[secoif]

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.

[soupboy]

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.

[GuiA]

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.

[seanp2k2]

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

[joncalhoun]

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

[Niten]

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...

[seanp2k2]

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.

[lloeki]

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