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.

0×10^c 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 0×0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0×0001 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.

http://www.vg247.com/2012/04/03/mojangs-new-space-game-is-0x10c-to-be-subscription-based/

It sounds amazing, but a sub kills it for me

I'm sure many people will sign up and enjoy it, but I won't do it because of the subscription :(

You know, it's going to have single-player too with a usual single-time fee only. The subscription kicks in only if you want to play multiplayer.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this. I'm not very confident in Notch's skills as but I love his ambition, it could really push things forward and I do love Minecraft.

Also, the name is quite simple actually (and I didn't come up with this solution, I read it in Rock, Paper, Shotgun's comments!): 0x10 is a hexadecimal number, and so is c. In normal decimal numbers, they correspond to 16 and 12, respectively. Thus the name of the game means 16^12 which is the numbers of years the game is set after the year 1988. I checked it; it works. Also makes sense. =)

It will be rather dark if he sticks to hard sci-fi.

At the year 281,474,976,712,644 or between 10^15 - 10^16 the universe will be in the degenerate era.

Today, as Carl Sagan has told us, there are billions and billions of stars in every galaxy, and they are bright. In this dark galaxy of the future Degenerate Era, there will be two or three stars from these merged brown dwarfs, and they will be about 10,000 times dimmer than the sun.

http://www.fathom.com/course/10701055/session3.html

Easy to program complete darkness of course. Planetary landings will be a but boring if at all possible, most solid inner planets will be destroyed after their star died.

Not a good time to wake up in unprepared.