I can imagine nothing pissing off a noob more than getting a virus within 10 minutes of play and having no idea how to stop his ship from self destructing.
Perhaps this will need some sort of firewall system built in where ships cannot communicate unless ports have been explicitly opened.
Perhaps some sort of communications proxy that can serve for safe communications.
It could have a system similar to EVE where high security systems have infrastructural to mitigate risk whereas low sec systems lack this but contain the best rewards.
I expect that inter-computer communication will be more like it was in the 80s, with swapping floppies and dial-up BBSs being the norm. It's still possible to get viruses that way, but there won't be worms spreading autonomously through the entire system.
I can imagine how an economy of reputation could arise where some people are trusted to distribute malware-free code.
It doesn't even indicate protected memory segments. You should be able to implement traditional buffer overflows and self-modifying assembly on this processor (that is, you can write to your instructions as if they were any other type of memory).
Here is an analogy, what you are talking about is secure walls with a lockable door; what you have in this chip is some wood, a saw, some nails and a hammer.
It's 128KB of RAM, that's the same as the original Macintosh in 1984. I would be surprised if it ran at more than about 10MHz. And nevermind the constrained resources for implementing any of this hypothetical infrastructure, unless Notch adds an MMU, you can't enforce permissions
You can't think about this in modern terms. It's not a modern computer. It's a 1980s computer, and it's supposed to run a spaceship. Think microcontrollers, not smartphones or set-top boxes.
Couldn't the permission system exist outside of the constraints of the in-game computer (as just some game mechanism)? If each of the ship's discrete components were accessible at some address, couldn't the game enforce the permissions at a level above the simulated CPU?
A rough static analysis of the code might reveal where those components are accessed, and as long as you enforce permissions while the software runs then you should be able to catch anything that tries to slip past.
Go back and look at the first post in this very thread. Notch explicitly intends nothing of the kind, and I certainly can't see why it would be done -- it runs counter to the vision thus far articulated.
It should be possible to provide programs as "data" that is interpreted by the program "running" on Notch's CPU, thus allowing a fine-grained, whitelisted permissions even without MMU. No?
Depends on how it's structured, doesn't it? It's entirely possible that programs and data will share the same memory with no sandboxing between programs. In that case, then without some sort of MMU a virus could just inject code into an otherwise benign program.
Even with finer program access controls, it would still be hard to protect as long as untrusted code was allowed to alter trusted.
You would have to abstract the CPU in some way and then write the permissions management in software as part of the interpreter. Bear in mind that this is already only a 16bit CPU with a restricted address space.
You would have to abstract the CPU in some way and then write the permissions management in software as part of the interpreter.
Yes, that's what I said. :)
Bear in mind that this is already only a 16bit CPU with a restricted address space.
I suspect the interpreter could be made to fit, with limited space left for the untrusted (to-be-interpreted) code. As has been pointed out elsewhere, though, if there is a backing store (i.e., simulated hard drive), it's probably possible to have effectively unlimited "RAM" in the game in practice, unless Notch implements a slowdown for accessing the backing store.
True, but your CPU is limited too so having to lex & parse sourcefiles and walk syntax trees to run programs could be a bottleneck there, if you remember old computers there was a significant performance gap between native and interpreted code.
In practice that might not matter for many applications if they do not have to use intensive algorithms etc.
I would still imagine that compilers would be used more than interpreters though which would mean that some security would need to be present at the "hardware" or "firmware" level.
Another interesting thing to think about regards backing stores:
I assume that the programs will be able to take input from the world around them, i.e other ships , objects in space etc.
So what's to stop you from using (perhaps) a tractor beam to re-organise the position of asteroids in space and then "read" that data back using ship instrumentation?
Potentially the entire universe becomes one big DB!
Notch could write some very basic software that everybody can buy or upgrade to. So players will have basic firewalls to start with, and can upgrade to better (but standard) firewalls.
So not everybody needs to actually know how to program, they can just buy stuff from NPCs or from the market off other players. But obviously, the ones who do know the system inside out will have an advantage.
There were a lot of things that were good about EVE (it's been about 4 years since I played).
Examples would be:
The Economy.
Ship Configuration System.
The Artstyle.
The security model.
The unforgivingness (made you think carefully before you acted).
The problem was just that the combat always felt a bit bland and favored players with the biggest ISK supply and XP. So in reality you needed to be part of a huge corp and wait for months for skill training to be competitive.
Do not underestimate those old computers. When you remove audio, visual, and textual data from your programs, remove all the code for handling those and slinging them about and processing them, when you remove the textual file formats and replace them with hand-optimized binary, when you give up on any form of structured modern programming and just hand-compile custom assembler, when your opcodes aren't 64-bits wide, and so on and so on, you can get a lot done in 128KB of code.
Problem was most of the demos used many many megs of ram as they procedurally generated objects and stored them in memory. The 64k demos were disk size.
Assuming memory mapping is used for displays the (128k of ram (64k of words)) is also needed to hold your display buffer. Assuming a mere 320 x 200 x 8 screen will use 1/2 of your entire virtual memory space. Look for demos of what people do on C64 demos for a better idea. Yes you can run a UNIX, yes you can talk TCP... but its going to chew up a lot of the capacity for that infrastructure. I expect very light weight protocols, TCP/IP is likely too heavy weight.
Who knows.
Assuming there is some way for players to transfer stuff between their computers and therefor address spaces all you need is one rogue jmp instruction.
Not to mention the usual social engineering stuff. "Hey install this great program, it'll make your guns 200% more powerful"
This opens a whole stream of electronic warfare, however, the problem is that this will be writing programs that have no real-world usage. Except... These programs will be a great way to introduce both kids and adults to programming as learning it will give an edge to people.
Question: Will we need to program an OS? And does it run Linux?
> These programs will be a great way to introduce both kids and adults to programming
This would be a tremendous way to do that.
Programming on normal computers is always kind of disconnected from the real world. So, your program can add two and two. Great. Now what?
Microcontrollers alleviate that issue to some extent. Now your program can walk and talk, and push real-world objects. But you kind of need to learn a bit of electronics too.
Notch's Universe solves this issue neatly. It's a mock real world, with programmable computers. Now your software can do some interesting mock-real-world stuff, like fly spaceships. That's pretty neat.
Learning about assembly/to-the-metal coding is probably not the best way to learn programming. "OP? LOAD? REGISTER? PC LOAD LETTER? What's a word? There's only 8 registers? Does that mean I can only save 8 things? What do you mean I have to push things into a stack?"
This is why most people advocate learning python or ruby. You don't have to deal with the underlying manipulation of the computer until you've decided you actually like programming.
I don't know about "most people" but I think a machine like this DCPU-16 is better than learning Python or Ruby. Those languages are huge and full of complexity. With a 16-bit machine with a tiny instruction set, the student actually has a chance of getting the feeling, 'I know everything there is to know about this system'. And that connects to a piece of wisdom I love from Design Principles Behind Smalltalk: "If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual".
And there's a certain concreteness to such a machine. The mental model has no vagueness at all. You could imagine building a physical copy of it and playing the role of CPU--adding small numbers, moving data between registers and memory, etc. I've played with this idea myself before of using an invented 16-bit machine as a teaching device.
Maybe it's just a case of personal differences, but as a starting programmer, I would have been extremely excited about a simple programmable thing that I can fully understand and use to do things within a game world. Python is cool too but it's overwhelming. There are learn-Python books that are thicker than most of my university textbooks.
Consider that a while back, that was the only way to learn programming.
Personally, I think Python is a great way to teach programming, because it allows us to get to concepts quickly. Accidental complexity is at a minimum, and the inherent complexities of programming become the focus. But, even thought that's my personal preference (based on some experience; I've used Java and C++ to teach programmers and had to explain away accidental complexities), I hesitate to say it's best because I have no evidence backing up that claim.
What's important is learning certain concepts, perhaps the most important of which is algorithmic thinking. That is, knowing what result you want, knowing how you start, and being able to reason through how to get from the start condition to your desired result, step-by-step. What helps is when the result you get is something you care about. I can easily see that for some people, getting something to behave a certain way in a videogame will be a more compelling result than others.
That depends. The Knuth MIX architecture is much like the architecture Notch has in mind. But the more recent MMIX architecture is far more like a modern 64 bit RISC system. In fact, it does look odd that Notch would prefer such an old behemoth nowadays.
An MMIX like ISA would open up the world for compilers much more. With this, it looks like people should be confined to writing simple stuff - which is kinda the point but still rather sad.
I'm sure part of the goofiness of this ISA is just that Notch wants to keep it nerdy and somewhat retro, but I wonder if he also wants to keep compilers from getting out of hand; like, he wants people writing (at least sometimes) in assembly.
Works for a lot of people. I started with FORTRAN and quickly went to assembly. I recommend doing some sort of assembly for anyone serious about programming.
I disagree. I recently designed and implemented virtualized image servers (real ones coming once the Requisition request comes through) for faster image serving. This was basically unheard of by anyone I work with however by having read the http specs I was able to give a report on why we wanted to serve images in parallel. It's easy to dismiss Web Developers as (X)HTML/CSS, Javascript & Php. In reality there are FAR, FAR, FAR more uses for programming competent Web Developers. Shoot, even having a good grasp of fundamental Computer Science helps with understanding Php's array's (or lack-thereof ;) ).
Now for practical usage? Sure Assembly is probably a waste of time. I still haven't found a real way to implement that wouldn't be. But the fundamental understanding of how a computer works, how decisions are made so close to the machine enhanced my understanding about programming which in turn enhanced my understanding about how I wanted to develop and engineer, even for the web.
I am not so sure. To be a good web developer, you need to have a familiarity beyond css, js, html, and the framework you are using. You should be able to understand the underlying protocol, for example, what do the HTTP headers look like? How are they separated? How can SQL injection be dependent on header contents? You can unknowingly build a vulnerable web app if you don't understand the mechanics.
And in my mind, "serious about programming" extends beyond building web apps.
having a low level understanding of program flow can help in many situations. If you are an extremely lucky programmer, you might be able to live your life only in high level languages, but most that I have met had to get down in the plumbing eventually. Understanding asm will help with that.
Most likely it won't need anything other than some very basic firmware which would be part of the emulator.
It is unlikely to need any mechanism for managing drivers for example (unless you can build custom hardware).
You might need some form of scheduler if you are running different programs to do different stuff (weapons , engines , navigation) but this could be something very simple and again baked into the emulator.
Some form of shell might be nice, but again not necessarily required.
You could run your spaceship computer like that, but you could also install a multitasking system that allows you to download files from your favorite space BBS while playing a game of solitaire and plotting the course to your next mining asteroid.
You would clearly have to reroute power from the primary core to the auxiliary shield systems which have been modified based on the tachyon attraction theory and amplified by shutting down unnecessary support systems on storage decks 3, 6, 11 and 42.
"Question: can we trade the programs we create? How will you stop malicious viruses etc?"
"yes. And I won't stop viruses, the players will have to do that themselves."
~ https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/187474819980328962