A look at the Technology behind the 4D Game Miegakure [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Even though simpler, I think what I built is only partially successful at this. In the end I think the audience for my toy and Marc's game will only be people excited about new concepts and toying with theoretical math ideas where the bulk of the fun is just from that rather than game play.
I believe much of a game's fun comes from matching the users existing abstract ideas about the world. I suspect that 4D manipulation of objects is so deeply counter intuitive that doing this is extremely difficult.
But I for one will be thrilled by any from of Miegakure that is ever released whatever it's state or level of fun.
I like that the game creates the ability to move through a 4D space while seeing the effects in 3D. The fundamental is great. Also, how a 4D person might move through walls via the fourth dimension. I think an even more interesting angle might happen if a game tries to break the assumption that 4D movement is wide open: put obstacles in the way where a person must use intuition to navigate it by making a 2D/3D map of that space as well. Maybe the game does that, too.
What I ended up thinking was how we can always see what's ahead in 2d / 3d (of course, without obstacles), and how we cannot see anything in the fourth dimension in this particular world. Could this ability be somehow recreated for 4D? Looking ahead/behind, being aware of what's happening "nearby" on the fourth axis?
Very interesting, look forward to more news about this game!
I can't wait to see that.
They evoke how their inspiration was flatland, which when I read it I found strikingly unimaginative. To explain, the characters are 2D objects; the book describes some of the problems these beings encounter, but doesn't really solve them, so the described society doesn't really hold up. One instance is that their field of vision is just a line with a dimension for color, so you need to see a form move into space to understand what it is (maybe I'm wrong, but I think the author does not say clearly that points do bear some 'depth' and 'texture' information, otherwise this wouldn't work). But there are creative ways to solve these problems: for example the beings could 'see' using a bat-like interpretations of echoes to get a sense of the space around them (we see in 3D, not in 2D). Life under different constraints ends up having different features than us humans. So in a sense, it is a bit like somebody who would stumble upon a mathematical paradox (say, the barber's one) and would just deduce 'how funny are words and numbers' (well, a bit like Lewis Caroll).
It's a bit like the 'Seinfeld is unfunny' trope; even at the time, some people found it unfunny. It does not mean that this effect does not play a role, but you seldom hear "well, Copernicus is such a greaaat guy for discovering that the Earth revolves around the Sun", while it does suffer from it.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks had devised such stories illustrating some mathematical concepts; it's just that more than 150 years ago, the audience for 'geeky stories' was not so big, as well as the potential writers for such stories weren't so numerous (although Gauss seems a bit cheeky on his portrait). HN just wasn't there.
Fez is similar.
We don't yet have a graphic game that makes a fourth spatial dimension more intuitive, but I do recall playing text adventures that had very limited 4-d interaction. The white cubes in Spellbreaker were all hyperfaces of a hypercube, after all.
Poetry.
"When you finally get to play Miegakure"
When it's going to be released!? Been waiting a long time now...
If you instead fix a spatial coordinate you get images as the two left and center images in
> http://electronicimaging.spiedigitallibrary.org/data/Journal...
The parent said "A 2D slice of a 3D object."
And that's wrong, it's a 2D projection of a 3D object.
If you include time then it's a slice in the time component, right, but that wasn't being discussed.
Videos can also be generated without using projections (though cameras use this method).
A video is either {2,1,0}-D or {1,2,0}-D, depending on the mathematical sign convention you chose for your spacelike dimensions.
When people use a single number, they invariably mean spacelike dimensions, as null dimensions and multiple timelike dimensions tend to give people the screaming jibblies when they try to visualize them.