I think it just may work out!
A great point. I can't wait for the first trojan that takes control of your ship and transfers control to a different player.
Will people be able to share binaries or just source?
Of course we can expect people will create compilers (I believe some already have) to compile other languages down to the assembly used in the game.
The viruses/trojans will be an interesting thing, I believe notch said that it will be up to players to protect themselves from these.
There's a risk here though for essentially turing complete griefing, so hopefully there will be something to help protect newbies from accidentally running some horrible code.
(Sidenote: Ah ok. So that's how to reply on HN once a comment thread has reached a certain depth: click link then reply.)
I don't think it's about depth; you can't reply to very new comments (presumably to give people a chance to delete mistakes?) but if you refresh the page a minute or two later the reply link will be there as normal.
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Indeed: https://twitter.com/notch/status/187474819980328962
And I won't stop viruses, the players will have to do that themselves.
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And https://twitter.com/notch/status/187451555384004610 :
@Kyle_Baran: Is it possible for players to give malicious code that negatively affects their ship? This should be encouraged in multi.
@notch: yes. It's a fully functioning computer.