0x10c (Notch's new game)

by vasco • 14 years ago

160 87 14 years ago

archgoon• 14 years ago

The new website now contains less content; noticeably the DCPU-16 spec is missing. Looks like he's in the middle of retooling. There is a video demo though.

SquareWheel• 14 years ago

Notch has been releasing quite a few gameplay clips recently. The best place to catch them is http://reddit.com/r/0x10c -- he often frequents the forum.

kevinnk• 14 years ago

I think Notch has been going through a divorce so understandably development has been a little slow.

http://www.reddit.com/r/0x10c/comments/yb94y/the_reason_for_...

cheez• 14 years ago

Man, isn't that just how it goes...

89a2• 14 years ago

He'll need one hell of a vacation to get over that.

Also how many weeks do we reckon till he dates MinecraftChick?

lloeki• 14 years ago

The spec on the website was awfully outdated, and enthusiasts were already following (and participating) its evolution on reddit, so that's not much of a loss.

wyck• 14 years ago

There is a ton of spec info here:http://0x10cwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page

I especially like this note: Room for 65,536 external hardware devices.

sunwooz• 14 years ago

Does anyone know if he's still using Java for this game?

tjdetwiler2• 14 years ago

His reference DCPU implementation was a Java Applet, so most likely.

TillE• 14 years ago

Notch does everything in Java. Realistically, for developing a heavily simulated real-time 3D game like this or Minecraft, how many options does he have? Maybe C++, maybe C#, but that's about it.

Everything else is either too slow or doesn't have the up-to-date gamedev ecosystem.

kennywinker• 14 years ago

It makes sense, but it means when they went to make Minecraft Pocket for iOS they had to re-write. Must have been a tough decision to force themselves into another re-write when they inevitably want to bring 0x10c to iOS.

SeoxyS• 14 years ago

Pure C is a fine choice, too. As is Objective-C. I'm pretty sure Objective-C will outperform Java and C# both. And there's no question that the best choice would be C, for its efficiency and its versatility.

abecedarius2• 14 years ago

I'm not plugged into the gamedev world, but how about Lua + C? I've been impressed by LuaJIT.

Of course if you like Java, use Java.

tjdetwiler2• 14 years ago

I wrote a simple DCPU assembler and simulator to teach myself CoffeeScript: https://github.com/tjdetwiler/hcf

Demo here: http://tjdetwiler.github.com/hcf/

mendocino2• 14 years ago

> Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years.

Mh, looks like he is off by a factor of 256 :)

LeafStorm• 14 years ago

The DCPU isn't byte-addressable - all memory addresses refer to 16-bit words. Endianness mixups would result in swapping 16-bit words, not 8-bit bytes.

mendocino2• 14 years ago

Oh, I see. Thanks!

HazzyPls• 14 years ago

I was under the impression that a byte is defined as the smallest unit of addressable memory; in the case of DCPU that would be a 16-bit byte.

danieldrehmer• 14 years ago

Pure genius!

jiggy20119• 14 years ago

The video reminds me of System shock 2 somehow. I guess an eerie empty spaceship with what look now like quite dated graphics.

Looks like there is some sort of FPS aspect to this, hopefully you can catch ships in tractor beams and then board them, merging both ships together into some kind of CTF map. That could be fun.

The Singleplayer/Multiplayer/Hyperplayer looks interesting too, it could be a totally different game playing a few people on a LAN vs the MMO version.

CodeCube• 14 years ago

I am so super excited about this game. Really interested to see what comes of the whole 'shared multiverse' ideas that he was talking about ... especially when joined with the programmable computers, I can't wait!

listic2• 14 years ago

I wonder why there aren't more science fiction stories about the past. For some reason, it's always assumed that science fiction is about the future. I say it's about the new and exciting science, but some of this new and exciting science (physics breakthrough, artificial intelligence, etc.) just might have happened today or in the recent past, and we might not be able to notice it yet (or it have backfired back then and will only come to fruition later). Given that recent past is the time all of us have lived in, and some have nostalgic feelings for, it looks like such an oversight to me. In sci-fi games, I can only see 0x10 and Darwinia do this to a degree.

idle_processor• 14 years ago

>For some reason, it's always assumed that science fiction is about the future.

Isn't steampunk essentially science fiction that's set in the past, near the industrial revolution?

GauntletWizard• 14 years ago

Same for the "Clockpunk" subgenre - It's Sci-Fi in the time or form of Leonardo Da'Vinci.

There's definetly a point, though - Have you read Sci-Fi set in the time of the Pyramids? In the time of the Roman Empire? Would you? What would change?

It's worth looking up "Rome Sweet Rome", a short story that got some acclaim a few months back when it was written on Reddit and then optioned by Warner Bros. It's modern military sci-fi, essentially, but the setting and the detail that's put into "What would happen if a modern platoon were set down in the time of the roman empire?" is pretty good.

listic2• 14 years ago

I should have said "recent past". I am not familiar with steampunk. I read Wikipedia article, but that's it.

But what about the present day? The technology that we might think of today as thing of the future might just be developed in some obscure lab today, or 5-15 years ago. Wouldn't it be fun to speculate in that direction?

egypturnash• 14 years ago

Given what your typical MAD SCIENTIST can do with a handful of gears and a steam boiler, I usually tag it as a subgenre of fantasy, not of SF. Just like Tolkien's medievalism, it's set in a romanticized version of the world before the technological revolution in progress as its being written. With magic.

I predict that once the Information Revolution is over, and the next one has begun, there will be people writing fiction set in an exaggerated, magical caricature of the early 2000s.

mcphilip• 14 years ago

Terry Pratchett (wildly successful author of the Discworld series) once quipped that fantasy is just scifi without the nuts and bolts. I take that as indicating that fantansy and scifi are related in that they both create narratives around fictional mechanics. The tropes differ, but they are exploring the similar space of what might happen in a world with mechanics (e.g. magic, 'quantum') allowing completely different set of experiences than the real world.

vacri• 14 years ago

Orson Scott Card submitted a short story based in a forest to a scifi magazine and was told 'scifi has rivets in it'.

chrischen• 14 years ago

Star Wars happened "a long time ago."

true_religion• 14 years ago

There are quite a few stories about people being sent back into the past.

Just off the top of my head I can think of: Conrad Stalingrad, Jainsiaries, and 1635 (Eric Flint).

And there are ofcourse the alternate history stories like the Drakar chronicles (wherein there was a African slave-state empire rather than traditional colonialism).

rat87• 14 years ago

Back to the future

trhtrsh• 14 years ago

Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Baroque Cycle, and Anathem?

Michener's novels? (How does "past sci-fi" differ from "historical fiction")

Alternate history novels like Fatherland?

dalke• 14 years ago

I believe Stephenson himself commented that the Enoch Root's long life and the ability to bring dead people back to life, both presumably due to alchemy, makes Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle 'past sci-fi'. Otherwise, yes, it's almost the same as historical fiction. A perhaps better example of the blurriness between the two is "Gravity's Rainbow."

Anathem takes place on another planet, and in our future (in that characters in the book have our present as their past).

sly010• 14 years ago

Like... a long time ago in a galaxy far far away?

Aardwolf• 14 years ago

From the website:

"Of course, I’m ending up reimplementing a lot of TCP, with packet resending and ordering for most things, so I’m not totally sure all this work is actually worth it, heh."

Then, maybe, don't, and just use it... :)

jws• 14 years ago

Generally, if you have to automatically survive a broken connection, you may feel an intense sense of duplicating TCP. If you have to make decisions about bandwidth utilization it gets even more redundant.

jiggy20119• 14 years ago

The problem will be latency, maybe there are some situations when you need to make sure you get all the packets in order but others where you don't.

For example , if you send an in-game message then this needs to be in the correct order. On the other hand if you have a spaceship turning quickly then as it's angle and velocity changes old information becomes useless so you will just introduce lag if you hang around waiting for old packets before doing anything with the new ones.

http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp...

davidp• 14 years ago

That's when you turn to using multiple data streams/connections/endpoints. Funnelling multiple data streams with different needs over a single mechanism (TCP, or UDP, or smoke signals) only yields misery, sadness, and death.

zalzane• 14 years ago

It's going to be interesting seeing how this plays out. Much of Minecraft's success can be attributed to serendipity, so it'll be interesting to see how this new game measures up, especially considering the scope of the project.

AshleysBrain• 14 years ago

Does anyone think this name might be a bit of a problem? Being a programmer obviously I get it, but I can imagine it being a problem for average-joe: "Hey, I saw this really cool game the other day, it was called, erm... zero one, c, x? One zero? Uh, something like that. Anyway..." - will the person they were talking to be able to find it?

Maxious• 14 years ago

No more complicated than a car name - RX8, S40 etc.

Also if you spell out the numbers as words, Google will still find those cars.

ANTSANTS• 14 years ago

The game is about programming a spaceship in a fictional CPU's assembly language. I don't think they have to worry about what non-programmers think of the name.

jiggy20119• 14 years ago

AFAIK programming is only one aspect of the game, hopefully it will have a more mainstream audience too.

lifeformed• 14 years ago

I'm sure once it gets popular, people will come up with an abbreviation. I bet this one will be 0x, pronounced "Zero X".

srik• 14 years ago

It's being referred to as "Oh-X" here.

derleth• 14 years ago

Even among 'normal people' (non-programmers, etc.) a lot of sharing is done via the Internet, where most people are already quite adept at sharing URLs via copy-paste.

Besides, giving the game a name that really is kinda technical (if only in a shallow sense) gives it a certain cachet it wouldn't otherwise have.

reustle2• 14 years ago

0x10c = Zero extancy = No survival

reustle2• 14 years ago

For those curious about the name:

0x10c = zero x ten c = zero extancy = no survival

dazmax• 14 years ago

Is that really where the name comes from? I thought Notch said it was "10 to the c", referring to the "0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years" from the story.

89a2• 14 years ago

Lets see if he actually manages to finish this one.

Also should he really be using TF2 models when he has his own team now?

0x10c (Notch's new game)

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