shading should be like TOR and copy everything from WoW and Double Dragon.

Well... you could ask for a toon shader....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel-shaded_animation

[Margalis]

He's just bringing his Star Wars baggage into this thread.

[Quinton]

I'm a little curious what people mean when they say they like Phong shading, what you are responding to? The starkness of the images due to lack of GI / textures / fill lights? I guess that is a question mostly for Darniaq and Sky, what is it that makes you distinguish this Phong-style shading from the shading of most other games? (Given again that technically they probably use Phong shading)

Perhaps it's more of a "I like the no-textures look" more than a "I like Phong shading" thing.  Think of the character/monster design in FFVII.

These days textures are cheap, and now even programmable shaders are pretty cheap, which brings all kinds of fancy trickery...  perhaps folks look back to a simpler era where TMUs and texture RAM were scarce, context changes were expensive, and programmable shaders a not-yet-imagined far future.  ^^

[Yoru]

Perhaps it's more of a "I like the no-textures look" more than a "I like Phong shading" thing.  Think of the character/monster design in FFVII.

These days textures are cheap, and now even programmable shaders are pretty cheap, which brings all kinds of fancy trickery...  perhaps folks look back to a simpler era where TMUs and texture RAM were scarce, context changes were expensive, and programmable shaders a not-yet-imagined far future.  ^^

Perhaps the rise of the plain-poly art style is generational.

It would make sense from a cultural perspective. For the last few years, pixel art has been in vogue, and is now waning. If you think about it logically, the kids who grew up on pixel graphics are now aging and giving way to the kids who grew up on unshaded polys and PS1-style chunky models.

[Fordel]

Minecrafts graphics always seemed like a happy accident to me. Being used as an easy and cheap way to have graphics, but ending up fitting the theme of the world very well.


The fact everything is super squares doesn't feel very jarring at all when the entire world is essentially nothing but squares itself. Or Cubes. It also helps keep everything internally consistent, which goes a long way.

[Malakili]

Because I want virtual piracy as a gameplay element, the EULA for 0x10c will say you surrender all claims to code you upload to the game.

Source: https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/200557714768805889

Thoughts? I'm not really sure what to think.

[Lantyssa]

What happens if Notch makes a Minecraft VM in 0x10c?

[Murgos]

Because I want virtual piracy as a gameplay element, the EULA for 0x10c will say you surrender all claims to code you upload to the game.

Source: https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/200557714768805889

Thoughts? I'm not really sure what to think.

I don't see how it could work any other way.

Hey, Notch!  I uploaded some code and it's been stolen and used by other players.  That's my copyrighted work, disable their accounts and/or pay me a fee.

It's why pretty much any user contributed system (i.e. Mods) has a similar statement in the EULA.

[Samwise]

What Murgos said.  It's a game, not a commercial software distribution platform.

[TripleDES]

Minecraft has made Mojang US$80m since launch. Their earnings / profit in that time were only around US$13m. Yes, it's a lot of profit for an indie title, but where did about US$67m go?

Fucking taxes!

[Malakili]

Minecraft has made Mojang US$80m since launch. Their earnings / profit in that time were only around US$13m. Yes, it's a lot of profit for an indie title, but where did about US$67m go?

Fucking taxes!

Then again, I hear living in Sweden isn't so bad.

[Mrbloodworth]

The fan forums are full of wild speculation about what might be in Markus “Notch” Persson’s next game, but the devs over at Mojang are still experimenting with the precise form 0x10c will take. When I head over to Stockholm to visit them, Notch has only just decided it’s going to have textures.

What is clear, however, is that this is a project of considerable ambition, which brings together the principles of player-creation, multiplayer and resource-gathering that established Minecraft’s success, and pitches that into an Elite-style space-game.

Except, unlike Elite, you take control of a person inside a ship rather than the ship itself – which has a 16-bit brain you can programme. Oh and there are seamless space-to-planet transitions, too.

“The goal is to have it feel a bit like Firefly,” says Notch. “You can try to land on a planet but you mess up and, instead of having the ship just explode like it would in real life, the landing gear gets broken. Then you have to try to fix that by finding resources. Instead of the adventure being flying from here to here, it’s: I set the destination, oh god I hit a small asteroid and the cloaking device broke. I think they really nailed that kind of emergent aspect in FTL. ”

It’s more of a forgiving game than FTL, however – a long-form style of game without FTL’s brutal cycles of life and death.

“I’d really like for stuff to go wrong,” says fellow 0x10c dev, Tobias Möllstam. “But I think we’ve managed to establish a philosophy where things can go wrong and we’re not going to judge too much. Like you run something at 120% and catches fire, but you just about make it. It’s kind of cheesey but I like it. Having a programmable and customisable ship means that there’s a lot more investment, and the game should reflect that and allow you to have it for a long time.”

Notch specifically wants to recapture that demoscene era of programming when it was relatively simple for a single person to do everything. But will code-newbs such as myself even be able to play the game? Notch suggests we will.

“I’m trying to design the game so you don’t have to know programming but you can share the code,” says Notch. “If you have a friend who’s made this really awesome docking algorithm, you can put that on a floppy disk within the game and put that into your computer.”

We’re some way of a black market for docking mechanisms though – the game doesn’t have any netcode yet.

“Right now it’s not multiplayer at all, I’m just trying to figure out the actual mechanics for it,” says Notch. “With Minecraft I waited too long to add multiplayer, so that was a huge hassle. So now, as soon as it’s fun, I’m going to do the multiplayer. But nothing in the game is fun right now. I need to figure out what is actually a fun game mechanic in all of this.”

The fun will come, no doubt – shortly after Notch has figured out how to get stairs working. It’s a little more challenging than it might otherwise be, because Notch is working with the same physics model for both the simulated gravity of the ship’s interior and the weightless vacuum of space.

“The idea is if the gravity generator crashes and you accelerate, you kind of get pushed backwards. If you get hit by something, everything can go ‘Bonk!’ You have wires, you have attachment parts that kind of hang down, so you can see [the effects of gravity and inertia] in how the wires hang. That’s one thing I don’t like about space games: they focus on the ship instead of the people in the ship. I want this to feel a bit like Alien, where the ship has this personality.”

That’s one of the reasons Tobias was attracted to the project too: “I also wanted to be a person on a ship – you’re always a ship – it’s like a flight sim in space, when I’d like it to be much more like a submarine simulator or something.”

All these ideals stated, both Notch and Tobias are careful to leave the future of the project ambiguous.

“We don’t know where 0x10c is really headed,” says Tobias. “We’ve built a lot of hype around it – now we need to take a step backwards and not raise too many people’s expectations. I like hearing fans hypothesising about what will be in the game. I think I read someone saying, ‘I want to have a station with automated turrets that identify incoming ships, and if they’re not identified they’ll warn them and then shoot at them, fully automatically.’ And that sounded fun – it wasn’t so much that we should take that idea, as that we should make a game so people can do stuff like that. Because with Minecraft it’s been really rewarding to create that sort of environment.”

But first, Notch still has those textures to sort out.

“I’m very tempted to go with the Minecraft look of like pixelated textures,” he says, “but I have the problem of planets being very very far away. If you go closer you don’t want the pixels to be like 15 kilometers large. So it has to switch between different textures, and you don’t want that switch to look bad. But maybe we could do it to intentionally look like games used to when they loaded in a texture. We could do that in a kind of ironic way.”

Link

0x10c with art test!

[Malakili]

“The goal is to have it feel a bit like Firefly,”

a bit like Firefly,

Firefly

[Soln]

Notch has only just decided it’s going to have textures.

I thought voxel engines with their chunking required low res poly.  Is that not the case?

[Mrbloodworth]

Not sure how poly count relates to using textures or not.

[schild]

This game is not even going to feel a little bit like Firefly. Don't even pretend Notch is capable of producing something like that.

[UnSub]

This game is not even going to feel a little bit like Firefly. Don't even pretend Notch is capable of producing something like that.

He also mentioned Alien, and I'm guessing the phrases "like Star Trek", "like Star Wars", "like Battlestar Galactica" and even "like The Last Star Fighter" and "like Battle Beyond the Stars" will pop up at some point.

... and besides the attraction of "Firefly" was the characters and dialogue, not the space ships. Given that the characters and dialogue will be brought by players, it won't be "Firefly".

[Lakov_Sanite]

What I took from the statement is that he wants a game with real problems,  where you feel like your ship can fall apart and you might have to duct tape shit to get to the next planet.  Firefly in the sense that it won't be a sweeping space epic like star wars or a techno-magic star trek world.

[Yegolev]

What I took from it is that he has an unfun simulation and he's got the guy who doesn't understand why Minecraft is fun trying to patch it in.

[Venkman]

Yea that. It's gotta be hard for him. It's not like he designed Minecraft to be the success it became. And yet, he's not permitted to just hide in a room until he comes out with the next hit. Because people likes them their idols too much to leave them the hell alone.

I hope he's not the kind of guy who peaked early. He looks at things sideways and this industry needs more of that at the non-sub-indie level.

[KallDrexx]

The "Notch only just decided to have textures" thing makes it sound like he's desperately flailing around trying to figure out what he wants and what he's going to make, and really shows he doesn't have a designers bone in his body, he just struck it right by making a block mining game.  And honestly, while I'm not knocking minecraft, it got it's popularity before the real "game" elements were added in.  It was pretty much accidental but now he's busy thinking he's a designer god and "must get things perfect" and it's pretty funny.