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I watched people playing this for about 15 minutes at GDC. Didn't try it myself and I didn't know at the time that it was 4D, thought it was just some weird xfo

by joeld42 17y ago

I watched people playing this for about 15 minutes at GDC. Didn't try it myself and I didn't know at the time that it was 4D, thought it was just some weird xform of the world. Looked amazing but was completely unintuitive to me. I didn't get it at all but if playing for a while helps me learn to visualize 4D space then I really want to try it.

jerf 17y ago
I don't know if you'll find this helpful or not, but there is one deceptive aspect in the video. Visually, you see a world composed of cubes, but geometrically that is not what is actually happening. In fact the "cubes" are actually points being represented as cubes on the screen. The game world is actually 10x4x6x4 in a discrete grid of points. (The 6 for height is an estimate.) When the first dimensional swap is done, if the world was literally as it appeared, the big ring would become a two-dimensional square ring as you swapped out its depth for the 0 it has in the fourth dimension. Instead, since it is really just a structure composed of 12 points represented by 12 cubes, the points remain in your 3D space and it seems untouched. That is because it was 2D in the first place, despite being drawn as 3D, and swapping around the two dimensions it didn't exist in in the first place leaves it untouched. So to some extent it is cheating a bit with the fourth dimension, in the sense that you aren't actually dealing with a continuous world, you're dealing with a very coarse-grained discrete one that is being represented as if it continuous. (I am not objecting. There is no practical other choice. I am just pointing out that if you are already confused, this unavoidable deception may make it more difficult to understand what is going on.) I will be intrigued to see how well the puzzle designers learn to cope with 4D. I was initially excited, but I'll want to see more than what they showed. I want to rotate the fourth in on the other height axis. (Now, that's a sentence I don't have the chance to write very often.) Keeping gravity constant would require that the height dimension be held constant, and that would probably be an acceptable compromise, vs. freely rotating in all directions. But we've seen a mere minute of a game, so who knows. (The number of people in other discussions I've seen about this video that implicitly assume the interlocking ring thing is somehow the only puzzle that could be given is driving me nuts.)

by joeld42 17y ago

jerf 17y ago

I don't know if you'll find this helpful or not, but there is one deceptive aspect in the video. Visually, you see a world composed of cubes, but geometrically that is not what is actually happening. In fact the "cubes" are actually points being represented as cubes on the screen. The game world is actually 10x4x6x4 in a discrete grid of points. (The 6 for height is an estimate.) When the first dimensional swap is done, if the world was literally as it appeared, the big ring would become a two-dimensional square ring as you swapped out its depth for the 0 it has in the fourth dimension. Instead, since it is really just a structure composed of 12 points represented by 12 cubes, the points remain in your 3D space and it seems untouched. That is because it was 2D in the first place, despite being drawn as 3D, and swapping around the two dimensions it didn't exist in in the first place leaves it untouched. So to some extent it is cheating a bit with the fourth dimension, in the sense that you aren't actually dealing with a continuous world, you're dealing with a very coarse-grained discrete one that is being represented as if it continuous. (I am not objecting. There is no practical other choice. I am just pointing out that if you are already confused, this unavoidable deception may make it more difficult to understand what is going on.) I will be intrigued to see how well the puzzle designers learn to cope with 4D. I was initially excited, but I'll want to see more than what they showed. I want to rotate the fourth in on the other height axis. (Now, that's a sentence I don't have the chance to write very often.) Keeping gravity constant would require that the height dimension be held constant, and that would probably be an acceptable compromise, vs. freely rotating in all directions. But we've seen a mere minute of a game, so who knows. (The number of people in other discussions I've seen about this video that implicitly assume the interlocking ring thing is somehow the only puzzle that could be given is driving me nuts.)