Also of interest: Velocity Raptor http://www.testtubegames.com/srel101.html
Just finished the game, it perfectly simulates contractions and time dillation on a 2D surface, check it out.
A Slower Speed of Light
31–40 of 108 posts
Re: A Slower Speed of Light
#32I don't understand why the colors are changing. Shouldn't the doppler effect not apply if the speed of light is the same for all observers?
Re: A Slower Speed of Light
#33I don't understand why the colors are changing. Shouldn't the doppler effect not apply if the speed of light is the same for all observers?
With sound waves, your speed is added to the speed of sound and you hear a different note. With light, the speed remains at c, but perceived energy of the photons is still affected (energy must be preserved after all). And energy ~ wavelength ~ color.
You can also think about it being one of these "zero (weight of a photon at rest) multiplied by infinity (energy of objects moving at c) gives a finite number (actual energy of a photon)". The last number still behaves nicely.
Re: A Slower Speed of Light
#34Re: A Slower Speed of Light
#35I'm quite curious as to whether the speed of light across the game space decreases instantaneously when you pick up an orb or whether the change in the speed of light propagates at the speed of... umm light. Also they definitely need to have a black hole or 2 chucked in and maybe some miniature binary stars orbiting at relativistic speeds
Since the speed of light doesn't change in real life, and there is no answer at what speed a changing speed of light would propagate in real life, does it really matter how it's implemented in this game? My guess is that they took the easiest route and made it change instantaneously for the whole world.
Re: A Slower Speed of Light
#36I immediately thought 'space (combat) sim!' when I heard that the engine was open.
Re: A Slower Speed of Light
#37Very interesting, although I dislike the "ice rink" feel. It makes the game very difficult to control. I'm unsure if this is intentional.
A sandbox approach might be good. I found myself wanting to experiment and change the speed of time myself.
Re: A Slower Speed of Light
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine it would be quite difficult to have working multiplayer relativistic mechanics. So far, I can only see single player mechanics working, which would restrict the appeal of such a game.
Yeah, multiplayer without a unified sense of "time" doesn't seem to work very well...
That's only partly true.
Consider a turn-based game: a turn being irrevocably discrete and the same for all players, each entity, depending on its relative speed - hence time dilation/compression ratio - would get a different number of action points to spend each turn. You can globally compute each item action points because you're simulating the game universe.
You can extend this to virtually continuous time by compressing/dilating time depending on the player's relative reference frame, and then you could cap the flow of time so that min_flow=real_time or max_flow=real_time, or even mean_flow=real_time. I could see this becoming a problem for say, a FPS game where the player would feel relativity as time slows down or goes faster, but for a much more global game applying such a scheme would make him witness each unit/planet/whatever relative reference frame time dilations/contractions from a sort of god-like reference frame. In a single player scenario (where you don't need base time flow synchronicity between players) this god-player could even change his own reference frame by scaling his base time flow between say min_flow and max_flow.
Re: A Slower Speed of Light
#39I'm quite curious as to whether the speed of light across the game space decreases instantaneously when you pick up an orb or whether the change in the speed of light propagates at the speed of... umm light. Also they definitely need to have a black hole or 2 chucked in and maybe some miniature binary stars orbiting at relativistic speeds
Since the speed of light doesn't change in real life, and there is no answer at what speed a changing speed of light would propagate in real life, does it really matter how it's implemented in this game? My guess is that they took the easiest route and made it change instantaneously for the whole world.
> does it really matter how it's implemented in this game?
Yes, I imagine it would affect gameplay quite a bit.
Re: A Slower Speed of Light
#40I was looking forward to this having seen the video, but it crashes every time when I click on from the screen that shows the controls - no reason given. I have 8Gb of RAM and good performance attributes in a Lenovo Z570, so there's nothing immediately obvious in my hardware environment.