It's kind of insane that people are writing games in assembly for a CPU in a game. I feel like 0x10c is going to be some sort of milestone in terms of innovation.
Next up is the immersive technology.
Next up is the immersive technology.
The key criticisms center around it being not a instruction set for compiling C and other higher language code. The biggest reasons for that are:
1. No ability to store based on the stack pointer (this is great for handling local variables not in registers)
2. No ability to deal with negative numbers
3. No way to address single bytes, everything is full words only. This makes many basic manipulations take many instructions
4. Not very many registers, particularly in light of limitation 1
The 6809 and 6502 had far fewer registers, but didn't have any of the other limitations listed above.
As they make the work of a compiler harder, they promote coding in assembly to get faster code. This, on the other hand, leads to lower code quality (as avoiding gotchas and dealing with corner cases correctly is a lot easier even in c than in assembly), which creates more "drama", which is good for gameplay.
How is representing a number in 2's complement verboten?
A different type of example could be EVE, where the rise and fall of corporations is gameplay not written in by the devs, but gameplay created by the players. Any game that has developed a professional gaming community could also be lumped into the category of having emergent gameplay, since there is an entirely new game mode (spectating) created by a community surrounding the game.
When I look at 0x10c, and know that I'm going to have complete control over a CPU in game, and this CPU will be the basis of my pursuits in the game, I know that there will be interesting things to be done. This is because there's such a strong focus on allowing players to create their own gameplay. No other game (that I know of) takes its players' creativity seriously enough to rest so much of the fun on their shoulders.
Having Notch to hype the game certainly helps, but helping to create this world is alone an exciting prospect.
Simplicity is extremely important. A lot of emulators appeared the same day that the spec was released. That not only needed people who wanted to implement the CPU, but also a spec that could be implemented in under a day.
There's a bit of Benevolent Dictator effect here as well. It's not that the system is the absolute best, but it's something that people can target for interoperability. Someone can write a compiler and someone else can write the emulator.