0x10c - Notch goes to space

Limitations are the god parents of innovation.
I think this sort of throwback to tech from the earliest heyday of the garage developer is brilliant.
I fully expect day 1 implementations of C, AppleBasic, C64 BASIC, TRS-80, BBC Micro, Acorn, and more.
It would be hilarious to play Elite on the ship's computer in Notch's homage to Elite.

The first Mac was also available at 64kB, and the graphics system took 22kB of it.

There has never been a shipping Mac with 64K. And note that even the minimum-spec Mac, at 128K, was barely usable to do anything with. You needed 512K to use the machine properly. You just couldn't easily get that for quite awhile.

Malor wrote:

There has never been a shipping Mac with 64K. And note that even the minimum-spec Mac, at 128K, was barely usable to do anything with. You needed 512K to use the machine properly. You just couldn't easily get that for quite awhile.

So what you're saying is that Macs have always been ripoffs?

You're right, Malor, I was thinking of the ROM.

So what you're saying is that Macs have always been ripoffs?

Well, they've always been high-margin products. But in that specific case, it was more that their reach exceeded their grasp; hardware technology of the day wasn't able to build RAM cheaply enough to be purchasable in more than very small quantities.

On a regular basis, I look at my current machine, which has 16 gigs of fast, reliable RAM, and I marvel. That's about a hundred and thirty thousand Mac 128Ks.

Anyway, devoting 6K out of 64 for networking would be very painful, and I think it's unlikely that you could track or talk to very many machines.

(edit: By the way, I can't find hard sales figures on the Mac 128K; the only number I can find is 'hundreds of thousands'. If we assume 500,000 sold, buying enough RAM to match every Mac 128K ever shipped would cost you about $400, and you could easily hold the resulting 16 chips in one hand.)

My Apple ][+ had 64k.
It was totally usable.

In case people here haven't seen the ARG going on with 0x10c - http://www.reddit.com/r/0x10c/commen...

Looks interesting, but the signal analysis is well above me at this point. The current running theory is it's a countdown to release.

Countdown points to the time:

Fri Jun 1 09:46:20 PDT 2012
Fri Jun 1 16:46:20 UTC 2012

Tweet from Notch

So, it's either the release date, Notch's birthday, or both

Seems crazy early to be releasing this game, even an alpha?

My bet is that he has been working on it since he began to back off on Minecraft development.

Minecraft was pretty rough in the early alpha, it just might be the same way with 0x10c.

Scratched wrote:
Robear wrote:

There's no way he's redoing something as low-level as Core Wars, it's gotta have a more accessible game around it. But I think it's very cool to have the option to mess with control software.

Which is why I mentioned RoboCode upthread. I think the biggest obstacle to working out exactly what the game is about is the lack of IO spec, to know what the computer can talk to, or with other craft. I'll agree that there's going to be some manual controls (if for no other reason than as a fallback), but the options that programming some AI for ship(s) provides is quite big.

I've never dug into the X games, but isn't there some simple ship AI in that?

Yes, the X games do have ship AI. In-fact, since X2, the games have featured an in-game, player-accessible scripting that runs tasks both on the individual objects (such as the autopilot on a ship) as well as globally (such as a script that generates new stations or spawns enemies).

The system even supports multiple tasks per object so that an object can have multiple scripts active on it at the same time; the missile defense script that has been in every signed bonus pack since X2 uses this so that the script that detects and targets incoming missiles can run at the same time the player is using the autopilot.

Compared to 0x10c, though, the X scripting system uses a high-level language and does not require the player to think about the machine state as much. In addition, the system in X is meant as an in-game scripting system, not a CPU emulator. So while in 0x10c it may be that if a single ship's computer ends up in an infinite loop that it affects only that ship (presumably until the player can restart the computer), in X, a bad script that runs in an infinite loop locks up the whole game (although part of this problem is that the multitasking system in X is cooperative-multitasking, as opposed to involuntary or non-cooperative multitasking used on most real-world operating systems).

I think that it is good that Notch is working on a project that can remind people that computers are not magical, they are machines. But I also think it will be more work than fun until higher level languages are introduced.

It's way, way harder to program those small machines. I saw an example a few months back where they were talking about how hard it was to write a simple spellchecker on 16-bit computers.... with so little RAM, they had to store dictionaries on disk, and then try to somehow do a fast spellcheck, against words on incredibly slow spinning storage. It was a major engineering effort.

In our modern 32-bit world (nevermind 64-bit), in something like Python, you just load the entire English dictionary into a hash variable, and then run through your input text, checking each word for presence or non-presence in the hash. What used to take serious brainpower is now so trivial that a first-year CS student could do it from scratch. If you want word suggestions, that takes a more sophisticated algorithm, but it still runs incredibly quickly.

Things have changed quite a lot, over the last fifteen or twenty years.

I guess I'm wondering if Notch thinks of the in-game computer as a tool for playing the game, or a game mechanic itself. If programming the computer *is* a game mechanic, then the limitations are supposed to be fun. I think back to some of the awful programming hacks I did back in the day to get my graphing calculator to do interesting things. That WAS fun, and occasionally even resulted in something useful.

I'm also thinking of the various redstone projects in MC. I'm sure someone will write a worm that turns ship computers into some distributed computer that folds proteins or make a pretty picture.

So as an average player am I expected to actually program for this thing, or am I just expected to install programs that other people have written? If setting up my ship is an activity akin to building a WoW UI by combining and configuring several mods then I can get into this. If I have to be the kind of user who writes their own mods from scratch then that's a bit too much of an obstacle.

We have absolutely no idea, Vargen. I'm not sure even Notch knows yet.

Malor wrote:

In our modern 32-bit world (nevermind 64-bit), in something like Python, you just load the entire English dictionary into a hash variable, and then run through your input text, checking each word for presence or non-presence in the hash.

*shakes head*

Or you could use a Bloom filter, like a sane person.

VeggiePirate wrote:

I guess I'm wondering if Notch thinks of the in-game computer as a tool for playing the game, or a game mechanic itself. If programming the computer *is* a game mechanic, then the limitations are supposed to be fun. I think back to some of the awful programming hacks I did back in the day to get my graphing calculator to do interesting things. That WAS fun, and occasionally even resulted in something useful.

It's also feasible to hack someone else's spaceship and delete the code that controls their weapons, thrusters etc, if memory serves. Fun or at least challenging for coders, but may put the non-code people off venturing into the big scary online portion of the game.

So, where are you guys seeing that there will be system to system comms and code transfers between ships? What I've gathered so far is that the code will be used to control internal systems, and so the interesting part of that is features and efficiency. But nowhere in any official statements have I seen comms between ships or the like, just people assuming it will be there.

Have I missed something? Please, enlighten me.

I think a game where you program your own systems would be fun. A game where someone can fly up to you and broadcast malicious code would make Eve look like a child's ice cream party... And would not be nearly as fun as snarfing sundaes...

I suspect player-to-player communication will be limited to a chat box.

Hypatian wrote:

*shakes head*

Or you could use a Bloom filter, like a sane person.

The whole point to my comment is that you don't need to. I just loaded the 'insane' size American English dictionary on my Linux box. Per wc, it's six hundred and fifty thousand words. And it's about 6.6 megs on disk, almost nothing. 650,000 words, and that takes WAY less RAM than most word processors.

I'd have to look, but it wouldn't shock me if freaking Minesweeper took that much RAM.

RISE UP!!

Notch is posting initial videos.

Initial video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49mUf...

Brightness increased - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7nEs...

The subreddit for 0x10c is where I found them. Link.

New art video.

I like how the spaceship has an old attic lightbulb dangling from a wire above the bridge.

Seems like Notch pulled the plug on this one.

I was recently talking to Notch in a TF2 livestream and asked him about his future aspirations of 0x10c. Although he seemed in a bad mood, he said: "Nope, their are no future aspirations for 0x10c. I'm going to make small games for the rest of my life. If someone on the office wants to carry it on they can." Well, at least now we have the final word from Notch. I thought it was just on ice, I'm very disappointed.

There's some kind of community effort to make something like it (without using any of Notch's assets).

I confess I never fully grokked the concept for this game.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/5870792...

I’ll also keep talking to the players and I’ll keep streaming myself rocket jumping in tf2 for whoever wants to listen to or watch that, but for now I don’t want to work on anything big.