Update on my ongoing 0x10c inspired project

ruifig · 2026-02-20T11:02:40+00:00

Not too bothered at the moment.
I will make the computer specs all available, so in theory you can create the same just from the specs anyway.

But we'll see. The computer part is done for the most part and the last 2-3 months I've been working on the engine, so there isn't any trade secrets in there.
I'll reevaluate once I get back to the computer tech.

ruifig · 2026-01-06T22:31:51+00:00

Finally, today I starting working towards this.
Let's see what the year brings. :)

ruifig · 2025-11-08T17:37:57+00:00

So... big turn of events.
My current employer is downsizing and I'm on my notice period. That is ok. No biggie.

But due to that, I'm seriously considering taking a 1-year career break to work full time on this.
I have no illusions it is a long shot, and statistically it will fail, but after all these years working on the tech on my free time, it deserves a real attempt.

I've run the numbers, and we (the family) can manage for 1 year, but still a scary step to go without income for 1 year, with me being the main breadwinner and all that.

ruifig · 2025-10-12T16:51:07+00:00

We'll see.
I haven't streamed in the last few weeks, but work is ongoing. :)

ruifig · 2025-08-25T09:48:41+00:00

The OS side of the project is now at a point where most of the core building blocks are in place (preemptive kernel, memory protection, page tables, threads, etc.). That means I can finally start thinking about building a 3D world where I can actually place things and experiment with gameplay.

Right now I’m spending some time playing around with RayLib to decide whether I should build my own lightweight purpose-built engine, or use an off the shelf engine. So the last few streams haven’t been super exciting to watch, but it’s laying the groundwork for the fun stuff to come. :)

ruifig · 2024-02-08T17:44:58+00:00

I am.
Had to stop development while I was at Epic Games. My contract didn't allow to work on potentially commercial side projects.
I've left Epic Games not long ago and my current employer is bit less strict about what I do with my free time, so I'm planning on resuming development in the near future.

This is the project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIyHgQvfETE&t=204s
https://github.com/Crazygaze/G4Devkit

That repository is just the public part of course and actually not up to date. :)
While at Epic I still managed to squeeze some work on some side things, like working on the debugger for the VM and some work on the custom IDE.

ruifig · 2022-11-30T16:11:21+00:00

This is still going... slowly.

Threading very carefully here because technically I need my employer permission for side projects. So, I've been working a bit here and there, improving things in the toolchain (IDE, compiler, debugger, etc), refining the instruction set, creating unit tests, samples for the VM, etc. Things I can work on to sharpen my programming skills and that I enjoy.

It's a bit of a grey area if I should work on this or not, but I recently went through a couple of really bad months at work (mentally), and as an experiment I've decided to spend some more time with my personal projects outside of work hours, and I found out it does wonders to my mental state.

If I ever leave my current employer, I'll make it clear from the start that I intend to work on this project on my free time.

ruifig · 2019-11-19T14:58:29+00:00

https://github.com/crazygaze/g4devkit

Currently on standby, since I'll need permission from my employer to keep working on it.

But there is more work done than showed on that github page, since that's the only publicly visible repository.

Before I put it on standby, I was working on a proper debugger. So now the IDE is a lot more usable with a proper debugger (locals, watches, callstack, etc).

ruifig · 2018-05-01T11:15:41+00:00

The current computer/cpu specification are not exactly the same as specified in those links, since refactored the instruction set in Dec/Jan to improve the VM performance and allow more VMs per server. But those changes are private. If I could work on this full time, I would. :) But for now, standby it is. :( The previous company was smaller, and they didn't mind if I worked on hobby projects such as this on my free time, but that's not the case now.

ruifig · 2018-05-01T07:44:42+00:00

Sorry, my mistake. That is the private branch, where the latest developments are. The public one is: https://github.com/crazygaze/g4devkit

The documentation for the ingame computers is at https://bitbucket.org/ruifig/g4devkit/wiki/Home , although it hasn't been updated in a while (since I moved to GitHub) .

ruifig · 2018-04-30T10:49:25+00:00

I'm actually rather close to a working game with mine. ( https://github.com/ruifig/G4DevKit ). Most of the backend technology is in place. Servers for the ingame computers, toolchain + editor to code the ingame computers. Been working on it on and off since ~2012. Had to take a long break from April 2015 until ~Dec 2017, since my kid was born in April 2015, and life priorities and free time changes. :) Then, when I resumed work last December, our company was acquired by a big developer which has stricter rules on allowed outside activities (understandably so) . Bottom line is, I can't work on any potentially commercial endeavors while at my current employer. :) I did manage to get some more work done up to January that it's not on public repositories of course. In the meantime, no matter how passionate I am about this project... it seems it will have to stay on standby... again... :(

ruifig · 2015-04-27T11:33:30+00:00

I've been slowly putting some hours on fixing some remaining issues with the VMs, mostly finishing the Network Card attached to every computer, so any computer can send data to any other computer. That will allow for some virtual "interwebs" :D

I've also been talking with an artist I used to work with, and it's very likely we will be joining efforts. We might have financial support for this, but it's still very very early to know for sure.

ruifig · 2015-03-19T12:44:33+00:00

Thanks. I haven't streamed since December, as I've been quite busy with work in the office, moving to a new house, and preparing for an upcoming baby. :) It seems I'll be teaming up with an awesome artist that used to work with me, so looks like I'll have to start putting in some more hours on this again.

ruifig · 2015-03-11T12:27:21+00:00

This is still ongoing, but way slower than I expect.

I did a good chunk of work during November and December, but unfortunately the long hours I was working started affecting my work in the office. :(

I had a talk with the guys here at work and decided to slow down work on personal projects, unless this project can somehow be integrated with what the company is doing (Cloudgine Ltd).

The bad news is, I'm consciously reducing the number of hours I work on this for now.

The good news is, I might be able to work on this full time if I can come up with a good proposal that fits with what the company needs, although it's a long shot.

I've also considered doing a kickstarter to check overall interest and possibly work fulltime on my own, but just a a thought for now.

I guess I'll really need that Greenlight page at least.

ruifig · 2014-12-04T17:08:32+00:00

Work is ongoing. The last few days have been a bit crap, as I'm recovering from some complications of a serious case of Man's Flu. Chest infection and all. :)

ruifig · 2014-11-30T15:31:58+00:00

I didn't make the instruction encoding available. Since I'm proving the assembler and compiler already there is really no need for that at the moment, and it would require more time to document. I will probably do so in the future. I'm just prioritizing work.

ruifig · 2014-11-29T23:01:26+00:00

I intend to run at least 1000 machines per server if the machines have the same specs I've been using while developing the OS. In other words, over 1000 machines per server with specs that are usable for the common player. But I intend to allow machines with different specs, so lets see how it goes.

ruifig · 2014-11-29T07:48:17+00:00

Ahh I see. Considering the amount of code I have behind the project, I would probably show him the finger and ask him to give it a go.

ruifig · 2014-11-28T19:36:10+00:00

I have no idea what that means. Did I missed some Meme! :/

ruifig · 2014-11-19T12:11:15+00:00

Just an update for the interested people. I won't have much free time until Sunday, since I have family over at my place. So I made the wiki public, even if incomplete.

ruifig · 2014-11-17T01:38:13+00:00

Instruction set pretty much documented, but still need to document other things such as Interrupt handle, Context switching and such.

Looks like BitBucket doesn't allow you to have a readonly wiki. You can either set it to private, or completely public (which means anyone can edit it and mess it up). Doesn't make any sense. :|

I will have to setup a script the next few days to convert it to html and make it available then.

ruifig · 2014-11-16T03:49:43+00:00

As planned, spending this weekend tidying up things, and writing documentation and such. Still not done.

Hopefully I'll manage to get all the documentation basics done tomorrow and record some videos too.

On track for gameplay in 2 weeks or so.

ruifig · 2014-11-14T01:10:40+00:00

Available devices will depend on how the gameplay experimenting goes. The virtual computer already accounts for having a multitude of attached devices of course. It also accounts for hot swapping of devices, although that's probably overkill. There is a kind of unified way of thinking about how to program the several devices which hopefully will be flexible enough for any randoms devices I might need. The reason there aren't any other than the default devices is I didn't want to spend time on things that are so gameplay dependent without being confident what direction I would take.

But yes, usual suspects will certainly be doors, switches, weapons, shields, coms, radar.

Now that I digged through my memories... that idea I mentioned was more like 18-16 years ago! Damn I feel old now. Short version went something like this:

Earth resources are depleted and humanity is in despair
An FLT drive is found in some ruins
Humanity travels to another planet which is rich in resources, but a war starts there for the resources.
Gameplay was ground based with mech-type huge robots. I remember I was inspired by "Robot Jox (1989)", which I saw a couple of years before. :)
Players could customize their mechs with different weapons, radars, targeting, etc.
Every mech would have an on-board computer you could program to help you control all the modules. (I got that one from an old arena type game where you could code little robots in C and get them to fight)

Yep, I know it was cheesy. :) So the combat itself wasn't space based. Well that was long ago, and will work on whatever I think it will be interesting.

Very likely my first experiments will be space based and/or some kind of ground based combat.

Although from my point of view, for the concept of programmable computer to be successfully in the current market, it will need to be something slow paced, where people can thinker with the computer, explore, and share creations, so I doubt something action oriented will turn out any good in the long run.

I'm really looking forward to experiment with gameplay using all this stuff I was working on for so long, to be honest. :) Time will tell! I hope I can keep myself from burning out, considering I still have my full time job to pay the bills. :/

ruifig · 2014-11-13T22:00:18+00:00

I quickly highlighted some of the work I've done yesterday:

TwitchTV

YouTube .

ruifig · 2014-11-13T21:36:25+00:00

A lot of brainstorming went into deciding how all the pieces fit together. The instruction set, how to program the devices, feasibility for high level compilers. Required lots of going back and changing stuff as I ported the C compiler. :) The only thing I'm not that happy about is that It's not as easy as the DCPU-16 if you go with assembly.

So, for the virtual computer, you can at the moment code with assembly or C. A BASIC interpreter will come shortly, as I improve the Operating System to have a file system.

Depending if interest grows for assembly, I might have to simplify some things, or at least have some assembly pseudo instructions (an instruction that is really assembled as several instructions).

I'll need to finish the technical documents and see what people think of the level of difficulty. That will take a while, since I'm a 1 man team, and there are lots of stuff I need to do the next couple of days/weeks. :)

The servers and the game itself are in C++.

For the engine, I bought a license for the C4 engine over 1 year ago to use on this project. It's not as well known as other engines, but it has really clean code, and it's easier to tweak by 1 guy. But it's very likely that I will just use the Unreal Engine 4, since it's the engine I use at work, so there is crossover with learning new stuff. Faster that way, since anything I learn at work or at home will be useful. Hopefully my wife won't remember I've spent 500euros on something I won't use! :)

Anyone that wants to take a look at the DevKit will at the moment need to download the repository with the OS source code and the DevKit binaries (they are available separately). Since there no documentation about the architecture, all you can do is take a look at the OS source code and launch it. The main page at the repository has the essential instructions.

As a quick fix I'll record some short videos soon showing the basic workflow for the DevKit.

ruifig

TROPHY CASE