Mojang's new subscription space game is 0x10c
Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson has revealed the title of his new subscription game - but wants players to figure out what it means.
Notch won't yet reveal how to pronounce the game's title, which he says is a riddle, but he has launched a website for 0x10c (the c is superscript). "It's going to be a space game, and it's quite ambitious," he wrote.
Every player will be equipped with a ship, and each ship's generator will produce a fixed amount of power. Players need to decide which devices they use to maximise the potential of their generators; Notch gave the example of a cloaking field requiring everything else to be unplugged in order to function.
Players also get their own "fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU" to control the ship - or play games on. Players will be able to program the CPU themselves - literally - and Mojang will release the full specifications soon.
It certainly does sound ambitious; Mojang will charge a monthly fee to cover the costs of emulating "all computers and physics" even when players aren't logged in.
0x10c is set in a parallell universe where the space race continued until 1988, when a "deep sleep cell" compatible with "all popular 16 bit computers" was launched.
"Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years," Notch wrote.
I see. (I don't see.) Anyway:
"It's now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy."
Oh! Now I see.
Mojang released a list of features it expects the finished game to include: Hard science fiction; Lots of engineering; Fully working computer system; Space battles against the AI or other players; Abandoned ships full of loot; Duct tape; Seamlessly landing on planets; Advanced economy system; Random encounters; Mining, trading, and looting; Single and multi player connected via the multiverse; The Generator and the Computer.
Mojang plans to release the game in a very early form and built it with players onboard, just as it did with Minecraft. No word yet on a launch date.