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4D Doom

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Re: 4D Doom

#71
post #20

The problem with these attempts always seems to be that you can see in dimensions 1-3, but never in dimension 4, so any movement or exploration along that axis is always just blind fumbling. The extra dimension is not equivalent to the others The only answer would seem to be an extra axis of rotation, but (a) doesnt work well with existing input methods, and (b) would be even more of a brain-breaker

Could transparency help? Ordinarily, a 3D scene rendered in 2D only allows you to see a cone from your eye up to the first surface the ray encounters, thus defining the 2D projection which you see. But you can make the surfaces transparent so the ray continues, and each additional surface adds a bit to the final pixel. This can look like a mess if you stand still but if you wiggle your movement left and right (or any…

Something like "wiggle stereoscopy"[1], but for 3d scenes instead of 2d images. Wiggle tesseroscopy?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiggle_stereoscopy

Re: 4D Doom

#72
post #41

I feel like now that I'm older, my brain just can't fully understand it say as quickly if I were younger. Makes me wonder if younger more plastic brains can adjust to having to juggle more dimensions than crochety old ones like mine with very rigid 3D grooves baked in. Or brains from other animals. I guess taken to the logical extreme, what does the brain of someone/thing that's good at playing this (or any game of N…

I feel the opposite. I'm 61 and I feel like I understand ideas more quickly than I ever did before, so much so that I'm surprised at how shallowly I thought about some things in the past.

While there is definitely something to the plasticity of young brains, for example in language acquisition, or the fact that the Fields Medal eligibility ages out at 40, I believe it's not a linear thing and not a one-way thing.

Re: 4D Doom

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a link?

I imagine they are taking about 4D golf by CodeParade, as seen here: https://youtu.be/y53UNskR-zU?si=iUfCkxYqkACx955t Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2147950/4D_Golf The person goes over quite a few technical details on their Youtube, though they talk about a bunch of other coding experiments too.

The additional code he wrote to make a 4d game work in the Unity game engine is available on github and MIT licensed: https://github.com/HackerPoet/Engine4D

When I first saw the title, I assumed this game was implemented in the same engine. I believe there are a few already.

Re: 4D Doom

#74
Its really a cool project, i loved playing doom game in my childhood hood, and i loved this fast paced Action FPP game…. plus the retro looks great,

Hey , did any one played “Total over dose”?

Re: 4D Doom

#75
post #63
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly speaking this doesn't make them a true 3d sensor, but rather a 2d sensor with an accompanying depth-map. In order for them to be true 3d sensors they'd be have to transmit information about both the near and far sides of an object simultaneously, for example.

Very true, a 4 dimensional being with 3 dimensional eyes would be able to look inside closed boxes, and see every side of every object at once. (just like we can see every part of a 2d scene all at once) Not merely 2d + depth perspective.

Arguably, humans are 4-dimensional beings living in a 4-dimensional world—it’s just that one of the dimensions is accessible with much fewer degrees of freedom.

(Not unlike how a seemingly 2-dimensional world of a top-down FPS is actually 3-dimensional, you just have to follow way more rules when it comes to moving in the third one.)

Re: 4D Doom

#76
post #24

It's cool and all and I typically enjoy lowres renditions... unless, it actually impacts gameplay. Since the gameplay is so much about 4D, clarity in what you see becomes more important and the extremely low resolution actually impairs the player rather than serve a positive (typically 'leaves more to the imagination'). It wouldn't take much of an effort to double or triple the resolution which I think would help the…

I really appreciate your feedback!

I tried pretty hard to increase the rendering efficiency on consumer GPUs. The biggest issue is that the main view is actually a 96x96x96 grid of "pixels" (or voxels). This makes scaling brutal: going up to 128x128x128 we'd double the total amount of pixels, to around as much as 1920x1080 resolution. Doubling the grid res to 256 would get us 16M voxels, which is about the same as two 4K displays. On top of that simple 4D object meshes scale much worse in terms of tetras than 3D objects do.

A quick solution could be to give the user a few resolution options, so they can bravely test the limits of their hardware.

So I've just modified the engine to allow you to specify a custom resolution in the URL:

https://dugas.ch/hyperhell/levels/the_bargain.html?vox_resol...

(Higher resolutions might break rendering entirely if the accel structure doesn't fit in allowed memory anymore. I was able to push it to 160x160x160 on my machines)

I'll also try to think of other ways to make the rendering more efficient, maybe a BVH instead of my simpler grid-based acceleration structure? My background is not in computer graphics, so others here might have better ideas.

Re: 4D Doom

#77
post #25

I read a novel when I was 14 or so who's premise is all about creatures inhabiting higher-dimensional space called "The Boy Who Reversed Himself" by William Sleator. I loved Sleator's books, they introduced me to really interesting concepts from theoretical physics as a youngun. If you find 4D Doom intriguing, I encourage you to borrow the book from your favorite ebook library, it's a quick fun read (at least, I reme…

Part of Greg Egan novel Diaspora takes place in a universe with 5 spatial dimensions.

Loved this book! Part of this project started from wanting to make 4D creatures and train them to walk with RL. One interesting fact I learned is that ants would probably have 8 legs in 4D.

Why? Well, apparently ants have 6 legs because this allows tripod-gait, a simple leg movement that always keeps 3 stable points on the ground[1]

In 4D, you'd need 4 points on the ground, hence tetra-pod gait (4+4 legs).

You could of course do with less, I'd guess even as low as 1-2 if you have lots of muscles and good balance.

[1] https://dugas.ch/4d_creatures/tripod_gait.html

Re: 4D Doom

#78
post #20

The problem with these attempts always seems to be that you can see in dimensions 1-3, but never in dimension 4, so any movement or exploration along that axis is always just blind fumbling. The extra dimension is not equivalent to the others The only answer would seem to be an extra axis of rotation, but (a) doesnt work well with existing input methods, and (b) would be even more of a brain-breaker

You may need more than 1 extra axis of rotations, unfortunately. https://youtu.be/tKDMcLW9OnI?t=309

Re: 4D Doom

#80

The AI generated logo image is a very big put-off.

I'd definitely prefer a human made one. If you know any artists willing to make a proper version of the cover art, I'd be happy to commission one (paid, of course).
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