Rioki's Corner

So Notch is launching a new game called 0x10c and it is a space exploration game. It would be an understatement that I am totally thrilled about that development. A classical game along the lines of elite with a modern cote of paint, is just what we need. Especially from the financially independent developer Mojang.

One of the twist about it all is that the game features a freely programmable 16 Bit CPU. Since I had not dabbled in compiler and interpreter development for a while, I was thrilled to take up the challenge and develop a assembler and simulator. As an added challenge I decided to only a plain text editor and vanilla C.

Remember Glow Cubes, probably not since I don’t have that many recuring visitors. (Maybe we can change that…)

Since around October 2011 I started developing on project “solid”. The idea is to develop a physic based puzzle game within a spaced out environment. With my relative bad track record, where I wandered into the realm of engine development and never came back, I set some clear goals:

• develop engine code only within the game project
• develop only what is needed for the next feature
• don’t get distracted with nice but usless features
• dedicate a fixed amount of time to the project to guarantee progress

The Escapist recently reported on the Torrent Freak’s latest numbers on piracy. I hate when things get reported in this form. They are not wrong, but things like that are taken with a very strong bias.

I will just take the PC number stated in the report, since they are by far the biggest:

For starters I doubt on the correctness of the numbers. How did they collect the data? I will assume they mean downloads via torrent, the numbers come from Torrent Freak anyway. To get accurate data they need to track the users of all torrent trackers, that is including all private trackers. It is impossible that they have access to every private tracker, especially since many are invite only. Also many users follow multiple trackers, so there is a source of duplicate entries. Finally some versions are incomplete, broken or malware infected, so people tend to download multiple versions of one game to get a running install. At very best they give a roughs estimate of actual pirated copies.