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Transform Any Unity Project Into a Relativistic Playground With OpenRelativity

Posted by Soulskill on from the aim,-calculate-lorentz-transform,-fire dept.

schirra writes "The MIT Game Lab has just released the graphics/physics engine from its popular game A Slower Speed of Light as an open-source project, allowing anyone to play around with the effects of special relativity using Unity3D. While the hope is that game developers and educators will use OpenRelativity to develop new kinds of relativistic games and simulations, that shouldn't stop those with a casual interest from playing around with these wicked cool effects. For the physics inclined, these effects include Lorentz contraction, time dilation, Doppler shift, and the searchlight effect--though a PhD in theoretical physics isn't required to enjoy or use the project."

2 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Link to the game by the_other_chewey · · Score: 4, Informative

    OK, so there is a game called A Slower Speed of Light...
    How about linking to it?

  2. Re:What about by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    From what I can tell (I just played their example game), its not a physics engine, just some tweaked shaders (and likely tweaked culling to match). The only stuff of real interest here are the rendering changes. There may be some physics in there, but the dynamics type physics wasn't very interesting/apparent.

    It looks like the distortions are done in the vertex shader, which means you need high vertex densities for high distortions to look reasonable (geometry shader based tessellation would resolve this). It was hard to notice the issue in the game-play due to the fast motion (it was hard to really see the effects very well), but it really stands out in at least on of their screen shots. In many games this will cause gaps in the models, and where models meet, so expect the distortions to not be a trivial dropping effect when you have overlapping meshes or T joints. I've tried simpler distortion effects in some of my games, and it had bad issues with large triangles not deforming accurately and thus leaving huge gaps between the ground and meshes placed on it. Their map was made with this in mind, and you would need to take it into account if you apply this to your game.

    It looks like they did the minimal thing, plus some UV an IR textures, which is a nice touch. Nothing amazing here, but pretty cool anyway.