Don't start worrying about the "purity" and "this was never intended". You don't specify a processor instruction set in the real world without expecting people to write higher level languages for it, so why expect people to write at such a low level in a GAME of all places? I am fairly certain everything is going exactly as planned. Notch has got this.

I second this. If anything, Notch must be feeling immensely satisfied if not somewhat overwhelmed by all the effort that the community has put into his project.

It must definitely be overwhelming. So much hype is building, and he doesn't even have a functional prototype working yet. Greater men have failed to succeed when so much pressure is present.

I love the game idea, and think Notch is a great game designer+developer, and sincerely hope that it will be what we think it will be. But at the same time, I'm not as optimistic as others might be.

Notch apparently loves amazingly slow VMs, so this is the next logical step after Java :D

I second this. Think about all the hype and excitement he is building simply be releasing a processor instruction set. Pure marketing genius =D.

Along similar lines, this morning I was thinking how wonderful it would be if whatever interfaces exist between the ship's computer and the rest of the 0x10c game world are rich enough to make security vulnerabilities in players' DCPU-16 code a real concern. Imagine disabling an opponent's ship by exploiting a buffer overflow in a custom communications protocol implementation, for instance...

This. Also, if it gets one kid interested in asm/ low-level stuff, it's worth it IMO.

We keep abstracting, but we can gain so much by going back to the hardware. Also, exploiting in general is fascinating to me, and I hope this pushes it more mainstream.

That very well may be part of the game: https://twitter.com/#!/notch/statuses/187474819980328962

It could run JavaScript, but this is a 16-bit processor we're talking about here, with minimal RAM. It's more likely we'll be using C and BASIC ;)

Yeah this seems like the exact scenario where hand-rolled assembly and perhaps some hand-optimized C will really shine. You don't see a lot of embedded processors running javascript, for example. If your ship can process data and respond 5% faster than an opponent's, all other things being equal, you will come out ahead.

If the current level of interest persists, by the time the game launches, I imagine that the vast majority of people will be downloading and running programs written by others. These will have been pored over and optimized to an extent that most of us would be unable to achieve by ourselves, and it will not pay to roll your own trivial implementation. I'd be curious to see what Notch can do to still encourage people to learn how the CPU works themselves. If the environment and game dynamics are rich enough, perhaps this will not really be a problem?

I think we're going to see some clever optimizing DSLs (a la FFTW) -- restricted languages for the kinds of embedded programs you write on such an architecture will be easier to optimize than general purpose languages. Particularly if they have a clear cost model.

The Haskell embedding is very likely to head in that direction.

(See e.g. in this style : http://www.fftw.org/faq/section4.html#whyfast or this style : http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/polymer.pdf -- code generation + DSL + constraint solver for instruction level timings).

At least, that's what I'd do.

Low-level lisps à la GOOL/GOAL[0] will probably gain some traction as well, or so I hope.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

Did they ever get released to the public?

No, but the design docs are still out there if you contact the former engineers. I would distribute them if I had permission.

I agree that 0x10c DSLs that control game play will be more successful than a C compiler. :)

The polymer article was very interesting, really cool stuff. However, I could not find any mention of using a constraint solver for instruction level timings. Is that in another article, or did I just miss it?

That's not in the polymer paper, but its what FFTW is doing (and the ICC compiler that we relied on for the monte carlo work).

Thanks. I misread the content description as referring to the latter paper only.

> I'd be curious to see what Notch can do to still encourage people to learn how the CPU works themselves.

Have some ship customisation stuff tied to assembly programming. People love changing the colour of carpets or wearing hats or collecting and displaying fossils.

Then allow the community to create simple how to guides - "This program will do $THIS_THING; here's how it works; now try to change it to do something slightly different."

I guess Codecademy should have a DCPU section too.

DID SOMEONE SAY HATS?!

Agreed that higher-level langs would be helpful for "newbies". I wonder if this was at all inspire by Schemaerse (google it, but TL;DR it's a space game written mostly with Postgres triggers where /you build the game client/ in whatever you want to use to interface with the pgsql :)

Yep, only thing I dislike is that the processor does not simulate the importance of cache. If the in-game processors allowed the selection of different cache-line sizes (both instruction cache and data cache) for different costs (paid via the in-game currency), it would add another level of depth to the game market. It would also mean getting into the nitty-gritty of optimization would be even more worth it.

Why currency and not cycles? The VM is designed to give each CPU ~100k cycles per second (billed per instruction).

For those old grey-hairs around and reading that remember RSX-11M/M+, there was a tool known as TKB.

The task builder.

TKB allowed (much) larger applications to run in the address space of a 16-bit DEC PDP-11, using what were called overlays, and overlay trees.

With overlays, the application call tree within an application was analyzed and implemented to allow various sections of code within a tree of subroutine calls to be paged out to backing storage.

If the underlying "processor" is fast enough and if you have enough swap space available, then you can stuff a whole lot of code into a 16-bit address space. Just not all loaded in physical memory at once.

And debugging it... Shudder...

4096 18-bit words are known to host a Lisp interpreter (http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/maclisp_fa... ), so 64K 16-bit words should be more than enough :)

How about FORTH?

Shhhh.... don't give away our secret weapon!

or false? http://strlen.com/false-language

Turbo Pascal!

New challenge - clone the Turbo Pascal IDE and get it to run on the processor.

For reference, Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than. I am still amazed that the compiler and IDE are only 39 KB.

http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

Turbo Pascal 3.0 was my first contact with Pascal, and while it was great for the time, I doubt I can call it an IDE.

It was more similar to vi + integrated compiler as an IDE.

agreed, but at this rate I figured I'd suggest the moon

He who has the best systems will win, no matter the tools or platform. I love it.

I think it is great for teaching kids to program as well, or be excited about it. Notch is going to do what thousands of teachers can't do because he is using the power of gameplay to drive it.

It's a game. if you can make your code run faster, you'll probably get more magic pixels.

I for one plan on writing the first in-game magic-pixel-collecting DCPU16 botnet.