f13.net

If actually programming your 16 bit computer is required then I think the audience may be a little narrow. Hopefully there is room to be a dumb dude with a gun who works for the crazy programmer dudes.

Consider the possibility of distributing backdoors through 'generous public software' and overriding your enemy's fleet computers at a crucial moment.

If actually programming your 16 bit computer is required then I think the audience may be a little narrow.

I can barely make Redstone work in MC, I don't think I am the target audience for this game.  :why_so_serious:

Nah, I doubt this ends up being EVE.   If he takes it all the way it ends up being a programming game, smells more like corewars or the like.  EVE really has no programming / scripting / customization elements at all.  Totally different beast from that standpoint.

Questions I have are along the lines of:
- does he provide a more accessible "higher level" programming interface (graphical building blocks, etc)
- is he forced to rethink things around the accessibility of the programming interface (if it really is hooked into all ship control and ships are autonomous even when your offline, seems like there'd be some heavy advantage to people who can customize their "AI")
- is it actually feasible (cost-wise) to run an open world of continuous physics/cpu emulation for all participants forever?

You are focusing way too much on the programming. How much of the Minecraft Audience actually sits around and dicks with mechanics? 0.1%? Even that seems high.

You are focusing way too much on the programming. How much of the Minecraft Audience actually sits around and dicks with mechanics? 0.1%? Even that seems high.

Question is, how's he gonna pull off having a virtualized OS for each player on a server?  I'd expect the demands of simulating a few hundred ship computers to be a bit of a strain on a server.

He better deliver on the promised duct tape.  :x

Hah! I just emulated 2000 DCPUs simultanously at less than 50% CPU load on my desktop computer! I like!

I'm not sure I get what's going on

I'm not sure I get what's going on

I wonder if there will be inter-ship communication. A group of players could conceivably build an AI that could be controlled by just one player. For example, all of my "guild mates" would load the slave program before logging off and their ships would assist me in mining, combat, or what have you.

The real fun is when things get complex and emergent behavior or hijacking begins to evolve. The glorious, "Oh shit, what did my ship do while I was gone?" moment.

My thoughts to this effect was a system to link ship DCPUs together, thereby creating a more powerful singular system ala the Borg.

Basic opcodes: (4 bits)
    0x0: non-basic instruction - see below
    0x1: SET a, b - sets a to b
    0x2: ADD a, b - sets a to a+b, sets O to 0x0001 if there's an overflow, 0x0 otherwise
    0x3: SUB a, b - sets a to a-b, sets O to 0xffff if there's an underflow, 0x0 otherwise
    0x4: MUL a, b - sets a to a*b, sets O to ((a*b)>>16)&0xffff
    0x5: DIV a, b - sets a to a/b, sets O to ((a<<16)/b)&0xffff. if b==0, sets a and O to 0 instead.
    0x6: MOD a, b - sets a to a%b. if b==0, sets a to 0 instead.
    0x7: SHL a, b - sets a to a<<b, sets O to ((a<<b)>>16)&0xffff
    0x8: SHR a, b - sets a to a>>b, sets O to ((a<<16)>>b)&0xffff
    0x9: AND a, b - sets a to a&b
    0xa: BOR a, b - sets a to a|b
    0xb: XOR a, b - sets a to a^b
    0xc: IFE a, b - performs next instruction only if a==b
    0xd: IFN a, b - performs next instruction only if a!=b
    0xe: IFG a, b - performs next instruction only if a>b
    0xf: IFB a, b - performs next instruction only if (a&b)!=0
   
* SET, AND, BOR and XOR take 1 cycle, plus the cost of a and b
* ADD, SUB, MUL, SHR, and SHL take 2 cycles, plus the cost of a and b
* DIV and MOD take 3 cycles, plus the cost of a and b
* IFE, IFN, IFG, IFB take 2 cycles, plus the cost of a and b, plus 1 if the test fails

http://0x10c.com/doc/dcpu-16.txt


More info inside the link.

I'm not sure I get what's going on

So, it's a game to write assembly?  Or do you write it all in machine language? (I can't get to the website from work).

I hope he's just ripping off an already proven open-source RISC ISA otherwise he's opening himself up for all sorts of bugs.

Notch was always the less "hardcore" part of team Wurm. Minecraft is close to what he originally intended with Wurm.

So you are saying that wurm could have been way less dick punchingly bad had they worked better with notch's style?

So, Quinton, need a guild?  :grin:

It's a machine-language virt. machine and then you're left to your own devices.  Tbh most people arent going to fool with the assembly language, myself included.  I'll wait for a compiler and toy with it inside an IDE.

How will you stop malicious viruses etc?

I won't stop viruses, the players will have to do that themselves.

Not giving him my money anymore.

This game sounds too much like work.

Some sort of FAQ here: http://0x10.cc/

What will be the price?

No price decided yet. But there will certainly be a monthly fee for playing on the multiverse since even when you will not be connected trajectory and your ship's computer will still be simulated.

For real this idea is fucking stupid and you guys are crazy. This will fail faster than Metaspace.

Aspergers in SPACE.

[...] with too much free time

f13, doomcasting games on the merest wisps of rumor since 1999.

Yup!  Same reason I never quite understood why people wanted to build computers with redstone logic when you can get cheap FPGA development boards and build real computers that run at 50-100+MHz!  Guess it's a "because it's there" sorta thing...

So here's the deal: the game will have no textures. Flat colored polygons with modern lighting, but no textures. None. (except a few)

https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/188385652482641920

Phong-style shading? I already love this game.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3667682/Scribbles/Qcraft.jpg)

A Spartan3 dev board is ~$200.  It's not a huge investment but there you are.  However, you can dork around with Verilog/VHDL in a simulator for free.

Really though, if what you want to play with is gate layout (which is closer to what redstone is) Magic and SPICE, although free, require *effort* to use. On the other hand doing something, like say implementing the 80386 architecture in Verilog and then creating a standard cell library to implement it to MOSIS layout spec in Magic with a good test plan and test results in SPICE might get you a mid-high 6 figure job eventually.

This game sounds about as fun as getting punched in the dick

Let the folks not into hacking on virtual machines enjoy it at a different level, and create a "crafting" market where the crafters actually create something...

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 (http://blogs.ft.com/tech-blog/2012/03/minecraft-mojang-financials/#axzz1qEie4QLa), 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?

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

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..

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

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

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.

Do you guys even know what phong shading is?

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

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.  ^^

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.

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!

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.”

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

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

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.

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. 

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.

Keep in mind, Wurm Online was Minecraft 1.0. There are many, MANY lessons learned there he applied to Minecraft. A great deal of the "complication" in Wurm was not Notch, it was not his idea of how it should be, Minecraft is infinitely closer. My point, Minecraft did not come out of nowhere. It was a refinement of what he had already attempted. The Cube Terrain came from another game, but the principle is the same, the visual representation of "Terraforming" just changed.

With 0x10C, hes going after the Chris Roberts vision, hes admitted as much over and over. But he has never made a game like that before.

Anyways, I guess my main point is that nothing in his public comments about this game or minecraft make it seem like he has a clear and well thought out idea about where he exactly wants to take it.  He has some pie in the sky idea that is extremely similar all the 16 year olds that go "I wanna make a MMO".

Keep in mind, Wurm Online was Minecraft 1.0. There are many, MANY lessons learned there he applied to Minecraft. A great deal of the "complication" in Wurm was not Notch, it was not his idea of how it should be, Minecraft is infinitely closer. My point, Minecraft did not come out of nowhere. It was a refinement of what he had already attempted. The Cube Terrain came from another game, but the principle is the same, the visual representation of "Terraforming" just changed.

With 0x10C, hes going after the Chris Roberts vision, hes admitted as much over and over. But he has never made a game like that before.

He has some pie in the sky idea that is extremely similar all the 16 year olds that go "I wanna make a MMO".

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.

That's underestimating his experience a bit too much.  Minecraft is a bit more technically impressive than it looks.  He's at least competent enough to gauge the work involved.

But you know, he's a millionaire that probably doesn't need to work another day in his life if he didn't want to so he can do whatever with his time. 

Saying this is going to fail is an safe prediction like predicting a football team won't win the superbowl during the preseason. It takes no insight to make it.

His openness caused several crap posts in this thread, so there's your empirical evidence.

Most people with the "I wanna make an MMO" mentality don't fail because of the technology, they fail much sooner in game design and content design before they even run into technical limitations because they have no clear vision of what they exactly want to make, and those that have an idea of what they want to make have no idea how to take those ideas and design (not even code but design) game systems to facilitate those ideas.

I think it's a bad idea because like it or not, opening up the process to the public can have unintended consequences on your own creativity, especially if you lack a clear vision.

Actually I think he's the kind of guy to ignore the feedback.  It's not actually an open process. 

The guy does blue water game development.  You can't layout a large, specific game design when the game is filled things that have never been tried.  He isn't making 2d platformer number #1123452345235345234.

In Minecraft you have axis aligned cubes you can create in code. That sort of thing will not fly in a space game where you need actual models.

Minecraft was apparently started because a game called Infiniminer came out, was cool, then fell apart, and Minecraft looks A LOT like Infiniminer. Like...almost exactly the same.

My guess is he's going to blow it. What he should have done is take anything and everything he made from Minecraft, dumped it into a healthy mutual fund account, and walked away.

What he will do is probably throw a bunch of it into his "next venture" that will never live up to Minecraft because he never truly understood what people loved about his game.

I'm utterly confused, I thought this was a space ship programming/combat game....

Persson said he had put the game "on ice" as a result of a "creative block," but indicated that he continued to support the project. Fans remained hopeful until this week, when during a Team Fortress 2 livestream, Persson said he had no future aspirations for the game.

Game is dead (http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/18/4634438/notchs-minecraft-follow-up-0x10c-officially-dead-but-its-gameplay)


I think Schild's take on Notch as a one-hit-wonder is becoming increasingly obvious.

More power to him deciding it wasn't fun and going on to something else.

I get the feeling he really likes working incrementally with feedback from whomever happens to be watching his tweets/streams/etc, but with the insane fan community that's following him post-minecraft, that's hard to do without people going nuts about every project.

Reminder: Minecraft started as a (slightly) expanded Infiniminer. Notch is not as creative as the hype says; he was just in the right place at the right time.

Infiniminer is a completely different game in all respects with exception it used block like environments.

Infiniminer is a completely different game in all respects with exception it used block like environments. Wurm is the prototype. Obviously there is influence from Infiniminer  however.

You played what Wurm turned into, mostly after notch left, due to the addition of all the time sinks. Things like recipes, the idea of the deformable terrain and mining systems are the common thread once you remove the time investments. Hell, even the crafting progress of wood, sans time investment, are the same.

Minecraft began as basically an Infiniminer clone and Notch even says so himself.