Not an expert in this but can't many physics calculations now be offloaded to modern GPUs which are designed to parallelize much more neatly?
Could you run part of your MMO server work as a distributed-computing setup on client PCs? (but how would you get that working in real time?)
Maybe the players that are online at a particular time could be doing some of the extra processing - the game client could run 1 or 2 extra 16-bit virtualizers in the background, along with the virtualizer for the player's own 16-bit cpu and the game thread. So 4 threads running on 4 separate cores.
If it's designed carefully, the code should be trivially translatable to native x86, at which point you may even be able to run a few thousand on a single reasonably beefy server, depending on how fast the virtual CPU runs and the average load.
you do realize we're talking about Notch here right?
Typing that should have been a pretty unambiguous clue you needed to stop.
That's kinda my point, coding ability didn't limit his ability to delight people.
He has programmed a number of games from scratch in very short time periods without using a bunch of pre-existing tools etc.
He is obviously very much a generalist and has done everything from 2d/3d graphics , networking , gameplay handling , AI and now CPU emulation. I would imagine most AAA developers will at some point find a niche and stick to doing that.
Not to mention building minecraft which is a non trivial programming exercise in terms of managing and rendering thousands upon thousands of blocks which can all potentially be re-arranged.
Perhaps he is not John Carmack but I would be confident he is at least as good as 90% of the programmers working in the game industry.
Yes.
>He has programmed a number of games from scratch in very short time periods without using a bunch of pre-existing tools etc.
PHP, QED. Also no he didn't, he used lwjgl.
>He is obviously very much a generalist and has done everything from 2d/3d graphics , networking , gameplay handling , AI and now CPU emulation. I would imagine most AAA developers will at some point find a niche and stick to doing that.
No.
>Not to mention building minecraft which is a non trivial programming exercise in terms of managing and rendering thousands upon thousands of blocks which can all potentially be re-arranged.
You do a real disservice to the people working on modern physics engines. Jesus.
>Perhaps he is not John Carmack but I would be confident he is at least as good as 90% of the programmers working in the game industry.
No.