Minecraft Creator's New Game Called 0x10c

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.""

Comments

Re:Towns

[ak_hepcat]

Seriously? You think a site like /. doesn't have readers that might be interested in a game that contains
a VIRTUALIZED CPU THAT CAN BE FREELY PROGRAMMED?

What are you, some sort of reddit user?

Re:Not Java. Please not Java.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure notch is able to write terrible code in every language.

Re:Not Java. Please not Java.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the 16-bit CPU is programmed with...assembly? Jesus Christ, please tell me that's not the only way he plans on letting people utilize it...

If you don't like it, nut-up and write a C compiler!

Actually, 0x10^C

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Actually, 0x10^C

[Rotag_FU]

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:Actually, 0x10^C

[Chris Burke]

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.

What I find amazing is not that such a simple mistake could be made, but that the cryo machines and the 16-bit computers running them were able to run for over 10^15 years!

Fucking nice job on the hardware, guys! But next time don't leave the drivers for the interns to write...

It's like a PDP-11

[Animats]

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:Towns

[Kefabi]

What I thought was the most interesting paragraph:

The possibilities of this CPU and generator are... Fascinating. For instance, users players (see, lines are already blurring) can exchange programs, so you can expect a lively scene of people exchanging programs. There's a nefarious side to this as well - Notch will not stop anyone from making viruses, so even computer security becomes an element of play. A virus could, for instance, disable a ship's weaponry or shields.