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A Slower Speed of Light

gamelab.mit.edu

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Re: A Slower Speed of Light

#91

Post by padraigm »

mayneack wrote: post #62
memming wrote: post #55

Someone should do the same with quantum mechanics by increasing the Plank constant.

I wonder how complex it would be to have a physics engine that allows for arbitrary changes in fundamental constants.

The thing is, most game engines don't even simulate Newtonian physics very accurately; it would be much too computationally expensive to do so. Gravity only works on certain objects and is usually a constant acceleration applied along the vertical Cartesian axis, objects are composed of at most a couple dozen perfectly rigid parts attached together at defined joints, liquids and particles are simulated in batches using only rough heuristics, and so on. If we were to allow arbitrary changes to fundamental physical constants, the game engine would have to simulate the world from the quantum scale up.

That's a hard damn problem. There are some extraordinarily well-funded research groups that are struggling to model any reasonably large number of interactions at that scale. State of the art supercomputing clusters can currently simulate systems of hundreds of thousands of atoms, not even in real-time, and they're still making some assumptions along the way, which might not hold true if you were to arbitrarily modify any fundamental constants.

You could probably write a physics engine that passably pretends to simulate some (non-arbitrary!) changes in fundamental constants. But it would be hard to guess what matter would even look like for different values of, say, Z0.

Re: A Slower Speed of Light

#93

Post by mdonahoe »

m_darkTemplar wrote: post #83

I(Ryan Cheu) was on the team that made this if anyone has questions! Most of my work was on implementing the actual calculations for relativistic effects. It was coded in Unity Game engine in C# mostly. The hard calculations are actually all calculated in a shader written in Cg (mostly just C) so they're on the graphics card.

Can I skip the orbs and go directly to the end?

The end has all the crazy distortions that make it fun.

Re: A Slower Speed of Light

#94

Post by dioltas »

Ambadassor wrote: post #25
omgtehlion wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the same in windows (7, x64)

Works for me on Windows 7, x64. Try updating your DirectX.

Doesn't seem to work for me either on Windows 7 64bit.

Just installed direct X from microsoft's site, still no joy. Crashes just after intro.

Any other libraries I might be missing?

Re: A Slower Speed of Light

#95

Post by dioltas »

omgtehlion wrote: post #17
fungi wrote: post #8

any one get it running in wine? i get through all the menus and story slides but then boom.

I got the same in windows (7, x64)

Crashes for me too.

Just read this on the site:

Some users have reported that the game may run on Windows XP and 2GB RAM. A known bug will crash the game on computers with some Intel graphics chipsets.

I have one of those hybrid graphics setups for laptops, so maybe that's the problem.

Re: A Slower Speed of Light

#96

Post by shardling »

xnxn wrote: post #81
StavrosK wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't listening to me. The speed of the photon is c in the direction it's traveling, a photon traveling due west is going north with no speed at all.

I don't think it makes sense to say that the speed of a photon is c "in a direction", since speed is a scalar quantity. (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm terrible at physics!)

Here, speed is a measure of the magnitude of velocity. It's perfectly acceptable to describe velocity (or a component thereof) as speed in a particular direction.

Re: A Slower Speed of Light

#97

Post by shardling »

m_darkTemplar wrote: post #83

I(Ryan Cheu) was on the team that made this if anyone has questions! Most of my work was on implementing the actual calculations for relativistic effects. It was coded in Unity Game engine in C# mostly. The hard calculations are actually all calculated in a shader written in Cg (mostly just C) so they're on the graphics card.

Is there a description anywhere of exactly how the FOV/perception of distance changes as you get closer to c?

Also why is it that you can't see the Lorentz transformations until the final orb? I'd have thought that they'd be apparent somehow -- is it somehow cancelled out by visual effects?

Re: A Slower Speed of Light

#98

Post by shardling »

lloeki wrote: post #38
jychang wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

I don't think it is quite that easy.

Try modelling the twin paradox that way, for instance...

Re: A Slower Speed of Light

#99

Post by beagle3 »

tjic wrote: post #19

I remember reading a science fiction novel based on a similar idea perhaps 20 years ago. It was pretty good. http://www.amazon.com/Redshift-Rendezvous-John-Stith/dp/1880...

Another recommendation for Redshift Rendezvous. It REALLY is science fiction, and not just fiction (most things classified "sci-fi" these days are pure fantasy; where's the science in e.g. Star Wars?).

It's a good story, (acceptably) good science (for a story book), and if I recall correctly from 20 years ago, very well written.

Re: A Slower Speed of Light

#100

Post by mayneack »

padraigm wrote: post #91
mayneack wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how complex it would be to have a physics engine that allows for arbitrary changes in fundamental constants.

The thing is, most game engines don't even simulate Newtonian physics very accurately; it would be much too computationally expensive to do so. Gravity only works on certain objects and is usually a constant acceleration applied along the vertical Cartesian axis, objects are composed of at most a couple dozen perfectly rigid parts attached together at defined joints, liquids and particles are simulated in batches usi…

Yeah, I completely expect 99% of the changes to just resolve to "this is something we can't possibly simulate"
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