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Notch puts 0x10c on ice
- catmanjan 13y agoAnyone else completely forget about 0x10c? I thought it was cool, but it's been so long that I'm not even bothered.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- eps 13y agoThat's a rather mean and baseless comment.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoYou clearly meant to reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6235930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6235930
- Centigonal 13y agoThe parent to eps's comment was also none too nice and not really relevant. It has, however, since been deleted.
- Centigonal 13y agoI don't think he (or anyone who's produced a work of art that massively popular, for that matter) is expecting to trump his earlier success. Most people who make great independent games (Persson, Daisuke Amaya, John Romero, ...Terry Cavanagh?) originally do so because of a desire to make games, which supersedes the desire to make hits. I don't think notch is trying to top Minecraft. I think he really likes making games.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoHe does, too. He seems to like making little ones for Ludum Dare etc.
- Centigonal 13y agoI think this happening wasn't wholly unexpected, and probably a good move for Notch's mental health. 0x10c kind of arose out of the haze following Minecraft's popularity explosion (For reference, it was announced on 3/31/12, a month before the XBox 360 version of Minecraft came out). Since then, a lot of things have happened to Persson and the people around him, both personal and relating to games, and he's had some time to acclimate. If he's like most people, Notch's head would be in a fundamentally different place now than it was at the time 0x10c's core ideas were fleshed out, and it's really hard to improve and expand a game you're working on alone when so much has happened. The community's response is really interesting! Judging by what the article said ("The community will not use Persson's code, story or even the game's title"), the only thing they're really keeping is the game's environment and its core ideas (which are really cool! You have a space ship with a user-programmable computer, and a big open world, EVE-style!). I wonder how much of what is said about the project's organization is spin, though, because "several departments" sounds uncharacteristic of that community (or any smaller open source project, really), especially given the loose, idividual-oriented nature of other notch-related projects (things like the Catacomb Snatch remake[1] and the very splintered Minecraft modding community) [1]http://catacombsnatch.net/ http://catacombsnatch.net/
- shardling 13y agoMinecraft was making obscene amounts of money well before the xbox release. (Something like 100k a day in 2010, according to a quick google.)
- Macha 13y agoThe reason there is such a large number of people involved in the community version is because of the game's nature - there were a large amount of highly interested programmers in the r/0x10c subreddit, so when someone proposed the idea of a community version, a huge amount of people offered to help. Of course, about 90% of those will probably drop off in the near future, but I reckon that they'll have enough of a development team left afterwards to go through with it.
- M4v3R 13y agoThis makes me sad, because I was really excited for that game. I even wrote a small QuickBASIC to DCPU-Assembly compiler with Go [1] for it, which was a nice Go learning project for me. I hope that someone will pick up this great idea and build a similar game, where programming is a first citizen and you can do crazy stuff that was planned for 0x10c like programming your own spaceship, sharing code with others on floppy discs, and so on. [1] https://github.com/M4v3R/DCPU-Bas https://github.com/M4v3R/DCPU-Bas
- VMG 13y agoI think the DCPU16-stuff can be reused in other games
- csense 13y agoThe community-based clone's website is http://trillek.org http://trillek.org Really, it should have been linked in the article...
- jared314 13y agoAfter skimming the forums, I am slightly worried. They are establishing the management tree and throwing endless ideas at a wall. I hope they actually release something, because I like the concept. But, they are also starting from, almost, scratch. https://github.com/trillek-team https://github.com/trillek-team
- jdpage 13y agoI would say that establishing a management tree makes semi-sense, since they seem to have a bunch more people working on it from the get-go that you'd usually have. In that case, I can see why they'd want to arrange who's working on what.
- rndmize 13y agoThis doesn't surprise me at all. To be blunt, Notch's work has continually been very... half-assed. I first felt this when I played Minecraft; with successive patches and new added elements, it always felt as if Notch had had an idea, and gone to implement it, and then never bothered to flesh it out or work out the kinks. The Nether and portal system was pretty sorry at release, with basically nothing to do in the nether; rails and carts were always minimal given the possibilities as well as having various non-obvious mechanics that were somewhat frustrating; and so on. I feel you can really see this with the help of the modding community, where often a poorly implemented idea like villages or what not is decently fleshed out by someone who had a strong interest in it. After Notch stopped working on Minecraft, and even before, there was talk of Scrolls, and the suit with Bethesda; after some time, that sorta fell by the wayside, was eventually handed off to the rest of Mojang, and Notch went to work on 0x10c. And now that, too, has been left in incomplete form. I dunno whether its a matter of expectations, where the massive fan responses he gets damages his creativity, or if he just loses interest in projects (I have no lack of half-completed works laying around myself) but at this point I'd rather hear about a new project when its close to completion or released, rather than as he develops it.
- citricsquid 13y agoMarkus was never involved in Scrolls development. Markus had been good friends with Jahkob (Mojang co-founder) for many years prior to Minecraft, Jahkob had been playing with an idea for a long time that Markus liked (what has eventually become Scrolls) and Mojang was formed, in part, to back Scrolls. Markus was never going to develop Scrolls; it was Jahkob's project and he formed a team to build it. Scrolls has become a full game that is being constantly developed, you can buy it now: http://scrolls.com http://scrolls.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrolls_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrolls_(video_game)
- pfisch 13y agoI don't know that I would call scrolls a full game. It has about as many cards as like 25-30% of a single magic set.
- baby 13y ago> was put on hold indefinitely last week This article is entirely false. The game has been put on holds for a year or so. More than 6 months ago people already knew that Notch gave up. No news here. edit : also if anyone is interested in the genre, it has been posted many times on /r/0x10c : check the game "Starmade". It's almost what Notch wanted to do, without the computer part.
- sspiff 13y agoAlso check out Rodina: http://elliptic-games.com http://elliptic-games.com
- csense 13y ago> More than 6 months ago people already knew that Notch gave up. I don't know about "people," but I certainly didn't know it. I was just checking the website http://0x10c.com http://0x10c.com as recently as a few weeks ago.
- baby 13y agoI'm talking about /r/0x10c
- rocky1138 13y agoSaw this one coming. The question is: what is he working on, then?
- embwbam 13y agoI left my startup last year. I didn't sell it, but had saved enough money to last me 3-5 years. It's enough to make me feel free to work on whatever is important to me. One of the unintuitive things I have struggled with is that now that I can do anything, I have a hard time choosing to invest time in something unless it feels like "the one" project. It has to be so important it was worth saving so hard and leaving my startup. So the bar is much higher for what I spend my time on. I realize this feeling is stupid, but it doesn't stop me from having it. I bet being wealthy and having a huge hit feels similar. Notch probably feels MORE like giving up on any given project because he second guesses himself. Since he can work on anything, it HAS to be amazing, or why else would he choose it when he can choose anything?
- Cthulhu_ 13y ago> One of the unintuitive things I have struggled with is that now that I can do anything, I have a hard time choosing to invest time in something Thing is, when one can choose between a lot of things, all of which seem awesome, one tends to be unable to choose (or choose all of the things and do everything half-assed or not finish anything). Human trait.
- Deestan 13y agoHaving watched the discussion around 0x10^c for the past year, it's hilarious to see all the comments (reddit, twitter, etc) where people seem to think it would help if Mojang just hired a large team to "pick up the pace". Notch was struggling to make the creative vision coherent - throwing manpower on the problem to "just start implementing it" would just have locked down the incoherencies and made the project unsalvageable. Given how seemingly intolerable the pressure on this game has been, it makes sense to just drop it. Maybe once the thing cools down and no-one is watching, he'll become motivated to work on it in quiet. Which leads naturally to some wild speculation: If I were Notch, and just got some renewed motivation to develop the game, I would have just told everyone "I have stopped - project's dead" so I could work on it in peace.
- workbench 13y agoHe could barely tell what it was meant to be in the first place. The idea was a complete vague mess and when he started working on it the direction only became more and more confused
- scotty79 13y agoBy hiring large team they might have accidentally hire someone who would pick up the vision and carry it further. Who knows, maybe Notch would join back in if he saw someone expanding on his idea and making things happen. I think I abandoned a lot of projects because no one shared my passion for them to the point of actually owning and developing parts of them. If no one cares enough about the idea to work on it then maybe I also shouldn't.
- shrikant 13y agoBy hiring large team they might have accidentally hire someone who would pick up the vision and carry it further. Please don't use this hiring advice.
- scotty79 13y agoHeh. It wasn't intended as such. Just an observation what might happen if you have too much money, not enough ideas about what to focus on and you start hiring awesome people.
- sspiff 13y agoI've been following the development of Rodina[1], which is a similar game except that it uses Lua instead of a DCPU, and has made decent progress in the past year. It will also follow a release early, release often way of working, with the first release by the end of this year. I'm far more excited about Rodina that I ever was about 0x10c. [1] http://elliptic-games.com/ http://elliptic-games.com/
- jbrooksuk 13y agoThis was kind of expected IMHO. Notch has had a helluva lot of stuff happening in his life. It was fun whilst it lasted though. Check out my DCPU13 in PHP https://github.com/jbrooksuk/DCPU16 https://github.com/jbrooksuk/DCPU16
- lsiebert 13y agoMeh, I feel like I got more than my money's worth from minecraft. Notch doesn't owe anyone 0x10c. AFAIK, no pre-payments were made.
- workbench 13y agohahaha saw this coming a mile away, typical lazy Notch
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoPeople lose interest in their projects all the time, the only difference here is the hype that surrounded this one.
- Associat0r 13y agoI'm personally more excited about Elite: Dangerous. http://elite.frontier.co.uk http://elite.frontier.co.uk by David Braben (from Raspberry Pi) It will have a scientifically based galaxy with rotating an orbiting planets which I think is very important in a space game like this, it also features a mass multi-player dynamic galaxy. It's shaping up nicely as you can see from the newsletters http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/home/?u=dcbf6b86b4b0c7d1c21b73b1e&id=eb767c006f http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/home/?u=dcbf6b86b4b0c7d1c21... and youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/FrontierDevelopments/videos http://www.youtube.com/user/FrontierDevelopments/videos
- opless 13y agoYou mean Elite 4, the game he's been promising to deliver for over a decade? :) That's E:D sorted ... I hear that the Star Citizen fanboys are quite rabbid and sure to turn up shortly. Brace for impact! looks nervous
- Associat0r 13y agoThey had a successful kickstarter campaign http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangero... It also has a solid release date set for March 2014 and they are right on schedule, alpha testing will start this December. It's not as if he can now run away with the money and postpone it for another decade.
- opless 13y agoNo, but he's bit off more than he can chew I think. Also, Star Citizen - using CryEngine and non procedural systems. snigger This, gentlemen is why there are no good space games out there.
- Tloewald 13y agoThere's something I call manic-depressive programmer syndrome. It used to occur infrequently, but -- I think -- because tools have gotten so much better (everything from the quality and speed of compilers and class libraries to the speed of hardware) it's becoming more common. We get a fantastic 1.0 product that never gets followed up. At best you see bug fixes and updates, but the extraordinarily promising core never gets expanded. I'll cite some examples: * TextMate * Silo 3D * The Hit List * Hypercard Each of these is characterized by being developed by a very small team (sometimes one person), being extraordinarily impressive out of the starting gate, and never developing to its full potential.
- pekk 13y agoI heartily disagree that it used to occur infrequently. It has occurred as long as people have been programming.
- Tloewald 13y agoYou're probably right, but I don't have examples to hand.
- dangoor 13y ago"The Second System Effect" is at play in at least some of these cases. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
- bane 13y agoLots of comments here about the stick-to-it-iveness of Notch. I bet it was shaping up to just not be terribly fun. Sometimes that happens with a game and no amount of tweaking the mechanics can push it over that hump, the foundational idea was just flawed.
- marknutter 13y agoHe didn't think the game was fun so he stopped developing it. This sounds like something a lot of game development companies out there could learn from.
- pekk 13y agoI wonder if the obsessive focus fans developed on writing ASM, to the exclusion of almost any game mechanics, might have something to do with that
- antirez 13y agoHint: before complaining do what Notch accomplished with Minecraft. That said, I'm sorry too about the news because I was really excited about the 0x10c plot / idea.
- neuro 13y agoHe created a masterpiece for today's younger generation - what the c64, 2e and trs80 did for others. An engine for building creative thinkers in today's locked down digital architectures. It's the experiencing exploring that's important not the artifact. That's not on ice.
- pearjuice 13y agoAm I the only one who reads it as "Zero Existence"?
- erikb 13y ago+1 for the great choide of title. The article is actually about the community taking over development, which is not really proven 1 week after starting the idea. It's not like cataclysm (a zombie rogue-like) where the developer built a running program and a community around that peace of software and now they finished a Kickstarter and developed the program some recognizable steps ahead. After a week of forming a new team it's not even clear if the team itself will hold up.