What Happened to 'Miegakure,' the Game That Promised the 4th Dimension? (2018)
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The each column is a slider with previews of how it will look when the slider is rotated
I don't suffer from non-VR motion sickness to a significant degree, but there's something about this that gives a really weird sick feeling.
It's similar but different to the AI weird dream loop fractal video things, or AI-generated pictures of unrecognizable objects.
"Unease" doesn't quite do the feeling justice.
https://twitter.com/marctenbosch/status/1129523036015681536
Not much to go on since this article came out.
Someone will implement it in minecraft or roblox first. Came home earlier this week to find my son playing a Miegakure clone in minecraft.
Here's CaptainSparklez doing a let's play of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSNlvtvvQ-M
Here's where you can download it: http://www.minecraftmaps.com/puzzle-maps/the-hypercube
It's... confusing, but as far as I can tell, accurate.
Could 4d be projected onto 2d in this fashion? Not a slice, but more like a shadow with surface effects. Maybe with red/green/blue lights in different positions in 4d space?
https://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/demox/Hyper.html
There's a hard-to-get-running-due-to-age Java applet there which, when it used to run easily, was very powerful for getting me to understand 4D in an intuitive way.
It has a variety of stereo viewing modes, ranging from eye-crossed 3D (and wall-eye), to red/blue glasses, and so forth. It also has an excellent option for "thick" lines, that accentuates the position of the 4D object by making lines closer to the camera thicker.
The trick is to use your brain's two different depth perception mechanisms in different ways. You have hardware depth perception in the form of parallax difference between your two eyes, and you have software depth perception in the form of your brain's image analysis capabilities that, given a 2D wireframe, can determine a 3D projection of it. This is always fun with optical illusions, where you can see that your brain only really uses small localities for these calculations - observe the traditional "blivet" fork for an example.
Anyone who has looked at an isometric rendering of a wireframe 3D cube on paper knows that there are two ways you can perceive this shape, and that's the key to getting 4D intuitive perception going. You should already be accomplished at mentally switching the cube back and forth without even closing your eyes before you move on to another dimension!
If you use a hardware stereo mechanism like crossing your eyes to get one depth axis, you can concentrate and use that software depth perception to get the second depth axis. In particular, it's important to note that different mouse buttons and key combos will rotate the shape in different axes, so just make gentle movements with each to get a feeling for the range of motion. One set of axes will rotate the cube as though its 3D projection was one of the two possible software-depth-perception interpretations of it, and the other set of axes will rotate it as though the other interpretation was correct. You can seamlessly move back and forth between those states!
Perlin's applet features a variety of shapes, from the classic hypercube, to a simplex with the fewest possible edges (akin to a triangular pyramid in 3D) on to a sort of Klein bottle. It's really tricky to figure that one out, but in the end it's basically a sort of hypertorus where the inside and outside can become one another. Yeah, that's not really conveying very well in text, is it....
The dev is terrified to release anything less than perfection and is insanely good at adding more content and can always justify to themselves procrastinating on release by working on more content.
What? I'm not projecting. You're projecting. Shut up.
Releasing it when it is ready rather than releasing it to release it is probably better in this case. Especially if the creator ever plans on other 4D game projects, since he has his own game engine to create them now. Better to not have someone's first experience with a 4D game be "This was garbage." in that case.
For games pushing a new gimmick this seems even more true, and especially the idea of iterating on things that maybe aren't even quite "good" in order to learn more and eventually understand how to make something great even if a lot of the time greatness seems accidental. Two examples come to mind... Doom was made in a year, but was a culmination of even shorter projects successively refining what FPS meant. Portal was done in a little over 2 years, but was also built on the experience of Digipen students' project game that introduced the gimmick mechanic along with others at Valve with experience making FPSes (along with some writers who knew what they were doing).
Unfortunately, at least my tastes and expectations in games have changed in the intervening 15 years, and it no longer suited them at all.
If only the game was as good as the 2001 E3 trailer.
Then Gearbox stepped in, wrapped it up in near passable form and shipped it. But the final product is very clearly not a good game. Level design is bad, graphics are terribly inconsistent, ranging from looking modern for its time to looking ten years dated. Gameplay is poorly balanced and the pacing is just not there.
I loved Duke Nukem 3D and was very much looking forward to Forever when it was announced. By the time it launched I had no expectations on it and bought it as a fun thing. It's amusing that they wrapped it up and published it, but it's not a finished game.
What it is, however, is fodder for some great conversation at work when we're discussing project management.
For a puzzle game, I would say that there's less risk for that, although I do recall other games copying the 4D mechanic since.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbp9m4/what-happened-to-r...
That's not totally true anymore when you have access to an update system as part of the platform. No Man's Sky is one example.
I know many others, and myself, who won't be playing Fallout:76 or No Man's Sky because both games were colossal train wrecks on launch that over-promised (or over-hyped) and under-delivered. It doesn't matter much if these issues are eventually fixed, most of the player base will have already moved on. Some many go back and try it out when they hear "it's better now" but many won't.
The games will be remembered poorly by most people, even if they eventually do become good and that is what the quote means.
They only brought multiplayer support a couple months ago. Honestly, this was one of those too little too late kind of things.
Remember Narbacular Drop? You probably don't, because it was a clunky free game with bad graphics.
Remember Portal? That was made by the same devs, when Valve hired them after seeing Narbacular Drop's seamless teleportation mechanics.
One of the key challenges is that it is so hard to distinguish the first case from the last. In practice, there are many more games that never get finished than those that do.
Though this is, of course, very common and not even specific to the gamedev to begin with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwBl7Rnkt78&feature=youtu.be...
His analysis of the game is great — he says it parallels early sci-fi and speculative fiction, which started by asking “what if?” questions to build stories around worlds constructed from the answer (“What if the world was four dimensional?” in the case of Miegakure, or “what if the world was two dimensional?” in Flatland.)
Braid was born of asking similar questions. (“What if you could play with the flow of time?”) Jonathan suggests that games elevate the art of asking that question further than fiction because you actually have to _build_ the world spawned from your “what if?” question rather than write it. But it creates some of the most interesting games — he demos some others in his talk.
It's great to learn that Marc ten Bosch is still working on Miegakure. I really enjoyed the previews and the concept art on his own site: http://marctenbosch.com/news/
The 2nd video on the page is really great at explaining this.
I haven't heard of this game before .. hopefully I'll forgot about it until it gets released. :)
Regardless of any other opinions I may have about the game industry's toxicity, I'm always somewhat sad to recall that, as I wonder what it might or might not have turned out to be.
I was attracted by the ideas used, but that "4th dimension" thing, really didn't seem so solidify much.
I'm guessing that in the end, it was all about playability, and that probably the novelty of the game dynamics wore off rather fast, leaving behind a dull game.
I think the developer probably got a lot out of the journey as well, thus making releasing the game very likely irrelevant.
I really do hope to play it one day, but I'm starting to think that the game is on a death march and will end up unsatisfactory no matter what. I am eagerly waiting to be proven wrong.
So it seems that currently it's time or art, implementation of said art, and polish.
I am not aware of any good game that has been developed bazaar-style.
I don't see how that has much in common with a "bazaar" approach to a game that is still in early development.
In other words, mods can effectively serve as "early development" versions of what eventually become new games, while being developed in bazaar style.
For example, open the original DotA in the scenario editor and look how simple it is. Some of the hardest things in game development are already done for them. The DotA creator could basically churn on their idea trivially at that level of abstraction.
Of course, coming up and implementing a fun game is the "other 90%" of game development, but the WC3 kit also heavily constrains you the same way RPG Maker 2000 does.
I just don't think this has much relation to the original claim that bazaar-style development would help this game along. Scenario editors are just worlds different. Consider how much work Miegakure's creator would have to do to arrive at the sort of custom game concept or Half-Life mod we're even talking about. WC3 and HL both already existed, for example.
Anyways, my guess is that Miegakure was a cute tech demo, but the developer has trouble lifting it into an actual game. For example, they also created http://4dtoys.com/, and it looks really interesting, but it's also hard to see how to advance from that concept to a more polished game. As opposed to, say, a tech demo based on portals.
But it's interesting: I feel like you're describing two halves of a coin.
Mods take existing tech and iterate on gameplay rules to make a fun game.
Miegakure, in your supposition, has tech but no game.
Certainly, Miegakure's creator could not have developed it as a mod to an existing game. But once they wrote their engine, perhaps they could have released it and let mod creators experiment with the game part.
...In practice, that probably wouldn't actually work, just because it's hard to attract a modding community to a game that isn't already popular. But if a community somehow came to exist, the kind of trial and error that modders do sounds like a great way to stumble on the right gameplay concept that makes 4D actually fun. If such a concept exists. :)
Think Team Fortress, etc. Things that have a complete enough set of rules to standalone as a unique gameplay experience.
Writing mods has in general nothing to do with bazaar style.
This probably won't help you figure out how to play Miegakure, though. Although I thought the comparison to FEZ was apropos.
The only difference between time and space is that entropy propogates across time but not space.
I just wanted to point out that time is basically a spatial dimension and we have alot of experience with 4D objects. The temporal aspect of time is entropy; that is the only difference.
Other than that the equations literally call it spacetime and treat it as the same thing.
The 4th dimension you experience in the game is literally time with the arrow of time removed.
Saying that "the fourth dimension is time" when people bring up the idea of things with 4 dimensions of space, is a frustratingly common confusion.
No. One can think of "3 dimensions of space and one dimension of time" as a 4 dimensional thing, but that does not mean that every time that someone talks about 4 dimensions, that they would be properly interpreted as talking about time.
4 spatial dimensions usually just means that it takes 4 coordinates to pick out the points (though one could also be talking about, like, the Hausdorff Dimension of something, but whatever.)
... are you making a joke?
People don’t talk about the time dimension because it is irrelevant (edit: because there is always 1 time dimension, so no new information is conveyed by mentioning that the game has a time dimension).
Do you really think, when someone talks about a “2D game” that they mean that the game world has one dimension of space and another dimension of time? Of course you do not! That would be foolish! They are obviously talking about a game with 2 dimensions of space.
The whole “the 4’th’ dimension always means time” idea is a stupid convention from bad sci-fi, which also brings us nonsense like “a journey into the seventh dimension”.
Call time “a” 4th dimension, as in, other than the 3 of space, sure, fine, people can tell what you are talking about. That just is imposing an order based on the order you are referring to things at the time.