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