Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Notch's next game is an MMO

0x10c.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 264 posts

Re: Notch's next game is an MMO

#251

Post by Anderkent »

intended wrote: post #161
xymostech wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Notch's next game is an MMO

#252

Post by sek »

cpeterso wrote: post #23

I was a developer for the ill-fated Perpetual Entertainment's Star Trek Online MMO (which was later sold and successfully launched by Cryptic Studios). Star Trek Online's #1 most common feature request from beta testers was "ship interiors." Players didn't want to play "WoW in Spaaaace " game. They wanted to play "The Sims meet Star Trek" and relive their favorite Star Trek TV episodes. That sounds like a pretty cool…

Absolutely.

When you can build your own ships in this game with a changing interior i am sold. We are talking about the creator of Minecraft here, maybe he is the one who really get's this freedom stuff.

Re: Notch's next game is an MMO

#253

Post by psquid »

Gormo wrote: post #115
hesdeadjim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This essentially embraces "macroing" as part of the game. Something every MMO out there has tried to fight and usually ends up losing. Makes me wonder if he will provide a way for players to sell the programs they make for in-game resources. This aspect alone is enough to excite me, can't way to play it!

I wonder how far this concept will be extended. Will there be a full OS running on the in-game CPU, with I/O protocols to interface with the ship's systems? Will you be able to cripple your enemies' ships by writing malware, a la Independence Day ? Taken to its fullest extent, this seems like not just a game, but also a simulated world in which one can learn and practice actual engineering skills.

I wouldn't be surprised if an impromptu communication protocol (based on assigning meanings to things other ships can observe you doing) sprung up pretty quickly to allow networking. At the point that ships can communicate, it's bound to come down to needing to do it with securely-written code, or risk ship-to-ship malware.

Should be really fun to see where this goes.

Re: Notch's next game is an MMO

#254

Post by intended »

Anderkent wrote: post #251
intended wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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).

Re: Notch's next game is an MMO

#255

Post by intended »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #51
stephengillie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will players have to maintain multiple accounts just to remain competitive, as in EVE? Someone will have to make and sell a 16-bit "minesweeper" to play while mining. What will the first computer virus do? Will there be "actual" viruses? Can we convince Notch to let our characters get Space Flu?

Well if there is some way to make the ships communicate data between each other's computers then I think exploits and viruses become a feature of the game whether the developers like it or not. It really depends on how the admins choose to handle this, whether spreading viruses is fair play or whether it will get your account banned. I can imagine a newbie would find it highly annoying if 5 minutes into the game they…

The immediate design of the game itself ensures that there is griefing - Even if the game didn't have weapons which could be fired on other people.

Take average griefer X - has nothing better to do, he goes around finding 'care bear' miners - your typical farmer, running macro script 1.

He now proceeds to bump your craft constantly using a macro into the sun.

Farmer ship blows up - and since this must have progression paths - an expensive leveled up ship goes bust, while the griefer goes of laughing all the way back to 4chan or SA.

Re: Notch's next game is an MMO

#256

Post by elliottcarlson »

jentulman wrote: post #212

Okay so I'm just a simple PHP dev, would someone be so kind as to point me in the right direction to start learning what I'm going to need to write for the in game CPU, so I can try and get a jump on things? (0x10c.stackexchange one day?)

Never think of yourself as a simple X dev. While you may not have the same experience or background as someone else, that alone doesn't take away from you being a developer (keeping in mind I don't know your proficiency or length of time as a developer).

That being said, since it's going to be a virtual CPU with what seems to be a system based on 6502 opcodes (or similar), we can assume that this means there will also be an opportunity for abstraction/compilation to that system. Basically, there would most likely be cross compilers available in a matter of time that could aide in the development so you don't have to learn ASM or anything that low level. If you want to learn for the sake of learning, and with a great chance of being able to implement that new knowledge in to this game, then learn C - it will teach you a lot more about lower level development and would be a great candidate for a cross-compiler when one were to come out (ex: http://www.cc65.org/)

Re: Notch's next game is an MMO

#258

Post by groby_b »

pantaloons wrote: post #249
groby_b wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assume for a moment a team of developers spend several months if not years doing infrastructure build-out to support the imagined CPU simulation system Huh? A CPU simulation is not that complicated a task. If it takes Notch several developers and years of time, he's definitely doing it wrong. > active and interacting with one another at all times. Yes. That's a solved issue, mostly. It's a large task, but it's not…

I think you might be missing the point, all simulation continues while players are offline. Implementing consistent physics in an MMO is (very) hard, but having all players simulated even when they are logged off is something else entirely. The state of the art there is things like mail systems, auction houses, and skill queues.

I wouldn't be surprised if the offline simulation curtails your abilities somewhat, enabling a much lower CPU-effort simulation. We'll see, I guess :)

(There's also the point that a monthly subscription fee of $15 buys you a nice VPS slice these days. If you're willing to cut into the - significant - profit margin of MMOs, you have a lot of performance available for offline simulation. I'll stand by my judgment that it's a hard, but solvable, problem)

Re: Notch's next game is an MMO

#259

Post by anthonyb »

mattstreet wrote: post #239
ajuc wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He could just interprete code on clients :) You have N players == N computers to simulate. Assign randomly 5 computers to each player to emulate. Choose the result that majority of clients return and optionally punish cheaters. EDIT: apparently simulation will go on even when players log out, so each connected client may need to simulate 100 in-game computers to account for that. Still less resource intensive than ru…

Letting the clients handle the simulation would have a lot of problems for a MMO. Extra problems if you were doing the work for other players as well. I think part of the point of it being a special emulated CPU set at a certain speed is to make it fair for each player, rather than the player having more processing power just because they have a better computer. The easiest way to secure all that is to run it on the…

You could make the client run other player's CPUs, perhaps ones from accounts on a different server. If it's not someone you know or are playing with, then there's less incentive to cheat. You could even pass the same work to multiple clients and flag those that are tampering with the results.

Not sure how that would affect the lag, though.

Re: Notch's next game is an MMO

#260

Post by heretohelp »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #242
heretohelp wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You realise how much money they've made from Minecraft yeah? If he wants cutting edge virtualisation technology he can no doubt pay for it (if it'll be fun, and he definately has an intuition for what is and isn't fun) That's kinda my point, coding ability didn't limit his ability to delight people.

Is he bad at coding? 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 whi…

>Is he bad at coding?

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.

Post reply on HN