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Gaming in the 4th Dimension
Wolf pointed me to a video clip demonstrating this game:
"Miegakure is a platform game where you explore the fourth dimension to solve puzzles. There is no trick; the game is entirely designed and programmed in 4D." Nothing to download yet.
So I've traditionally known "the fourth dimension" to be something like time. Although you can call it space-time or the relationship that our three dimensional world has with our concept of time. And in games like Braid (which is like an interesting two dimensional scrolling platform with four dimensional control), you get to have fun manipulating this time so that you can predict where your little character is when you slide back in time. It's where you were before.
In Miegakure, it appears that the player is controlling a fourth dimension except it's not too clear what fourth dimension actually represents to me. If Miegakure's fourth dimension was time, we would see some indication of natural decay of the environment to give us visual cues that it's aging. For example, if one ring were made of steel and the other of wood, the wood one would decay as we go to the future and then we would make some action that is "special" (meaning that it is not subjected to our time control) and then move the steel ring into the wood ring and blast back to when the wood ring existed. Our special action could not be undone otherwise you wouldn't get anywhere with being able to control time.
Miegakure seemed to invent non-natural transposed states of the environment that I, for the life of me, could not understand. How did I know which blocks would appear and disappear leaving only shadows? How do I know how far to go in a fourth dimensional direction? Must the player explore the available transposed states before planning their movements along all four dimensions? So that they can construct an interleaved solution?
And what happens with a now block exists in a shadow space and you try to transposition yourself to the point when the shadow space is occupied by another block? Does the game block you from making that transposition? What if you want to transpose to a point beyond that when it is a shadow space again? Is this a blocking mechanism that will add to the difficulty of the puzzle?
As someone ravaged by the Adventures of Lolo series on the NES, I could see a potentially high level of addiction here.
My work here is dung.
Wow, Randall must have some timing
http://xkcd.org/
Or is there more to this game than the video shows? I always thought Time was the 4th dimension...
This article was written by the most hideous of triangles.
There's nothing here but some fancy 3D design.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
The first 3D Zelda game did that same 4D deal, where you had to do a task in the Garoudo desert, travel backwards in time, and then finish the task. (Sorry I can't be more specific but it's been a while since I last played.)
Yes, But it's nothing like chronotrigger!
The 4th dimension, in this case, enables 3D model clipping?
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Didn't they get to number six with "Baby I Want your Love Thing"?
The 4th dimension in this game isn't time, it's a 4th spacial dimension. Like going from a circle to a sphere. In the video we see the the player moving one loop inside another loop, so that they're intertwined, something that is impossible to do in 3-D space. The equivalent in 2-D space would be to move a small circle inside a large circle without the two ever touching. This can be accomplished only by taking the small circle off the page (into the 3-rd dimension) and dropping it back onto the page inside the other circle.
Thank you though, until I thought about how to explain it I don't think I really understood what was going on myself.
There's a bunch of games that have used time control already, so what's the big deal now? (I know that Eversion probably isn't a great example, but OP's is). Time's always been a fun addition to a game, especially when you manipulate it. Would Sonic Adventure 2: Battle count, considering that they use Chaos Emeralds to slow down time?
As someone pointed out in the YouTube comments, and in the above reply, this doesn't really offer freedom in the 4th dimension, or even an accurate way of looking at the 4th dimension. It's analogous to two 2D mazes stacked on top of each other with the ability to jump between the two. The overall puzzle exists in the third dimension, but not in a "life-like" way.
Another problem with this type of representation of the 4th dimension is scale. If the 4th Dimension is time, and you want to move in the 4th Dimension to a point at which the object you're trying to circumvent, say a wall, doesn't exist, you have to go back to before it was made or forward to when it decays away. In a lot of places, any wall you're likely to encounter is older than you are which, you might suppose, would mean its size in the 4th dimension would be bigger than you. I suppose if a wall were new, you would be at one edge of it 4th dimensionally-speaking.
Anyway, I know that this game is just using the 4th dimension as a way of spicing up a puzzle game, for which I applaud them, but I would love to see a real mind-warper out there sometime. There used to be a 4D rubiks cube program, for instance that used to really tweak me out.
The description sounds as if you choose which of the four dimensions to project onto your three, but in the video it looks like you keep the standard 3 and represent the fourth by phasing objects a fixed distance into the 4th, represented by translucency. Haven't had a chance to get hands on this yet, though.
For great justice.
I had the idea for a 4D variant of something like Metroid Prime 2 (the one where you switch between a "light" and "dark" world). Rather than there being two discrete "worlds", there would be a whole continuum of "slices" between those worlds, and instead of using specific gates to switch between the worlds, you (as the playable character) would be able to shift yourself continuously along the continuum of slices (using the left and right shoulder buttons or something). So, you're in a 3D world much like that of MP:2, but since you can also move in the "left/right shoulder button" direction you suddenly need 4 points to describe your location in the game world and bam, 4D. Naturally using the 4th spatial dimension would be a gameplay element, perhaps you need to hit a switch that is enclosed (in 3D terms) by a hollow cube or sphere, so you move along the 4th dimension until you get to a spot where the wall of the sphere is nonexistant, move in using the normal 3D directions and shift back along the 4th so you wind up inside the cube.
I figure playing such a game would be an excellent way of getting an intuitive feel for moving about in 4 dimensions, and if I had any skill in 3d game programing I'd've made the game myself and given it a Japanese name I picked out and have a slashdot article written about me. Ah well... :)
I was going to make a comment about how if the 4th dimension is time then every board game ever conceived is a 4D game. I was reminded of how 3D ultrasounds are called 4D.
However, this actually looks quite creative, although I'm having a bit of trouble determining the goal of the game. The immediate problem I see is being able to make things out with so many objects obstructing the view. In some ways this reminds me of Echochrome which I think plays with the notion of multiple dimensions in an even more dramatic and mind-bending fashion.
So... is this just Super Paper Mario but with an additional dimension?
:(){
haven't played the game but from watching the video....this isn't 4 dimensions at all, it's simply 2 sets of 3 dimensions that you can travel between.
So we're inferring a 4th spatial dimension in a game which uses our perception of a 3 dimensional construct on a 2 dimensional screen.
I'm still waiting for the "wow" moment, and I suspect it's not going to happen here.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I haven't wtfv (watched the video), but 4-D can be represented in 3- and 2-D using projections, just like we regularly watch 3-D images projected into 2 dimensions (TV, video games).
Think of a cone, a 3 dimension shape. In the 3-to-2 dimension projection, that cone can look like a triangle, a circle, an ellipse, or an ellipse with a point, all depending on how you rotate it.
Now imagine that there's a 4-D shape whose projection changes appearance as the shape is rotated about its fourth-dimensional axis. There's no reason you can't have one projection of it that shows a cube, and another of the same object that shows a sphere.
It's tough to conceive of what this shape looks like since we can't see or experience it in four dimensions. But it's still possible to develop enough of a concept of the shape to recognize its various projections, learn how they're connected, and eventually be able to navigate it.
Projecting a shape from 4 to the 2 dimensions of a screen will lose an awful lot of information, but we seem to be good at developing a 3-D concept based on motion and visual cues.
Interesting stuff.
The main character's sprite looks suspiciously like Claus from Mother 3.
It looks like this is treating the fourth dimension as more of a quick transport (can't watch the video here at work, just looked at the still shots). It would be interesting to see a game wher you could actually move through the fourth dimension incrementally and continually instead of jumping.
The 4th dimension in this game isn't time, it's a 4th spacial dimension.
Okay, explain the functional difference between the travelling through time in OoT, and the travelling through the extra spacial dimension in this. Apart from being more difficult in OoT, it seems the same. You need to manipulate an object in one frame of reference, or move to the other to find an open path, etc. Getting prissy, saying "It's not time, it's a 4th spacial dimension" is irrelevant. It's the same mechanic with a different name. It is, however, different than Braid's time manipulation, yes.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
So we're inferring a 4th spatial dimension in a game,
which uses our perception of a 3 dimensional construct,
displayed on a 2 dimensional screen,
stored on a 1 dimensional memory space,
played by people with 0 life.
There have been a lot of games written over the last 15-20 years, certainly, that attempted to make a usable game doing 4D-2D projections.
Some were fun, most I played with just gave me headaches. I remember one (can't recall its name) that ran on one of SGI's high end imaging systems using active shutter LCDs so it was 4D->2.5D. That one *really* gave me headaches.
On an unrelated note, Quake ran really nicely on that box :)
Absolutely ! What's new ?
Ok, so “Zelda III A Link To The Past” is in 3D: two parallel worlds in 2D.
To make a impossible displacement in one world, you must make this displacement in the second world and come back in the first world .
Applying this in 3D world, ...
He copied it from abstrusegoose.com
http://abstrusegoose.com/88 ->
http://abstrusegoose.com/secret-archives/across-the-third-dimension
http://dtris.sourceforge.net/
All houses there are crooked
providing no unique, testable predictions for over 20 years...
I've been following this thing since it was listed as an entrant in the 2010 Independent Gaming Festival.
WHEN THE HELL IS IT COMING OUT!
Technoli
Actually, there is a demo to download. You just have to move your mouse along the w-axis to reach the link.
I don't consider time to be the fourth space dimension. In a space dimension, you can move back and forth, and the spatial relationship is not restricted to a relationship of cause and effect. We don't know if it's possible to move back and forth in time yet, but we do know that the time dimension has a cause and effect relationship, therefore it cannot be a space dimension.
I'd say the puzzle is way easier in the fourth dimension because you have one more degree of freedom. Two objects that appear to juxtapose or collide in the lower three dimensions is still collision-free if you consider the fourth. Similarly, although our vision is only the projection of three dimensions to a two dimensional plane, we still understand that an object that appears to be in front of or behind another object doesn't necessary mean the two occupy the same space. If you look at it this way, you can actually play Miegakure with 2D graphics, which would probably be easier.
What might be puzzling in the Miegakure game is the direction of gravity in the fourth dimension. The preferably easiest configuration is to let the gravity to have no effect.
I once had a signature.
http://xkcd.com/721/
He LIES! There is no demo.
Technoli
If you want to try another 4d game while Miegakure doesn't release, check http://harmen.vanderwal.eu/hypercube/ The objective of the game is to push the big ball towards the blue cross, then move the cursor to the square. You will then be outside the box and have to reach the green square again, while you avoid the small ball. Try it in 2d and 3d before going to 4d.
The linux game Adanaxis (add an axis) does this too.
But... the future refused to change.
I, too, struggled with the idea of linking one 3D-torus to another 3D-torus using the fourth dimension. But one visualization made it click for me: do the process in reverse. Start with 3D-torus T1 and 3D-torus T2, linked, in 3D-space S1. Then move T1 into the rest of 4D-space so that it no longer intersects S1; in S1, we are left with T2 linked to nothing. Then move T1 within 4D-space so that it is nowhere near T2. Then move T1 completely back into S1, nowhere near T2. Hey, if you can do that, you can certainly do it in reverse and link T1 to T2.
"Though superstring theory requires 10 or 11 dimensions of space (from what little I understand), so serious physicists really believe those dimensions might exist."
I suspect string theory is wrong because it's too complex. I think at the core of all physics must be simplicity. If you get as complicated as string theory I think you're heading down the wrong path.
Physics, when distilled, should be elegant. When Einstein proposed mass-energy equivalence with a formula it changed the world - not because it was a complex relationship that only physicists could understand, but because it was so incredibly simple that it HAD to be right.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwL_zi9JNkE
No TV, No Beer make Homer go crazy!
I don't think this is a 4th dimension. It's more like a second/parallel space. I want to say sub-set or second vector space, but that doesn't sound right either. Each space has 3D (4D if you count time). Are there any Mathematicians in this group that knows the correct terminology?
I don't know how this game works, but the concept of 4D puzzles is nothing new. Years ago I wrote a simple 4 dimensional maze. I started with a simple 2D maze (my son at that time liked to play a simple maze game, but did not like several things about the way the game worked, so I wrote him another one one, learning Python along the way). Then I extended it to 3D by adding several floors. After that, it was a simple exercise to extend it to 4D. Let's say you start with a simple 3x3 maze, that is 9 rooms arranged in a square grid on a plane, with doors connecting some of the adjacent rooms. You use 'h' and 'l' to go left and right, and 'k' and 'j' to go forward and backward. You take 3 such "floor-plans", put them above each other, and connect some of the adjacent rooms through the floors and ceilings. You add keys, say 'u' and 'n', to move upstairs and downstairs. You can also add "rotate the world" feature, which will turn the cube on a side, so that the up/down direction will bacome, say, left and right, etc.
Now you take 3 such cubes, and add "doors" from some rooms in one cube to corresponding rooms in an "adjacent" cube, you add two more keys, say 'o' and ',', to move from cube to cube, and generalize the "rotations" to work in 4D, and you have a simple 4D maze. Then you can put a wumpus in the maze, couple of bottomless pits, and have fun. You can do other puzzles, for example, you can create a 4D minesweeper this way.
I guess you could interpret the fourth dimension as time, you would have a 3x3x3 maze where each night, some doors would disappear, and new doors would sprout between rooms, and you can move into the future or past, in the range of three given days.
AccountKiller
I read somewhere that knots are an artifact of having 3 dimensions. They're obviously not (heh) possible in two, and apparently if a 4th dimension is thrown into the mix there's still no way to tie a 4D knot. I thought it was kind of neat, though I have no way of knowing if it's true.
Your brain is not a computer.
I don't really get it. How is this any different than entering 'Spirit mode' or whatever from any number of games? Prey is a good example. And bringing some object with you? You can call it whatever you want, 4th dimension, Spirit World, Dreamtime etc. but it still seems like the same concept to me.
Well, that would make Eversion a 3D game now, wouldn't it? 2D + 1D. Nevertheless, I think a distinguishing feature of a 4D game is for it to allow fairly free movement in the w direction, and not only at specified points.
I remember when Quake came out, there was all this talk about how Quake was "true" 3D and Duke3d was 2.75D or something (arbitrary labeling, I know). The point is that Quake allows would be smooth and allow you to rotate on each axis. We don't call River City Ransom a 3D game, even though it has motion in 3 axes, because the camera angle is fixed. I think a "true" 4D game will allow you to smoothly rotate along all 4 axes.
nothing further.
Ever heard of second moment of area, used in mechanical engineering?
Its units are to the fourth power. i.e m^4, mm^4 etc.
This has always messed with my mind.
The game is currently in development and the goal is to release it in downloadable form for consoles and PC/Mac. There is no announced date and platform yet. There is no publicly released demo at this point. There will be one when the game is released though, so please be patient :) Thanks.
I guess the demo is somewhere in the 4th dimension...
a line:
______________________
a "ring" called "A":
__A_____A_____________
and another "ring" called "B":
__A_____A___B_____B__
lift "B" into the second dimension:
_____________B_____B__
__A_____A_____________
slide "B" across:
_____B_____B___________
__A_____A_____________
drop "B" back onto the line:
__A__B__A__B_________
"A" and "B" are now "linked" in the 1D universe.
We don't know much about this game yet, so it's hard to say. However it's not hard to envision a scenario where there's some sort of time limit to completing the 4D puzzles. With the Zelda game, there was no real time limit to most of the puzzles, and when there was one, the puzzle was wholly within one of the time periods.
Majora's Mask actually dealt with time more similarly to the way we experience it. The game takes place over the course of three in-game days, and events happen at specific times and places. You might miss events if you aren't there at the appropriate time. Now imagine one of those events entails going into the 4th dimension in order to get through a wall. You would then have a 4D game where time might be considered yet another dimension. Now the distinction between a fourth spatial dimension and time becomes relevant.
World maps from games like FFVI are clearly 2D toruses.
The world map is represented by a rectangular field. If you head north long enough, at any 'longitude', you wrap back around to the same longitude on the south edge of the map, so it's like the world map was wrapped in a tube so that the north edge meets the south edge. However, if you travel west long enough you eventually re-appear at the east end of the map at the same 'latitude' so clearly the two open ends of the tube are wrapped around again to join each other. Thus, the FFVI world map is actually a 2D torus.
BASIC associated dollar signs with strings decades ago. How did they know?
A crucial difference is (I hope, haven't played it) that the time puzzles in OOT only use 2 layers of that special dimension and there are many other games with similar 2-layer systems (Super Mario Bros. 2, SNES Zelda, Soul Reaver).
Analogy: There are sidescrollers that you might call 2.5D where you switch between 2 planes at some points and there are games that have a 3D world and players feel every second that the world is 3D.
So...wouldn't Prince of Persia: Sand of Time/Warrior Within/Two Thrones count as 4D? 3D game, plus you manipulate time by slowing it down, speeding it up, or reversing it (having extreme effects on the environment; in WW reversing time resulted in the Dahaka's speech making sense, for example). That's three games all well before this that required smooth control over time in order to solve puzzles and defeat enemies.
show me a rotation along the time-x plane axis.
How are you defining the rotation? If it's entirely based on time alone, then warping time would be a "rotation" in the sense that you can go from time point "0" (normal flow), slow time down to point "-1" (slowed time), then swing back around to normal flow (point "0"). You can manipulate the world and the other three dimensions at each point during this.
4D shooter http://www.mushware.com/
Try Time Traveler Understander for simple fourth dimension gaming:
http://www.cracked.com/video_17823_a-helpful-tutorial-game-that-would-confuse-einstein.html
This sentence no verb.
How can a 4th spacial dimension exist if it can be expressed in 3-D? ;-)), yet in the game it just looks as if there's one parallel 3-d space.
People here bring forth the plane and circles example (if they intersect, you can untangle them by 'lifting' one off the plane through the z coordinate, shift it and put it back on the plane).
But from the viewpoint of the plane, that 3rd dimension can not be represented. An object in 3d (a cube) that doesn't intersect the plane is just plain not visible on the plane.
Sure you have the 3-d to 2-d projection to visualize 3-d on 2-d, but that is a fixed projection.
For this 4-d dimension in the game, it looks totally random, like they decide where something is placed in the 4th dimension.
The way they represent it in the game,It doesn't look like a 4th dimension, but rather a parallel 3-d.
If there really was a 4th spacial dimension, there would be an infinite amount of parallel 3-d spaces (and between every 3-d space, another infinite amount
Am I making any sense?
I suppose a proper handling of relativistic velocities would make it a 4D physics system. But, really, I'm more interested in 4 space dimensions. Rotation in 4 space dimensions would be done in a planar cross section, which would make the axis of rotation also a plane.
I've seen that video before, and sorry, but it's a load of rubbish - there is no mathematical or scientific basis to what he talks about above 4 dimensions.
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is just an interpretation - quantum theory does not tell us that it is true. But even if it was true, it makes no sense to call this the 5th dimension. Yes, colloquially in sci-fis, we call in "travelling to another dimension" when people travel to parallel universes, but mathematically it makes no sense to call it a dimension (which implies a continuum - if the universe splits into two, what's the universe halfway between them in this 5th dimension?)
To then say that the 6th dimension is simply magically jumping through this 5th dimension makes no sense at all. From this point onwards, there isn't even any vague relevance to science - he's just making it up as he goes along.
And lastly, this has nothing to do with the dimensions of string theory - if these exist, these would be additional spatial dimensions, not the nonsense that he's made up.
The frustrating thing is that the video is presented in a friendly way that makes it seem convincing - no doubt the reason why it's been propagated around the web, and you got modded up for it.
Echochrome seems somewhat similar, but not 4d.
Isnt the fourth dimension time?
We've already gamed in the 4th dimension. 4D Sports Driving (Stunts), 4D Tennis and 4D Boxing all come to mind.
This is merely 4-D vapour-ware!!!
/. for too long now!
Oh, and the obligatory:
In Soviet Russia, 4th dimension displaces YOU!!
And dare I:
Gone is the Beowulf cluster. Now we pay homage to the mighty Beowulf Dimension!!
Sigh! I think I've been reading
Any game involving just manipulating objects back n forth just to get to a final state or destination is pretty boring.
There was a video of a cool looking multidimensional game a while back that was an action platformer and you could rotate the camera view by 90' along 2 axissesesses (axii??) which would introduce otherwise invisible level content. (Paper Mario touches on this concept a bit, but this platformer I speak of took it way farther). Now if only I could remember a name.........
There's also a "4D shooter" Adanaxis ( http://libregamewiki.org/Adanaxis ), where you have not just aim at things in three dimensions, but also align color of yourself with color of the target (if you don't do that, you don't hit it, and I believe can fly just through).
Add:
1. there are many parallel worlds. About many as there are tiles of in any direction in the basic one.
2. On top of shifting transdimensional objects and transferring them between planes, you can rotate them. (think a 1-tile block that reaches through 5 planes becomes a 5-tile bar in 1 plane)
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Let me define rotation to a perpendicular axis: exchange the meaning of two dimensions in relation to an object.
In this case, rotate a cup of coffee turning height into time: will get a vertical tube with boiling water on the bottom, then hot coffee getting gradually colder towards the top. But what will be the meaning of depth of coffee in the cup replaced as time?
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I've heard of 3G programming languages (remember those from the 1980s?) but how do you program something in 4D?
Well obviously the depth of the coffee is how much time as passed (ie one unit above the boiling water would be one unit of time passed). But actually implementing something like that which allowed you to see all possible locations in space in relation to time would be a huge eye sore, unless it was something that activated only for specific objects and only when the player activated it.
Thing is, linear time transformed to height will result in all variations of coffee state over the time, height proportional to time passed.
But how do you transform variations in coffee texture (over height) to time? How would cup-second differ from dregs-second or coffee-second?
The problem seems to be that while our basic 3 dimensions seem isomorphic. You can substitute any of them with the other without consequences. Same could be said about other spatial dimensions (like in that game). Time is different - it assumes continuity (things don't just "pop in" from other dimensions), unidirectional consequences (cause causes effect, not opposite), monotonic growth of sum of entropy, and generally a piece of matter 1s ago is considered still the same piece of matter 1s later, while a piece of matter 1cm left from it is not.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I think my brain just exploded. Never was good with the 4th dimension.
I think the key is that _nothing_ is "the" fourth dimension; all you have is a list of candidates for "a" fourth dimension.
Or to put it another way, what is the second dimension? Is it height? Width? Depth? Depends where I start counting, doesn't it? Could be time even. Rudy Rucker wrote a good book about it, thats worth a look: The Fourth Dimension.