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[Roboboy33]

I want to make my engines spew radiation.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

lol, pursuing you will be fun if it's possible.

Will we only be able to control our ships through programs? will we be unable to control the engines manually?

[Girlinhat]

We don't know, but I'm going to assume manual control will be difficult.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I see...

I'm curious: will anyone be modelling there ships with EVE in mind?

also, I was reading a topic on the 0x10c forum and I was wondering: Will there be a poly limit? for ship building, and are the exterior and interior poly counts seperate?

[alway]

Random bitflips in radiation. OH HELLS YES!

Basically to avoid unexpected program behavior or outright crashing in radiation will then require a vastly different programming paradigm. One which is fail-safed all to hell (checksums, redundant code, ect) and perhaps even whose opcodes are specifically chosen to avoid instructions mutating into something particularly hazardous.

On the topic of generators, I don't really see it being a problem. In order to actually make use of any substantial number of generators, one would either already be spending all day in the game or need a bunch of buddies freeloading off them. Selling power probably won't be too problematic either, as any sort of 'batteries' will almost certainly be very limited; anything more than a full generator of output would probably be much more hassle to sell than it was worth, simply because batteries are physical objects, and as such I wouldn't expect players out in deep space to be able to sell them without returning to a station (though I may be wrong). Generators will probably be very cheap, as the fee is to pay for the server-side computation of the things they run; which isn't a very big cost.  My bet would be everyone has as much power as they need simply because it will probably be a low enough RL cost.

Computers will have wireless communications, but it takes much more than that to hack into a computer. It needs to be running a program with some sort of bug or exploit that reads from that communication, the hacker then needs to send the correct message for that particular piece of software to respond in a way they want. Both aren't all that likely, since DCPU programs are much more low level and simple than modern programs, meaning less vulnerabilities. Secondly, people's choice in programs in a game where programming is a bit part of gameplay will be incredibly diverse, with a large chunk being written by the person who is actually in the ship. Thus tailoring an attack to any given ship will be really really hard unless you know in advance the weaknesses of that particular guy's system.

[Drevlin]

I'd rather have flips, because then you can manually shutdown the computer and run it by hand, or you can boot up your hardened programs and run those instead, with more limited functionality.  If your case, if you didn't want to accidentally shoot your allies, you should shut off your computer before entering the field and just run the rest by hand.  For me, I'd shut it down and move to hardened systems before entering the field, and keep going on a smaller computer network.

The problem is that he's going to fully emulate a real(istic) computer architecture, so flips will inevitably lead to computer crashes. For example: you enter a radiation field, ram gets corrupted and the computer crashes. You manually shut down the computer and reboot it. While rebooting, ram gets corrupted again resulting in another crash. There are no "hardened" programs, the only thing is to protect the computer box with some radiation-proof material.

EDIT: partially ninja'd by alway

[alway]

I'd rather have flips, because then you can manually shutdown the computer and run it by hand, or you can boot up your hardened programs and run those instead, with more limited functionality.  If your case, if you didn't want to accidentally shoot your allies, you should shut off your computer before entering the field and just run the rest by hand.  For me, I'd shut it down and move to hardened systems before entering the field, and keep going on a smaller computer network.

The problem is that he's going to fully emulate a real(istic) computer architecture, so flips will inevitably lead to computer crashes. For example: you enter a radiation field, ram gets corrupted and the computer crashes. You manually shut down the computer and reboot it. While rebooting, ram gets corrupted again resulting in another crash. There are no "hardened" programs, the only thing is to protect the computer box with some radiation-proof material.

EDIT: partially ninja'd by alway

Well, it really all depends on the rate at which it happens. DCPU RAM is a pretty decent memory space, and as such, small programs taking up only a very small percentage of RAM would only be corrupted on occasion. If it's something like 1 flip per second, it may take a minute or more for a small program to be effected. Since it is only RAM being effected, a small comparison program checking periodically against memory on a disk could reduce failure rate of all programs on the machine to the failure rate of the small chunk of RAM in which the comparison program is stored. Such a comparison program could probably be made in a few hundred bytes, maybe less, and so even at a relatively high rate of 1 flip per second, you could create a system which only fails once every 10 minutes or so, as the critical code can be made to be much smaller than the overall amount to be run. So yes, you can in fact reduce failure rates with software, assuming the flips are at a relatively low rate.

[Girlinhat]

Even better if you have multiple checkers checking each other, then you can basically remove crashes, but it's going to occupy a large portion of your computer space.

[DrPoo]

Well, I should specify, not "buy energy" but to literally "Use RL$ to buy equipment."  Energy/power will be a resource in the game, but at the same time, the overall idea of "I have a powerful ship" is still there.  To compare it to other MMOs, it would be as if you had to pay to advance every 10 levels.  Your monthly fee gets you up to level 10, but if you want to reach 20 you'll have to pay extra!  Whoever has the most cash becomes the most powerful, and that never works for any game design.

Also: I really hope we can't shield the ship from radiation.  It provides a very unique issue and a delicious set of problems that I hope never become undone.  If you can just toss on some shielding and dive into the heart of a radiation cloud, then things become too easy.  Of course that's the dwarf in me talking...

Arent you meaning Dwarfette? unless i got it totally wrong about your gender

[Girlinhat]

Dwarves have no gender.

[dreadmullet]

Great, another one of Girlinhat's nightmare fuel theories...


My biggest concern about the game in general is how the ships move in space. If the ships fly the way they do in every space movie ever, i.e. like fucking airplanes, I'm going to have to pass the game up, no matter how fun it may be. Also, if there's sound in space. Or if lasers are visible. I highly suspect I'm going to be disappointed, since notch threw away the idea of hard sci-fi.

[Roboboy33]

Or you could shut down everything and use momentum to get through the field.

[Girlinhat]

You'll get sounds and lasers, because hard scifi is rather boring and untheatric.  Momentum is questionable, but I suspect it will act more true-to-form than other games.

[Sowelu]

If you've got logic gates, you can wire up consensus-based RAM and make it turn on a light on the bridge when unanimity is lost.  Then you scurry into your mainframe room, check the bank of lights for the specific one that's misreporting, and fix it manually.

...Or you just feed the majority report back into the input for all copies.

If my computer is 'soft' against radiation for the sole reason that I can't wire up my own RAM, then I'm not interested.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

@dreadmullet: Im under the impression that this will be a physics basef game meaning that, ships will fly, well, like things in a near gravityless void, meaning that in theory, using thrusters you can fly like an airplane or once accelerated can maintain your speed almost indefinitely. Also i should mention that fighters will most certainly be able to fly like airplanes.