6 ms·

4D Toys Update 8: Rotating the 3D Slice, 2D Faces Projections, Marble Scenes

126 points by simonpure 3y ago

joe-collins 3y ago
Always love to see updates from this project. Miegakure is the peak of game design: not merely a Skinner box or masturbatory fantasy, it's an honest exploration of what-if, so far outside the realm of our daily 3D experience that the process of modeling it has been something akin to fundamental research.
- helloplanets 3y ago
  SIGGRAPH actually released a technical paper by Marc Ten Bosch a couple years back. [0] Developers like him who put a decade+ of work into a project just because they love the subject are a direly needed example of what hard work can mean instead of a 'grindset' mentality. [0]: https://marctenbosch.com/ndphysics/ https://marctenbosch.com/ndphysics/
- coldpie 3y ago
  > Miegakure is the peak of game design Uhhh let's at least wait until it's released. There's a lot of cool stuff out there already, we don't need to be declaring this development-hell game as the peak before it's even out.
robswc 3y ago
Totally forgot about this project. Maybe I can play around with it without melting my brain now.
soup10 3y ago
4D in games is something that sounds funner then it is. In theory it's some braintwisting geometric/spatial effects. In practice it's just a lot of geometry clipping into and out of view that doesn't lend itself to interesting gameplay. Despite marc's best efforts.
- mariusor 3y ago
  I think we might want to wait with the conclusion on this topic until Miegakure is out, 4D toys is a tech demo, not a game.
  - soup10 3y ago
    Winds of winter might be out before that happens.
    - ralphc 3y ago
      We'll be living in condos in the 4th dimension before that happens.
    - mariusor 3y ago
      Works of great magnitude done by a single person, often take time. Let's try be grateful for when they finish, instead of cynical and demanding. :P
- nerdponx 3y ago
  4D Golf seems a little more interesting than that https://youtu.be/1ad9y0FmQ9g https://youtu.be/1ad9y0FmQ9g
  - saiya-jin 3y ago
    What did I just saw... brings some memories from reading 3-body problem. Not sure how 4D represented on two 2D screens in VR can be grokked by my tiny brain. Or just ordinary 2D screen
- vincnetas 3y ago
  "Miegakure" was a promising game, but looks like it is still not released and even does not have a planed release date: F.A.Q. When is the game coming out? As soon as possible, we are very far along but haven't announced a release date yet. https://miegakure.com https://miegakure.com
akomtu 3y ago
One way to visualize 4d is using scale as the 4th dimension. Objects that are far along the 4th axis will appear too small or too large.
- IIAOPSW 3y ago
  Another way is to realize waves of different frequency are literally orthogonal vectors. Also, RGB colors form a literal color space. So at the cost of sacrificing normally colored objects, you can have rainbow banding in the 4th direction. Imagine along the 4th dimension there's a hallway with evenly spaced lightbulbs tinted in RGB such that looking down the hallway you see rainbows. If you are moving in the direction of the 4th dimension, these rainbows will appear to be moving like waves rushing towards you from the vanishing point. If you are moving perpendicular to it, the bands of rainbow colors will remain constant relative to your motion. In general, the apparent speed of the background color banding patterns will be proportional to the component of your motion in the direction of the 4th d. The rings of rainbows are easily spaced, so looking at the scene you can tell how far along the W axis it is by seeing how tightly the rings are bunched (must be approaching vanishing point if they seem close) and also by just eyeballing how often the rainbow has repeated between your position and the object, judging distance as if you were counting floor tiles.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  That's actually how we visualize 3D with our 2D retinas and monitors. It is a perspective projection: objects that are far away (in 3D) appear smaller (in 2D). Making a perspective projection from 4D to 3D, and then from 3D to 2D for display is simple mathematically, and it could be done in wireframe mode instead of what is currently, I think, a simple orthographic projection. In fact, it is very possible that the author tried it but didn't like it enough to include it.
GuB-42 3y ago
I wonder how twisted the author mind is now. He has been working in 4D for more than a decade (first mentions of Miegakure was in 2009), if it is ever possible to get an intuitive feeling of a 4D world, that should do it. The alternative is to just throw away intuition and just do the maths with one extra vector coordinate, but that would be unfortunate for a game that is all about thinking in 4D.
- gcr 3y ago
  Reminds me of a scene from Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan. This is a conversation between an embodied human and a person who grew up in a completely virtual environment: Yann, sitting beside him, caught his eye. "You okay?" Tchicaya nodded. "In the scapes you grew up in," he asked, "was there a vertical?" "In what sense?" "I know you said once that you didn't feel gravity...but was everything laid out and connected like it is on land? Or was it all isotropically three-dimensional--like a zero-gee space habitat, where everything can connect in any direction?" Yann replied affably, "My earliest memories are of CP4--that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex dimensions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this"--he motioned at the surrounding, more-or-less-Euclidean space--"for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate, visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single, three-dimensional space." So much for being a seasoned traveler. Tchicaya didn't envy Yann's upbringing, but it probably rendered the world behind the border less exotic to him than the notion of a jungle had been to Tchicaya as a child. It shook his confidence to be reminded that there were measures by which his millennia of experience had been laughably narrow.
- rcme 3y ago
  The 4th dimension is somewhat intuitive if you think about it like a 3D space + a time dimension.
  - jasonjmcghee 3y ago
tonmoy 3y ago
I haven’t had the feeling that computers are awesome in quite a long time (probably since starting my career). The video in the landing page gave me the feeling that computers can be such an amazing thing!

126 points by simonpure 3y ago

Always love to see updates from this project. Miegakure is the peak of game design: not merely a Skinner box or masturbatory fantasy, it's an honest exploration of what-if, so far outside the realm of our daily 3D experience that the process of modeling it has been something akin to fundamental research.

helloplanets 3y ago
SIGGRAPH actually released a technical paper by Marc Ten Bosch a couple years back. [0] Developers like him who put a decade+ of work into a project just because they love the subject are a direly needed example of what hard work can mean instead of a 'grindset' mentality. [0]: https://marctenbosch.com/ndphysics/ https://marctenbosch.com/ndphysics/
coldpie 3y ago
> Miegakure is the peak of game design Uhhh let's at least wait until it's released. There's a lot of cool stuff out there already, we don't need to be declaring this development-hell game as the peak before it's even out.

robswc 3y ago

Totally forgot about this project. Maybe I can play around with it without melting my brain now.

soup10 3y ago

4D in games is something that sounds funner then it is. In theory it's some braintwisting geometric/spatial effects. In practice it's just a lot of geometry clipping into and out of view that doesn't lend itself to interesting gameplay. Despite marc's best efforts.

mariusor 3y ago
I think we might want to wait with the conclusion on this topic until Miegakure is out, 4D toys is a tech demo, not a game.
- soup10 3y ago
  Winds of winter might be out before that happens.
  - ralphc 3y ago
    We'll be living in condos in the 4th dimension before that happens.
  - mariusor 3y ago
    Works of great magnitude done by a single person, often take time. Let's try be grateful for when they finish, instead of cynical and demanding. :P
nerdponx 3y ago
4D Golf seems a little more interesting than that https://youtu.be/1ad9y0FmQ9g https://youtu.be/1ad9y0FmQ9g
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  What did I just saw... brings some memories from reading 3-body problem. Not sure how 4D represented on two 2D screens in VR can be grokked by my tiny brain. Or just ordinary 2D screen
vincnetas 3y ago
"Miegakure" was a promising game, but looks like it is still not released and even does not have a planed release date: F.A.Q. When is the game coming out? As soon as possible, we are very far along but haven't announced a release date yet. https://miegakure.com https://miegakure.com

akomtu 3y ago

One way to visualize 4d is using scale as the 4th dimension. Objects that are far along the 4th axis will appear too small or too large.

IIAOPSW 3y ago
Another way is to realize waves of different frequency are literally orthogonal vectors. Also, RGB colors form a literal color space. So at the cost of sacrificing normally colored objects, you can have rainbow banding in the 4th direction. Imagine along the 4th dimension there's a hallway with evenly spaced lightbulbs tinted in RGB such that looking down the hallway you see rainbows. If you are moving in the direction of the 4th dimension, these rainbows will appear to be moving like waves rushing towards you from the vanishing point. If you are moving perpendicular to it, the bands of rainbow colors will remain constant relative to your motion. In general, the apparent speed of the background color banding patterns will be proportional to the component of your motion in the direction of the 4th d. The rings of rainbows are easily spaced, so looking at the scene you can tell how far along the W axis it is by seeing how tightly the rings are bunched (must be approaching vanishing point if they seem close) and also by just eyeballing how often the rainbow has repeated between your position and the object, judging distance as if you were counting floor tiles.
GuB-42 3y ago
That's actually how we visualize 3D with our 2D retinas and monitors. It is a perspective projection: objects that are far away (in 3D) appear smaller (in 2D). Making a perspective projection from 4D to 3D, and then from 3D to 2D for display is simple mathematically, and it could be done in wireframe mode instead of what is currently, I think, a simple orthographic projection. In fact, it is very possible that the author tried it but didn't like it enough to include it.

GuB-42 3y ago

I wonder how twisted the author mind is now. He has been working in 4D for more than a decade (first mentions of Miegakure was in 2009), if it is ever possible to get an intuitive feeling of a 4D world, that should do it. The alternative is to just throw away intuition and just do the maths with one extra vector coordinate, but that would be unfortunate for a game that is all about thinking in 4D.

gcr 3y ago
Reminds me of a scene from Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan. This is a conversation between an embodied human and a person who grew up in a completely virtual environment: Yann, sitting beside him, caught his eye. "You okay?" Tchicaya nodded. "In the scapes you grew up in," he asked, "was there a vertical?" "In what sense?" "I know you said once that you didn't feel gravity...but was everything laid out and connected like it is on land? Or was it all isotropically three-dimensional--like a zero-gee space habitat, where everything can connect in any direction?" Yann replied affably, "My earliest memories are of CP4--that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex dimensions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this"--he motioned at the surrounding, more-or-less-Euclidean space--"for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate, visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single, three-dimensional space." So much for being a seasoned traveler. Tchicaya didn't envy Yann's upbringing, but it probably rendered the world behind the border less exotic to him than the notion of a jungle had been to Tchicaya as a child. It shook his confidence to be reminded that there were measures by which his millennia of experience had been laughably narrow.
rcme 3y ago
The 4th dimension is somewhat intuitive if you think about it like a 3D space + a time dimension.
- jasonjmcghee 3y ago

tonmoy 3y ago

I haven’t had the feeling that computers are awesome in quite a long time (probably since starting my career). The video in the landing page gave me the feeling that computers can be such an amazing thing!