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[Dragonmaw]

The game is hugely ambitious. It'd take years of development before it reaches anything near what's been promised— and by then, everyone will have moved on to other things and be sick of waiting.

I can't think of a single example where a game took forever to come out and failed because people got sick of waiting and moved on.

Uh, Duke Nukem Forever.

[spolvid]

That game didn't fail because it was anticipated for so long. It failed because it sucked.

[Blademasterbobo]

My mom. I waited all day, and when she finally got there, I just... didn't feel up to the task anymore.

[st33d]

There was a quote earlier that captured exactly what I was thinking - this is Notch selling a game directly to those crazy redstone programmers. In Minecraft, redstone calculators are just a novelty for getting Youtube views. In this game, you could earn in-game profit and rise to the top of leaderboards with cunning programs that players want to use for themselves. Players with these programming skills who are not totally socially inept will surely find a way to profit from this game (in real-world currency), and have fun doing it too. Programming a mediocre console game and heaving it into the market void is a lot trickier than finding a captive MMO market and then selling to that particular fanbase. This is a shrewd move by Notch that will probably be successful.

This is exactly what Second Life is.

I tried it back in the day. To begin with, the scripting and modelling was a lot of fun (we didn't have minecraft back then, so Second Life was pretty cool for its time).

But it was also fairly broken. And it had to stay broken because a lot of the community had built things like flying machines and whatnot on broken code.

From the outside, this seems really cool. Like you're hacking into the engine and the guys running the show are supporting your ingenuity.

But what it came down to was that the scripting language was fucking shit, the modelling tools were fucking shit and where did all these fucking furries come from?

I think this game's programming language could easily make or break it.

[Blademasterbobo]

it uses "assembly." anyone could (and knowing the nerds who play mc, probably will) make a compiler for any other language.

[SirNiko]

Second Life lacked mechanics on the simple end for less skilled players. In Minecraft, digging a block and placing it on top of another block is simple, and a player is encouraged to do so within minutes of starting the game. Second Life has a huge learning curve to overcome before you can take the first step from being an observer to a contributer.

Second Life also suffered from problems stemming from attempts by the developers to turn it into a virtual marketing tool.

But yeah, the concept seems really similar on a basic level. Introducing in-game resources with artificial value will encourage trade of programs in a way that is very different from the cash-purchase systems in Second Life.

[brettchalupa]

I think this is relevant: Github's Support for DCPU-16 Assembly as a Language for 0x10c.

All kinds of neat stuff and a bunch of VMs for different languages like Ruby, Python, C, etc.

[_Tommo_]

I think this is relevant: Github's Support for DCPU-16 Assembly as a Language for 0x10c.

All kinds of neat stuff and a bunch of VMs for different languages like Ruby, Python, C, etc.

I love how this is possible in a game but it's not possible in a browser

[Guillaume]

I think this is relevant: Github's Support for DCPU-16 Assembly as a Language for 0x10c.

All kinds of neat stuff and a bunch of VMs for different languages like Ruby, Python, C, etc.

I love how this is possible in a game but it's not possible in a browser

Hu?

[Udderdude]

Second Life lacked mechanics on the simple end for less skilled players. In Minecraft, digging a block and placing it on top of another block is simple, and a player is encouraged to do so within minutes of starting the game. Second Life has a huge learning curve to overcome before you can take the first step from being an observer to a contributer.

That may be true, but learning an entire assembly language sounds like a much bigger barrier than Second Life's scripting language.

[Glyph]

I cringe to think that there's going to be tons of 12-year-olds out there claiming to be master programmers very soon
That being said, it sounds interesting. No reason to mark a game down simply because of its community. (Single-player, at least)

[Ashkin]

I cringe to think that there's going to be tons of 12-year-olds out there claiming to be master programmers very soon

nonononononoNONONONO NOOOOOOOOOO

[BlueSweatshirt]

don't worry Game Maker did that before 0x10c did.

[Blademasterbobo]

That may be true, but learning an entire assembly language sounds like a much bigger barrier than Second Life's scripting language.

the point of using asm is that you won't have to program in asm, people will make compilers for, at the very least, basic

[eld]

One easily falls into the "why do I have to dig for all these cubes to place them?" when thinking "why assembly when I could just be given a high level language like lua or python"

There's just something fun and pedagogic with going that far down, and while these 12 year old wont become master programmers, they'll learn a pretty low level programming language and some very fundamentals on how computers work.