Transform Any Unity Project Into a Relativistic Playground With OpenRelativity

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."

Comments

What about

[viperidaenz]

spaghettification? What good isa physics engine if it can't turn every day objects into noodles?

Re:What about

[buchner.johannes]

spaghettification? What good isa physics engine if it can't turn every day objects into noodles?

Spaghettification is classical tidal forces, you don't need a special relativity engine for that, just a compact heavy object. What I would like to know is whether the engine also considers general relativity? Probably too complicated though, deforming space and so forth.

Re:What about

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What about

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

From playing with the demo last time it was mentioned, their implementation simulates the optical effects of varying the speed of light(getting massive doppler shifts at walking pace made me want to puke); but doesn't simulate(beyond a very rudimentary 'running and jumping on a plane with some scattered scenery) changes in mass, deformation of either objects or space or both. The new release may be more comprehensive, haven't had a chance to look at it yet.

Re:What about

[viperidaenz]

I just wanted an excuse to mention spaghettification.

KSP

[goertzenator]

Would go great with Kerbal Space Program.

Re:a newer version..

[buchner.johannes]

world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.

This hypothesis is constantly disproven. Search for Boltzmann brains for research, or this neat talk:

Link to the game

[the_other_chewey]

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

Re:Lorentz contraction?

[camperdave]

It depends on the frame of the observer. We can detect certain particles from space that, if they weren't "seeing" a shorter atmosphere, wouldn't make it to the surface. They'd decay first.