Minecraft Creator's New Game Called 0x10c 206
silentbrad writes "As announced last month, Notch — creator of Minecraft — is working on a sandbox space game (no, not the Mars Effect April Fools joke, though it's similar). "The game [0x10c] is still extremely early in development, but like we did with Minecraft, we expect to release it early and let the players help me shape the game as it grows. The cost of the game is still undecided, but it's likely there will be a monthly fee for joining the Multiverse as we are going to emulate all computers and physics even when players aren't logged in. Single player won't have any recurring fees. ... The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish. Full specifications of the CPU will be released shortly, so the more programatically advanced of you can get a head start.""
the ingame-CPU is quite interesting (Score:3, Informative)
there's already a lot done,
see reddit.com/r/dcpu16/ [reddit.com] for the first reactions...
and the first questions on stackoverflow are already coming in - stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/dcpu-16 [stackoverflow.com]
Re:Towns (Score:5, Informative)
Also? RTFA.
Here's the CPU:
http://0x10c.com/doc/dcpu-16.txt [0x10c.com]
Re:Minecraft + Eve Online = 0x10c (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Towns (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, Mojang definitely is "indie". Indie does not mean small or low budget, it's short for independent, as in, independent of the major publishers. Mojang self publishes, hence they are "indie". One hit game does not make them a major publisher.
Actually, 0x10^C (Score:5, Informative)
Took me a few minutes to figure out, but the title is actually 0x10^C, which is 16^12 in decimal, which is 281,474,976,712,644, which is the year the game is set. Clever!
Re:Towns (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the simulated processor is 16 bit, but that just runs the code you write to control your ship and such, as I understand it. Read carefully: "The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish."
That means as part of the game, the game provides you a computer to work with, and that computer is 16 bit. There's a whole game going on outside that computer.
It's like a PDP-11 (Score:5, Informative)
It's very similar to the basic models of the PDP-11. 64K of 16 bit words, two-address instructions, operands can be registers or memory. It should be possible to modify a PDP-11 C compiler to compile for the thing.
No indication of how I/O works, or if there are timers or interrupts. If you're supposed to control a spaceship with this, they're going to need those. PDP-11 I/O was done by putting devices on the same bus as memory, and storing into their device registers. But the spec here says that you have 64K words of memory; no portion of the address space is reserved for I/O. So they may use the unassigned opcodes for I/O.
Re:Actually, 0x10^C (Score:5, Informative)
Took me a few minutes to figure out, but the title is actually 0x10^C, which is 16^12 in decimal, which is 281,474,976,712,644, which is the year the game is set. Clever!
Well if you want to get ever more precise and pedantic. 16^12 is actually 281,474,976,710,656 not 281,474,976,712,644. While it is true that the game is set in the year 281,474,976,712,644, the way that number is arrived at is by adding 1988 to 281,474,976,710,656 to get 281,474,976,712,644. The concept is that in 1988 the cryo units for travel were accidentally set for 281,474,976,710,656 years due to an endian mistake.
Re:Towns (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.edge-online.com/news/mojang-turns-publisher [edge-online.com]
Re:Towns (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, I had considered the trojan route also. I'm guessing there's enough people looking over others' programs that trojans won't last too long in the wild. But, I guess it just depends on how subtle the trojan is.
The difference between a backdoor and a coding error might only be found in the programmer's intent and not the code itself. For example, consider a buffer overflow that leads to arbitrary code execution: It's a coding error if the programmer didn't intend for that, but a backdoor if the programmer intended to exploit it later.
Re:Why not just create a scripting language? (Score:5, Informative)
Because that doesn't fit with the plot or mechanics of the game?
The plot is that the space race never ended, so in 1980ish we had ships equipped with 16 bit computers and cold sleep chambders. An endianness bug caused people who wanted to sleep for 1 year to sleep for 0x10^C years (which is where the name comes from), so now you all have to rebuild stuff.
The mechanics inolve writing programs that will be run offline; your computer in-game will execute a particular number of cycles per second. With a low level assembly language, Notch can (and does) define precisely how many cycles each instruction takes. How would you do that for a scripting language with API hooks? It would end up being ridiculously complicated.Doing it in assembly like his lets people hand-optimize their stuff a lot easier, especially when (as you say) the high-level languages will be quickly available anyway.
Basically, doing it your way would be fairly blah.