Notch, of Minecraft fame, has been Tweeting about securing a new domain for his next game. The site just launched, and it’s called 0x10c. It looks to be a space game that has many elements of an MMO, including possible monthly fees, an “always on multiverse” in which time and physics pass even while players aren’t logged in, and of course multiple players online at once.
What’s perhaps most interesting about 0x10c is that Notch has designed a custom, in-game 16-bit CPU. The possibilities that this opens up will be, once put into the hands of enterprising players, pretty remarkable.
Remember that people have figured out how to build fully working circuits and computers inside of Minecraft, just using in-game items such as switches and torches. Having a full 16-bit CPU available is going to mean that people will be able to unleash a great deal of creativity. From the website:
Each ship has a generator capable of producing a fixed wattage, and everything you connect to it drains wattage. A cloaking field, for example, might require almost all the power from the generator, forcing you to turn off all computers and dim all lights in order to successfully cloak.
The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish.
Full specifications of the CPU will be released shortly, so the more programatically advanced of you can get a head start.
There is no more information about the game, but it will be the same model as Minecraft: a cheap alpha and beta during development and playtesting, and then an eventual release for a presumably higher price.
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