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Comment by nullflux | Hacker News Reader

This really sounds like a game for hardcore programmers (16-bit emulation, "assembly in space" as h2s called it.) Minecraft is far more accessible: will this really gain nearly as much traction?

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I feel like this will be a game where those of us that know assembly will end up writing our weird assembly programs for playing text based adventures or spinning our ships in spirals or whatever, whereas everything that is actually necessary will (hopefully) be able to be bought/created in game.

Also, there's probably going to be a lot of community sharing of ideas and programs (just like there is with Minecraft) so non-programmers will be able to steal code from other people if they really want something.

Obviously I have no idea, but he says "_can_ be used to control your entire ship" not "must be programmed to do anything."

Yeah I see it as a "Well you got a bunch of gyros last pit stop. Pity they don't all link up to your guidance stuff" so you write a program to grab data from your gyros and headings from your heading input. You could still fly just fine using the default stuff but if you want say...constant attitude adjustment or the ability to have your ship not pick up unwanted spin you're going to have to deal with that yourself or trade with somebody who has already dealt with it.

Looks fun, I want to make a program that does orbit translations and stuff for you with minimum delta-v.

Would be fun to have a market for functions (literally programming functions)

Let the original author keep the insides secret, maybe the protection decays over time (say a year)

Sounds a lot like copyright but sensible and the false constraint is only to make the game fun : P

Will be fun once someone makes a slaver/infector virus.

This is kinda difficult - even if you manage to infect (via some kind of program trade, possibly), you probably won't have a way of directly interacting with the infected computer, so you would have to send instructions using the infected ships sensors... By moving your ship in his vision range for example, and decoding the movement with the virus for the instructions. That could take forever for any kind of direct control.

Heh, that's interesting, but I think the simpler vector will be the more common one - Think like a griefer, if you will.

People will just infect useful scripts and let consumers copy/distribute them.

Thats it.

I know griefers - and they will find a way to abuse the crap out of this.

Honestly I'm not saying anything, but this entire mmo idea is just plain bad. If anyone other than notch had come up with it, it would have been shot down at t(-1).

it will probably work something like electrical engineering you can do in minecraft: you never need to do it at all for the game to be fun, but if you want, you can steal a plan for an automated monster-trap from youtube, spend a few hours figuring out a simple one yourself, or go crazy and spend two years building a working cpu.

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