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.

Comments

Two words:

[bigstrat2003]

Fuckin'. Awesome.

I knew a low-level understanding of computing must be useful for something! ;)

Re:Two words:

[krakass]

Great, now other games are going to try to one-up them and Half-Life 3 is going to make you design a 386 processor in order to solve a puzzle.

Re:Two words:

[Brian Gordon]

Full adders are really simple to implement.. this really isn't so awesome. But you can do amazing things with wire mod in Garry's Mod.. I've seen autonomous pets, auto-targeting turrets, and chess engines constructed out of physics objects. Also it's extremely powerful because you can write lua scripts that are represented as black-box "chip" objects in the game with inputs and outputs.

Re:Two words:

[AKAImBatman]

Full adders are really simple to implement.

A full adder is simple in theory, and quite easy to implement in electronics. It's not nearly as easy to implement when you're looking at mechanical parts. Granted, this particular mechanical calculator is virtual, so it doesn't need to worry about mechanical stresses. But that doesn't mean that it lacks the complexity of wiring up 16 bits via mechanical means. (7 bits for the number, one bit for the sign, two numbers.)

It's not like he can simply call "add(8)" and have an 8-bit full adder with carry flags magically created for him. (As so many modern electronics toolkits can do.)

Re:Two words:

[moosesocks]

don't worry

there will be a cheat code that lets you use an FPGA instead.

This just in

[philspear]

Someone has spelled out "BOOBLESS" on said virtual calculator. This comes 3 seconds after the level went public.

Re:This just in

[philspear]

Update: someone else in littlebigplanet has made a virtual XBOX 360 using just 3 red lights.

Re:This just in

[powerlord]

Update: someone else in littlebigplanet has made a virtual XBOX 360 using just 3 red lights.

Ah ... so its even fully functional.

(yes ... this was a joke, I know XBoxes don't experience the RRoD as often as they used to)

Dwarf Fortress

[Danny Rathjens]

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

Re:PS3

[Trogre]

Tell me - might you like Guitar Hero or an FPS if they weren't mainstream?

Levels of abstraction

[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.

Re:Levels of abstraction

[Spazntwich]

Kind of makes you wonder what happens once we design a computer fast enough to accurately simulate physics exactly as in our universe.

How would we limit the universe? Maybe just create a pacman-like solution where hitting the boundary sends you back to the other side. Maybe increase the size of the simulation as you can throw more computing power at it. You'd need a method of interacting with the matter in the universe to make sure the new space is utilized, right?

Why not just create some shit that doesn't ruin the rest of the simulation by interacting in any fashion other than pushing the various systems away from each other so your ant farms don't get too close to one another and fight.

what?

Boob-gate rocks LittleBigPlanet

[nobodyman]

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!!"

Color me unimpressed

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

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.

What about a game with a programming mini-game?

[JSBiff]

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.

Re:How about a beowulf cluster of those?

[Le Marteau]

Universal Turing Machine. Implemented using Conway's Game of Life.

Just amazing. If you know what those words mean, you HAVE to check that pattern out. I could watch in run for days. Just mind blowing.

Reminds Me of Marathon

[adavies42]

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.

Working links to videos

[mzs]

Little Big Planet - To Zanarkand Theme

Little Big Computer

What impresses me most

[DrXym]

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.