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Portal’s physics engine rebuilt in 25KB—on a graphing calculator

arstechnica.com

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Re: Portal’s physics engine rebuilt in 25KB—on a graphing calculator

#21

Post by ionforce »

vacri wrote: post #15
ionforce wrote: post #11

That is an excessively sensationalist headline. Portal, physics and graphics-wise, does way more than that graphing calculator. To imply that they are equivalent is shameful and ignorant.

I don't see any claims of recreating Portal's graphics. I think yours is an excessively sensationalist criticism.

You're right in a way. Portal could be thought of as two parts, the raw physics and the raw graphics. But when a lay person makes claims of recreating Portal's secret sauce, they're really implying the portal mechanism which is one part physical and one part graphical.

Literally recreating only the physics portion of Portal would be silly.

And yes I was intentionally trying to be sensationalist back because it's a waste of time being victim to submitter's sensationalist headlines, especially on a technical site such as as this (one would hope).

Re: Portal’s physics engine rebuilt in 25KB—on a graphing calculator

#23

Post by ionforce »

vacri wrote: post #20
peterhajas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claiming to recreate the physics engine implies that somebody remade the Source engine on a calculator. This is a massive exaggeration.

You don't think that ionforce is over-egging the criticism pudding by throwing in inferred claims about graphics, too? I find it ironic that such a tactic should be used in a criticism that strongly applies the 'shameful' label.

You're right that it is ironic. It's ironic the same way bigots say that liberals are being intolerant of their beliefs.

Re: Portal’s physics engine rebuilt in 25KB—on a graphing calculator

#25

Post by geori »

The memory limitations are a bitch. It isn't that difficult to build your engine in that amount of space, but storing any decent graphics or level maps are nigh impossible. I had to quit working on a Zelda clone and JRPG because of memory issues. To this day, I've only seen one long game actually worth a crap and that's Joltima - http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/34/3456.html Karneges had to use every trick in the book (huffman compression on 4 bit tilemaps) to fit it into 32K of RAM.

Still, it's impressive to do anything like Portal on the calculator. Glad that someone picked it up, even if the headlines are sensational.

Re: Portal’s physics engine rebuilt in 25KB—on a graphing calculator

#26

Post by fatjokes »

> While programming for graphing calculators admittedly doesn’t give Marcolina’s work a wide reach

Are they joking? Those TI 83's will be used by high school students in the US/Canada as long as TI has this chokehold on schools. They've outlasted god-knows how many versions of Mac's, PC's, Nintendos, Xboxes, PS's.

Re: Portal’s physics engine rebuilt in 25KB—on a graphing calculator

#27

Post by andrewmunsell »

gipsies wrote: post #13
jlgreco wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not be so sure. It really all depends on how much physics you want your "physics engine" to have. Rag-dolls? Not likely. Quake 1? Sure, you could do physics to that extent on an 89. The 89's are more powerful than you may suspect, unlike the 84 (seen in the article), they have Motorola 68k's. Here is an idea of what you can do with a 84's Zilog z80 (warning: long animated gif): http://benryves.com/images/nost…

I remember playing a lot with my old TI-83. One of the most impressive games was DOOM: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/238/23843.html Best video I can find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuupoxmeQ6U Unfortunately I never had a TI-89. Would've been awesome if I had one back in the day, and then test these games: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/405/40593.html and http://www.ticalc.org/arch…

I always find it funny that someone actually ported Fruit Ninja. http://tiwizard.com/downloads/fruit-ninja/

The controls are pretty clever too.

Re: Portal’s physics engine rebuilt in 25KB—on a graphing calculator

#29

Post by loeg »

geori wrote: post #25

The memory limitations are a bitch. It isn't that difficult to build your engine in that amount of space, but storing any decent graphics or level maps are nigh impossible. I had to quit working on a Zelda clone and JRPG because of memory issues. To this day, I've only seen one long game actually worth a crap and that's Joltima - http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/34/3456.html Karneges had to use every tri…

You can absolutely page in data from Flash memory as needed, it's just non-trivial (and not handled by the "OS"). On devices with flash memory as an extension of RAM (TI 83+, 89, and 89 titanium), this could help for read-only level data that isn't needed all of the time.

Edit: Of course, Joltima targets the TI-83 (different from the 83+), which doesn't have any flash memory. Bravo, Justin Karneges.

Re: Portal’s physics engine rebuilt in 25KB—on a graphing calculator

#30

Post by vacri »

peterhajas wrote: post #16
vacri wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any claims of recreating Portal's graphics. I think yours is an excessively sensationalist criticism.

Claiming to recreate the physics engine implies that somebody remade the Source engine on a calculator. This is a massive exaggeration.

The title says 'in 25kb on a graphing calculator'. The only way it's "amazing" is if you know what a graphing calculator is, and if you know that, then it's pretty obvious that the title is a mild form of poetic license rather than a sensationalist attempt to mislead. And really, when people think of "Portal physics", for the most part they think of 'a hole between two non-adjacent surfaces you can travel through', not 'a realistic 3D world where objects behave according to newtonian physics', because the latter is a dime a dozen.

Honestly, how many people who know what a graphic calculator was would seriously think that they "remade the Source engine", misled by the 'sensationalist' title?

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