I was recently talking to Notch in a TF2 livestream and asked him about his future aspirations of 0x10c. Although he seemed in a bad mood, he said: “Nope, their are no future aspirations for 0x10c. I’m going to make small games for the rest of my life. If someone on the office wants to carry it on they can.” Well, at least now we have the final word from Notch. I thought it was just on ice, I’m very disappointed.
I don’t envy Notch. Minecraft’s success is virtually impossible to top, and no matter how awesome and perfect 0x10c would have been, it would have always been compared unfavourably to Minecraft. He could not have won here.
Continuation efforts are already under way, but I’m not keeping my hopes up. In the meantime, there’s rymdkapsel for a very watered down (but awesome!) mobile experience, and there’s Starmade for those who want Minecraft in space.
What the hell is 0x10c?
Notch’s next game after Minecraft.
A space game where basically you could program your space ship, or something like that.
So it’s a bit like FOFT:
http://hol.abime.net/514
Well as far as I can tell the ‘thing’ with 0x10c was the way you would control your ship’s computer (and hence your ship) with the use of actual programs (which you could write yourself).
FOFT as I recall it from my Amiga days was pretty much an Elite clone with some bells and whistles?
FOFT was indeed an Elite clone. IIRC the programming of the computer was very limited. I think you could automate a few things.
FOFT never got near the success of Elite despite the extras. Well, nor did Elite 2 (Frontier).
As I understood it, the point was that you were stuck on a spaceship somewhere out there and your spaceship was commandeered by a 16bit CPU. You had very limited resources, most important your ship’s power-supply, and in order to perform tasks you had to program your CPU to manage the power in some specific way for you to get to do that task, like e.g. you noticed a heavily-armed assailant nearby and came to the conclusion that you can’t outrun them or out-gun them, so you want to slowly slink away in stealth — you have to program the CPU to shift power away from all the other parts of your ship to steal, while still maintaining life-support and other essential systems.
I think actually that it was a bit more like you could program the computer to perform functions, though you might use that to perform the scenario you describe. The CPU would mostly run the day-to-day of your ship, automating things — your average sysadmin would be right at home. You could also program it to do other things — scan for planets at longer ranges and log them to visit, for instance. The game was reportedly persistent, and the ships program would continue to run even while the player is logged off.
I am nit-picking, but it really bothers me: it should be “There are no future aspirations” and not “Their are no future aspirations”
EDIT: simplified comparison. Fixed my own error, cannot edit title
Edited 2013-08-19 12:38 UTC