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Working Calculator Created in LittleBigPlanet
jamie pointed out a really impressive creation from the LittleBigPlanet beta. The game allows the creation of puzzles from a collection of simple objects and tools. A player called upsilandre used 610 magnetic switches, 500 wires, 430 pistons, and a variety of other objects to create a functioning calculator that will do decimal/binary conversions as well as addition and subtraction. The creation does well to illustrate the potential for amazing creativity in level design. Another user recently designed a level to play the Final Fantasy X theme song. LittleBigPlanet is almost finished and set to be released later this month, though the controls may be refined in a future patch. We recently discussed a student level-design event at the Parsons New School for Design and Technology.
Fuckin'. Awesome.
I knew a low-level understanding of computing must be useful for something! ;)
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Someone has spelled out "BOOBLESS" on said virtual calculator. This comes 3 seconds after the level went public.
so what. Is it a fun game?
This seriously makes me want a PS3. Are there any other actually good creative games for the system? I don't care about your normal mainstream-crap like Guitar Hero or FPS'es. Anyone have any other suggestions to push me over the edge to drop the money for a PS3?
adventure-today.com
A player called upsilandre used 610 magnetic switches, 500 wires, 430 pistons, and a variety of other objects to create a functioning calculator
How many MPG does it get?
This reminds me of the way you can combine the various elements in Dwarf Fortress to be able to perform computations. The graphics are at a wee bit of a different level, though. :D
http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Mechanical_logic
Pfft, I won't be impressed until they build a Turing Machine.
I love you, Anonymous Coward.
As they say, there's no problem which cannot be solved by adding a level of abstraction.
1. There was a world full of physical objects, with all the interactions between them exactly as they should be.
2. Someone built an amazingly powerful calculator out of these parts.
3. Someone else built an amazingly complicated program which could be run by said calculator. The amazingly complicated program would simulate a very small subset of the physical world as described in 1. on the machine.
4. Someone else built a calculator out of the parts available in the world available in the program running on the powerful calculator. This second calculator was much more simple and less powerful than the first calculator.
Very impressive! Make a Babbage Difference Engine next!
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
In light of this newly discovered piece of illicit content, the ESRB has fined Media Molecule and slapped the game with an M rating.
Jack Thompson was quoted as saying "Oh, what cruel irony is this!? At a time when Sony has unleashed this family destroying game murder-simulating calculator on our children, I am no longer a lawyer!!"
I owned my first calculator 30 years ago and implemented my first one in BASIC not long after. If it's only just reached the capability of a machine with just a few K of RAM and a BASIC interpreter then it can't be very impressive. What is LittleBigPlanet anyway? The codename for the latest OS from Microsoft? Trust the /. editors not to provide any context.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I've, from time to time, mused about the possibility of trying to create a game with a 'programming' mini-game. This might not obviously be programming to most users - maybe it would use some sort of icon-based programming (which it sounds like LittleBigPlanet sort of has with this parts system). Maybe this could be a system to let users create their own spells in a magic game, or used as a 'hacking' mini-game in a sci-fi game (something like Bioshock or Mass Effect, but replace the simplistic GUI puzzle 'hacking' mini-game with a slightly more robust mini-game which actually encourages people to learn real programming techniques), or maybe the ability to give a ship or other piece of equipment new abilities in a sci-fi game.
Anyone know to what extent this idea has been tried in the past by any other games? The only thing that comes to my mind is a game I saw a few years ago (can't remember what it was called now), where the player was in some sort of base on Mars or one of the moons of Jupiter or something, and the player created these autonomous vehicles by combining parts (chasis, engine, wheels, breaks, batteries, and various 'logic components') using a wiring system (which is sort of like programming). Then the vehicles would be pitted against each other in a sort of arena. Sometimes you would be racing an obstacle course, other times the vehicles were fighting each other (you could get weapons which you could wire up to the vehicle).
I imagine that, for the game to gain any popularity, this should be a fairly optional part of the game, since most users might get a little overwhelmed by it, if it were complex enough to be fairly powerful.
Reminds me of Marathon 2/Marathon Infinity--back before Aleph One and the addition of a scripting language, some people liked to use only standard game elements to create logic effects. One guy designed a half-adder cell using two monsters, a platform, and a switch, and used a bunch to make a ripple-carry adder that triggered as you ran down a hallway, displaying its results on a bank of lights at the end. Another guy won a Bungie contest by reimplementing most of Myst Island's puzzles in Marathon.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Little Big Planet - To Zanarkand Theme
Little Big Computer
Anonymous troll confirms it, PC gaming is DYING!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
That's a lotta parts. The Curta has only 605 parts and I thought that was complicated.
This is just another proof that we are currently living in a game.
Absolutely nothing new, but fun to play with none-the-less :)
True that.
...of the BASIC interpreter written in TeX
My opinion? See above.
...needs to get out more.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
finally the PS3's true processing potential has been revealed to us!
but seriously, it's funny to think how many hundreds/thousands?/millions?/billions? of calculations the ps3 is doing... simply so that game can do a little addition. bwhahaha
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
I think this was more of a joke "go the fuck away" rather than a serious "I hate you, leave" Loosen up a bit.
Lego has this of course with its most advanced sets that allow for simple programming of a control unit.
As introduction to programming there are 'games' that allow you to program a robot and you 'win' by using the fewest instructions to clear a maze the fastests.
The problem is however limits imposed by the game. A maze is only so complex, the sensors in Lego only so good. Pretty soon you hit the game limits, the solution has been found and the game is over.
It is not that you can't make a game out of it, but that you either need a LOT of ways to do things yet keep it simple or face the fact that your game is going to be finished pretty quick.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
When you watch the start of the clip you think big deal, there's probably a script doing the addition or something. Then it starts panning up and you just see hundreds of ropes, pulleys and levers which are all wired together. A simple interface hides a horribly complex set of mechanics. Even more impressive that all this is modelled in a game using a level edito. The accuracy of the physics and the sheer number of interactions is deeply impressive. The sheer quality and variety of levels in the beta phase shows how awesome this game is going to be. Two weeks to go.
On a Blue Ray player and taking the ability to play Little Big Planet as a bonus... Now if I can just get my wife to see it that way.
Tasha Yar wants to know "How fully functional?"
...There will be no treaty, no vaccine, and NO LIEUTENANT YAR!
Bow-ties are cool.
I could care less if they make GH games. I'm glad people have fun with them. Some of my best friends are even ga....I mean like Guitar Hero. I just want to know if the system offers other more creative platforms before I invest in it.
Well, there's Rock Band!
(What can I say, I'm a HMX fanboy...)
Bow-ties are cool.
...makes me want to point a glider gun at the sucker.
Some men just want to watch the world burn.
(Admit it: you only played with the Game of Life so you could stop execution at any point, knock out a cell or three, and see if you could get it to totally collapse or whether those plucky cells got lucky and ended up as stagnant post-apocalyptic 2x2 colonies.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.