0x10c (Notch's new game)
0x10c.com
0x10c.com
Demo here: http://tjdetwiler.github.com/hcf/
http://www.reddit.com/r/0x10c/comments/yb94y/the_reason_for_...
Also how many weeks do we reckon till he dates MinecraftChick?
I especially like this note: Room for 65,536 external hardware devices.
Mh, looks like he is off by a factor of 256 :)
Per Wikipedia - "The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. The de facto standard of eight bits is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255 for one byte. With ISO/IEC 80000-13, this common meaning was codified in a formal standard. Many types of applications use variables representable in eight or fewer bits, and processor designers optimize for this common usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures have aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit size.[3]
The term octet was defined to explicitly denote a sequence of 8 bits because of the ambiguity associated at the time with the term byte."
When I worked in embedded, whenever people were working on non-8-bit processors, they used the words "byte", "word", and "double word" in this way.
Looks like there is some sort of FPS aspect to this, hopefully you can catch ships in tractor beams and then board them, merging both ships together into some kind of CTF map. That could be fun.
The Singleplayer/Multiplayer/Hyperplayer looks interesting too, it could be a totally different game playing a few people on a LAN vs the MMO version.
"Of course, I’m ending up reimplementing a lot of TCP, with packet resending and ordering for most things, so I’m not totally sure all this work is actually worth it, heh."
Then, maybe, don't, and just use it... :)
For example , if you send an in-game message then this needs to be in the correct order. On the other hand if you have a spaceship turning quickly then as it's angle and velocity changes old information becomes useless so you will just introduce lag if you hang around waiting for old packets before doing anything with the new ones.
http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp...
http://www.isoc.org/INET97/proceedings/F3/F3_1.HTM
I haven't read the whole thing, but the TL;DR appears to be:
If the connection is good then TCP will keep increasing it's Window size until packet loss occurs. This will cause the sender to keep sending more packets. The result of this is that the TCP connection will start to consume most of the available bandwidth effectively drowning out more of the UDP packets (e.g if a buffer in a router starts to become full). TCP is designed to play nice with other TCP connections.
This is probably precisely what you don't want in a game where the UDP packets contain the most important information.
Also if you spell out the numbers as words, Google will still find those cars.
I think it just may work out!
A great point. I can't wait for the first trojan that takes control of your ship and transfers control to a different player.
Will people be able to share binaries or just source?
Of course we can expect people will create compilers (I believe some already have) to compile other languages down to the assembly used in the game.
The viruses/trojans will be an interesting thing, I believe notch said that it will be up to players to protect themselves from these.
There's a risk here though for essentially turing complete griefing, so hopefully there will be something to help protect newbies from accidentally running some horrible code.
(Sidenote: Ah ok. So that's how to reply on HN once a comment thread has reached a certain depth: click link then reply.)
I don't think it's about depth; you can't reply to very new comments (presumably to give people a chance to delete mistakes?) but if you refresh the page a minute or two later the reply link will be there as normal.
--
Indeed: https://twitter.com/notch/status/187474819980328962
And I won't stop viruses, the players will have to do that themselves.
--
And https://twitter.com/notch/status/187451555384004610 :
@Kyle_Baran: Is it possible for players to give malicious code that negatively affects their ship? This should be encouraged in multi.
@notch: yes. It's a fully functioning computer.
Besides, giving the game a name that really is kinda technical (if only in a shallow sense) gives it a certain cachet it wouldn't otherwise have.
0x10c = zero x ten c = zero extancy = no survival
Isn't steampunk essentially science fiction that's set in the past, near the industrial revolution?
There's definetly a point, though - Have you read Sci-Fi set in the time of the Pyramids? In the time of the Roman Empire? Would you? What would change?
It's worth looking up "Rome Sweet Rome", a short story that got some acclaim a few months back when it was written on Reddit and then optioned by Warner Bros. It's modern military sci-fi, essentially, but the setting and the detail that's put into "What would happen if a modern platoon were set down in the time of the roman empire?" is pretty good.
In the meantime: http://www.ams.org/notices/199805/review-graffi.pdf
But what about the present day? The technology that we might think of today as thing of the future might just be developed in some obscure lab today, or 5-15 years ago. Wouldn't it be fun to speculate in that direction?
Going backwards just a little in time... Dieselpunk is often set between the two world wars. I loved the style of The Rocketeer, Skycaptain and The World of Tomorrow along with other post-aviation, pre WWII sci-fi/fantasies (even if the non-stylistic aspects of Skycaptain were deeply disappointing).
I predict that once the Information Revolution is over, and the next one has begun, there will be people writing fiction set in an exaggerated, magical caricature of the early 2000s.
Card maintains that switching genres wasn't a difficult
thing for him. He believes that, ultimately, the
difference between the two genres is largely on the
surface. "Half joking, I was writing to Ben (Bova) about
this very subject, and I said, look, fantasy has trees,
and science fiction has rivets. That's it, that's all
the difference there is, the difference of feel,
perception.Just off the top of my head I can think of: Conrad Stalingrad, Jainsiaries, and 1635 (Eric Flint).
And there are ofcourse the alternate history stories like the Drakar chronicles (wherein there was a African slave-state empire rather than traditional colonialism).
Michener's novels? (How does "past sci-fi" differ from "historical fiction")
Alternate history novels like Fatherland?
Anathem takes place on another planet, and in our future (in that characters in the book have our present as their past).
Everything else is either too slow or doesn't have the up-to-date gamedev ecosystem.
With the depth of this game and the FPS type elements though I'm skeptical whether it will make a good iPhone game or not though.
More impressively if you use C# you can release cross platform using mono.
Would be interesting to know if he is using Scala for any parts of it though.
And you'd have to be insane to write a game these days in C. It's just not a productive enough language for that. Whatever little speed you give up for Java pays off many times over in speed of development, debuggability, etc.
Of course if you like Java, use Java.
Also should he really be using TF2 models when he has his own team now?