Sounds exactly like Eve Online
but with a built in 16 bit emulator.
Minecraft designer Markus 'Notch' Persson has revealed Mojang's latest project, 0x10C, a Sci-Fi themed universe set billions of years in the future that allows gamers to code and share their own computer software. Notch plans a similar development path as Minecraft, with heaps of user-created content, although not in an …
Yip that would be cool, and indeed about as old school as you can get with assembler, beyond double entry code which would be doable with this.
Also this is not the first space game to have a inbuilt computer you can play with. Was one for the Atari ST though atm the name escapes me and was some form of basic it could be programed in.
This game will perhaps be more akin to BOTS in space. Funny as most MMO's try to prevent bots, this activly encourages it with this aspect.
In some ways this sounds a lot like Second Life. The big similarity is the dependence on user-created content.
Second Life has its own scripting language, relatively high-level, and few people can use it well.
Just the idea of an emulation of a 16-bit computer being a vital component for game success is scaring me. I once wrote something in Assembler, for an early microcomputer which used the Z80 processor, but it was a long time ago, and in another country. Add the potential for "griefers", and I think I shall give this oine a miss.
It's a game for an intellectual elite of coders. I cannot see how it can be made to pay.
It won't take long before there are interpreters and compilers for higher level languages so that less elite programmers can get involved, nor will it take long for open code to start appearing around the net for non-coders to copy and use. It won't remain the exclusive playground of the intellectually elite for long if the rest of the game is any good at all.
Someone I know is already 90% through coding a Pseudo C compiler for DCPU.
The fun thing here is that (from the information currently available) the coder doesn't need to start with coding for an entire ship. People can "crew up" and work together so a person can specialise in for instance optimizing drive controls or weapons guidance systems.
Trading for generic "operating systems" will probably start fairly quickly with a few main contestants forming a defacto "standard" just like the real world.
It'll be interesting to see how things develop. This could either be awesome or totally uncool.
Beer, because it's Friday.
Not on purpose; I just wrote an Elite clone and needed a scripting language, so I threw a z80 emulator that I already had written in, being one of the 300,000 people to have written a Spectrum emulator at some point. I'm aware this was an absurd way to write such a thing, but it was just a personal hobby for fun.
Anyway, the way I had things set up left every individual world entity with its own little 64kb address space and a personal z80. I then had some fun scripting them myself, then got bored and put it all away, being aware that games in which you program things are ten a penny, Elite clones aren't exactly rare and there was no reason anyone should care about yet another.
I'm sure Notch's effort will be top drawer though, and should be fun because it'll attract a whole bunch of other talented people.
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I already play the single-player version of this game every day. Therefore I will *really* have a lot of fun playing it online with a bunch of 13 year olds teabagging me. Right?
This is just taking the "user created content frees the developer from having to spend money on any of the things that make a game fun" maxim to its logical conclusion. I guess.
And if you squint, the assembly language isn't that far removed from 6510 assembly either. Well, the JSR, addressing modes and limited range of registers look similar anyway. The 16-bit opcodes look a bit bloated and strange though--definitely not like a C64. Then again, A9 30 only stores an 8-bit value there.
Off to read more about the instruction set.