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.)

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.

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.

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!!"

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.