A Slower Speed of Light (2012) | Hacker News Reader

A Slower Speed of Light (2012)

gamelab.mit.edu

89 pointsrbanffy15 comments

Another speed of light game is 'Velocity Raptor'. Depending on how fast the dinosaur is moving, nearby objects appear to slow down, change size, and change color. The author says it is an "accurate and mathematically based depiction of the world at high velocities".

You can play it here in your browser. http://www.testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html

Or read how it works here http://www.testtubegames.com/srel101.html

That models movement in relativity in a logical 2-dimensional way, but doesn't show the 3-d visual effects like Slower Speed of Light does. It runs in much weaker machines though.

When I teach relativity, I offer my students extra credit for playing each of these two games. They capture rather different aspects of the structure of spacetime, and I think both are interesting and worthwhile.

(As an aside, I fairly consistently wind up feeling a bit dizzy after playing all the way through "A Slower Speed of Light". It can be disorienting in a way that messes with my inner equilibrium somehow. Velocity Raptor isn't immersive enough for that to be a problem.)

Nice. Coincidentally, I was thinking just the other day about implementing a real-time (or near real-time) ray/path tracing renderer with relativistic effects. Looks like they beat me to it, although using raster graphics. I'm a bit surprised by the result, though. I wonder how accurate it is, or if they had to make significant approximations due to the raster graphics constraint.

It'd be interesting to add relativity to a popular rendering engine such as Blender. Wouldn't be trivial though. Would be fun to have objects with mass and see them bending the light paths and local time.

In college I did a project where I added a speed of light delay to a game of Asteroids. I didn't implement a proper Lorentz transform per se, but the effect was still pretty cool. Just for fun I added some faster than light particles and FTL jumps and wormholes. Notable side effects:

FTL particles appear as if they teleported to a location then split in half and leave in two directions.

You can sometimes see an object leave a wormhole and then enter it.

When you FTL jump, you can see yourself from a few moments ago about to FTL jump.

If you fire your laser and then FTL jump in front of your laser, you're in for a bad day.

Where can we see it? It sounds fun!

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4731749

It doesn't work for me. Segfaults, just prints the following:

Set current directory to /home/elronnd/slower_light Found path: /home/elronnd/slower_light/A Slower Speed of Light.x86_64

Mono path[0] = '/home/elronnd/slower_light/A Slower Speed of Light_Data/Managed'

Mono path[1] = '/home/elronnd/slower_light/A Slower Speed of Light_Data/Mono'

Mono config path = '/home/elronnd/slower_light/A Slower Speed of Light_Data/Mono/etc'

zsh: abort (core dumped) ./A\ Slower\ Speed\ of\ Light.x86_64

Same thing for the 32-bit version. Windows version seems to work in wine, though.

Same here. Maybe it's hte Intel crash mentioned here: http://memolition.com/2013/03/04/a-slower-speed-of-light-mit...

But then, why would it work fine in wine?

ANU made a relativistic ray tracer quite a while back and animated some videos of what would happen if you set the speed of light to ordinary human-scale speeds, which sadly seem to have vanished from the Internet.

http://people.physics.anu.edu.au/~cms130/TEE/site/tee/learni...

vivid colours, morphing objects, fantasy creatures.. would also be an accurate description of a real psychedelic trip.. wonder why they put in so many mushrooms..

It takes infinite energy to achieve a walking pace? Where do playets get that?

Iddqd, idkfa

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