Poll: Video Games With More Than Four Dimensions?

[OneCatch]

snip

Just because you know Avogadro's number from Chem 101 and can say something that is provably extremely complex (quantum physics) is easy doesn't make it so. The fact that you think those things I described as being theoretically possible under current theory need a citation to so prove you don't even have an inkling of it.

The overall impression I get from what you write is that you feel intimidated by people who are more gifted by birth or breeding, so you try to talk down those who are better off in one respect or the other.

I think what really offended you about my post was the implication that people are improvable.

Although perhaps a little abrasive [footnote]a tone which you've now far surpassed with the 'birth or breeding' comment![/footnote], Chromatic is correct.
Dimensions aren't nearly as exciting as they sound, and the use of them is kind of akin to using a calender based on the day and year, or using states of water as a basis for temperature scales, or messing with reference frames [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation] when playing with special relativity.
It's not universally or objectively required, but it makes a lot of sense to do so (and is generally easier).

And I don't think that Chromatic was saying that specialising in quantum mechanics as a field is easy, but more that the mathematical systems themselves used are relatively well defined, straightforward[footnote]at least compared to how they're seen in popular culture[/footnote] and consistent. It's the application of them and the results you get that can get a bit... philosophical.
But regardless, it's not as mystical as often presented. It's just lots of mathematics.

It's also worth noting that 'quantum theory' isn't some panacea of technological advancement - it's just one scientific field.
How on earth is instinctive understanding of a rather obscure mathematical system going to give us neutronium? That's like saying that because Einstein was really good for figuring out relativity, we developed gallium arsenide, or that because an astronomer is the world leader in galactic formation theory, they'll be able to produce really good GM crops.
See what I mean? Scientific skills aren't universally transferable to, or have a beneficial effect on, other fields.

And 'superstring communicators' and 'quantum power plants' are literally straight out of sci fi. You might as well go the whole way and say 'hyperdrive' or 'time travel' - both are on the same level of speculative fiction.

And anyway, we've got theories about changes to the Standard Model coming out of our ears. We don't actually need any more at the moment - we need to verify or disprove [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Findings] what we've already got through experimentation (hence the LHC), and if nothing fits, then we go looking for other mathematical models which work.
Funnily enough, that doesn't require theoretical physicists at the moment. It requires engineers who are in the comparatively mundane fields of magnets and supercooling.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more complex RTS games, but saying that they'll save the species because quantum mechanics is a little odd.

 

[Stryphoon]

NOTE: In the following I make assumptions about: the fourth dimension, the fifth dimension, what elements will be included in the new final fantasy 13 game. I also prattle on a bit.

My understanding on the fourth and fifth dimension are:

4 being time, as in actual progressing/fluctuating time and not strictly as we measure it (clocks)
5 being alternative paths, as it choices. Will you take the red or the blue pill (provided they were possible outcomes)

As for a game doing it, I think a few have already.

Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64)
The game it set in the span of three days which progress in real time (at its own adjusted rate of course). This shows an actual progressive world where everyone lives their lives doing certain predetermined action depending on which point in time you are at. You can actively reset time back to the first day, skip ahead half a day at a time, and speed up and slow down the progression of time (just the events not the combat or moving or anything that would interfere with the game play).
For the 5th dimension it does meet this as well (or at least my interpretation of what the fifth dimension is, which I will be the first to admit is probably completely wrong). Choices you make have long term effects throughout the game. For example, on the first day, there is a man who you can see come down from the mountain goron village and walk around town. He was there to enjoy the celebration in the town and he booked a hotel room. You can choose to steal this guys hotel room, and if you do you see that guy sleeping out on the street each night after that and he will complain about his room being stolen. If you don't you can see him in his hotel room. This is only one of a myriad of things you can change and see happen.

The persona series (or at least 3 and 4 as they are the ones I've played) also follow a similar format, though it is quite rigid and not nearly as in-depth.

A lot of game give you something akin to (my understanding of) the fifth dimension with their multiple choice systems but not a lot generally comes of it as the choices generally only have small affects on the main cast rather than the world. And a lot of games do have some semblance of time but it has no real baring, skyrim/fallout/etc have day and night cycles but there is no specific starting point so it remains static in terms of actually functioning like time does.

From what we have been told of FF13: Lightning's Revenge (or return), is going to function in much the same was as Majora's mask did, actual time progression, choices affecting the direction time progresses and given that Serah and Noel are in it time travel will likely make a return. Given that the world is constantly progressing through time it seems like the time travel element (provided it is even included) would operate more like in Majora's Mask and less like the static time travel included in Serah and Noels game, FF13-2.

LoZ: MM is my favorite game, largely because of what I was saying about it, which is why the mere possibility of FF13-3 operating like it is exciting as all hell to me. After FF13-2 I loved the FF13 franchise, now combining it with the best elements of my favorite game ever is almost too good to be true.


In terms of further implementing this these principles in games, sure as people have said it wont directly lead to a brighter tomorrow (math skills =/= chemistry skills, etc) but exposing people from a younger age when they are more open and susceptible to new ideas and concepts can encourage a more flexible way of thinking, which could result to better aptitude for complex matters later in life which could lead the breakthroughs in other fields. (like in law and order, its isn't the perp, its one of the guys, who leads to a guy, who leads to a guy, who leads to the perp)

 

[AITH]

For example, an enemy close in the second, third, sixth and seventh dimensions, but faraway in the fifth and eighth, would appear spatially close, and be illuminated in bright green and blue, but appear shadowed and lacking in red chroma (green and blue representing dimensions six and seven, red and lumina representing dimensions five and eight).

You lost me here. I understand the concept that you are trying to relay, but I don't necessarily see how you can insert this into a game for the main reason that the only way to insert the extra dimensions is to make them navigable by the player. For example, Portal forces the player to think in a non-linear fashion about gravity and forces because they must navigate through changes in them. The problem here arises that spatial orientation and position in it are, as you already stated, 4D. Therefore if anything you insert into the game has to do with spatial orientation or position as a function of time, you haven't actually added any dimensions, you've merely bent them.

Now, velocity is the derivative of position (change in position with respect to change in time, dx/dt), acceleration the derivative of velocity, jerk is da/dt, jounce is dj/dt and so on (I've never seen anything beyond jerk as useful but that's besides the point). Not knowing much about dimensions I could be wrong about this, and I'm fairly certain that this kind of thing is irrelevant to dimensions, but considering Portal introduces that sudden change in spatial position and sudden change in the orientation of forces acting on a body, I would be willing to concede the notion that Portal possibly added a new dimension to gaming never before seen. Perhaps it is just bending it as I said before though.

tl;dr The extra 'dimensions' are meaningless unless navigable by the player. If it doesn't tell you where or when an enemy will be, what good is any other indication? You can't do anything about it even with the extra info because they aren't near and they aren't there now.

 

[lacktheknack]

IQ: 125. I have a higher IQ than that (if only marginally)

So does that mean you are an underperformer relative to Feynman?

No more than you, I bet.

It means that IQ means squat when it comes to the citation that I asked for. Now, you were saying that one in tens of millions can grasp the intricacies of quantum physics. I don't believe you. Your first piece of "evidence" was not only completely false, but based on a horrible misunderstanding on how intelligence works, which isn't helping your statement. Care to try again?

Very, very few people (on the order of one birth per tens of millions) have the intelligence and mental flexibility necessary to comprehend the paradoxes of quantum theory.

...

Citation needed. Citation very, very needed.

You don't remember this guy's previous extremely inflammatory threads and posts? I mean, it's been a year, but the guy was everywhere when the feminism wars originally broke out.

OT: Where's the cliffnotes version of that OP? It was far too rambly and peppered with passive aggressive insults for me. You'd probably deem me too stupid to understand 4D+ gaming anyway, so I don't think my input really matters.

I guess it doesn't surprise me. The boiled-down version of the OP is "We need to make a game that has overlays allowing you to interact with the 4th, 5th, 6th, and all other dimensions, maybe up to about 20, so that we can train gifted children to see multi-dimensionally for the good of mankind".

Not only is this more or less utterly impossible to program (by the eighth dimension, we're hitting the infinite multiverse, and beyond that, we've hit the pure insanity that is string theory), it's essentially impossible to render on foreseeable hardware (even a four-piece multiverse requires the computer to render four worlds at once) and has a hilarious misunderstanding on how human perception works (we can see into the multiverse by TRYING REALLY HARD, YOU GUISE).

 

[OneCatch]

The game would take the form of a tactical RPG with a plot and gameplay similar to Disgaea. Whereas most tactical RPGs are strictly four-dimensional, however, this game would feature a variable number of dimensions depending on map. Additional dimensions would be displayed on the 2D screen via either the option to adjust the camera along more than two axes via key combinations, or by indicating changes in dimension by optical effects.

For example, an enemy close in the second, third, sixth and seventh dimensions, but faraway in the fifth and eighth, would appear spatially close, and be illuminated in bright green and blue, but appear shadowed and lacking in red chroma (green and blue representing dimensions six and seven, red and lumina representing dimensions five and eight).

Coming back to this thread when it's not one in the morning, I want to be a little more constructive. Now I do maintain my previous statement that such a multitude of dimensions in the way you describe wouldn't necessarily be helpful or fun, and isn't intrinsically linked to quantum mechanics anyway.

But that's given me another idea, which would be for a space strategy game that actually incorporated special relativity. So you'd have to factor in time dilation, Lorentz contraction, and so on when it came to giving units orders or moving your own ship - things like having units further away taking longer to receive orders because of the speed of light, lack of an absolute definition of time progression, visual distortions when moving at significant fractions of c.
You could incorporate red- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_shift] and blue-shift [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueshift] in place of the chromas you were using to denote dimensionality, and it would actually be useful in determining the velocity (and thus power) of incoming projectiles, or movement of enemy ships.

And the beauty of it is that special relativity is mathematically incredibly simple (it's about 4 equations), but has some seriously mind-bending [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox] consequences[footnote]To get an idea of the kind of things you could implement, consider having a read of the Lost Fleet [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Fleet] books. They're kind of badly written (especially on the emotive side of things), but the space combat and strategy in it is downright brilliant[/footnote].

---------

As for examples of existing dimension bending games, try AntiChamber, Portal, Quantum Conundrum. In that order of preference!

 

[Nieroshai]

The only problem is that you'd only be saying something's 5+-dimensional, and we'd have to take your word for it since we can't perceive beyond the fourth.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well I do enjoy your enthusiasm at fantasizing science, but out in the real world these things are only incomprehensible until adequately explained.

As for games with 4+ dimensions, yes they can be made because mathematics are in no way limited by real world concepts, however for anyone but the computer that would be just a load of gibberish (might as well just run binary code across the screen at that point), stuff we can't comprehend really doesn't make for good entertainment.
Heck even with the lowly 4 dimensions we fully comprehend you have to take extraordinary care to make sure the player got the proper context for everything or they become disoriented and annoyed.

 

[Pinkamena]

As a physicist:

I don't evem know what to say. You seem to be using big words and intricate sentences structures to hide the fact that you likely have only heard about these things through popular science.

 

[Yopaz]

Well I do enjoy your enthusiasm at fantasizing science, but out in the real world these things are only incomprehensible until adequately explained.

As for games with 4+ dimensions, yes they can be made because mathematics are in no way limited by real world concepts, however for anyone but the computer that would be just a load of gibberish (might as well just run binary code across the screen at that point), stuff we can't comprehend really doesn't make for good entertainment.
Heck even with the lowly 4 dimensions we fully comprehend you have to take extraordinary care to make sure the player got the proper context for everything or they become disoriented and annoyed.

This is basically what I wanted to say on the subject earlier, but I couldn't manage to find the words.

The hypothetical existence of dimensions beyond the ones we know exist in the world of mathematics and it's all logical to work out that. However if we were to explain the 4th dimension (or if we count time as a 4th, 5th) that would be like explaining 3 dimensions to someone who lives within a 2D universe. Basically, you have to explain a concept that for that being does not exist. As fascinating as the subject might be I don't think it would work as something entertaining.

 

[Phrozenflame500]

What the fuck.

I'm not even to pretend I understand the quantum physics side of things, but from a game development side of things this basically seems like a gimmicky RPG. I can hardly imagine it being "highely addictive".

Captcha: yada yada

You said it Captcha

 

[lord.jeff]

What I got from your post is you want to make a Math Blasters game for higher level math and theory.

 

[lacktheknack]

The game would take the form of a tactical RPG with a plot and gameplay similar to Disgaea. Whereas most tactical RPGs are strictly four-dimensional, however, this game would feature a variable number of dimensions depending on map. Additional dimensions would be displayed on the 2D screen via either the option to adjust the camera along more than two axes via key combinations, or by indicating changes in dimension by optical effects.

For example, an enemy close in the second, third, sixth and seventh dimensions, but faraway in the fifth and eighth, would appear spatially close, and be illuminated in bright green and blue, but appear shadowed and lacking in red chroma (green and blue representing dimensions six and seven, red and lumina representing dimensions five and eight).

Coming back to this thread when it's not one in the morning, I want to be a little more constructive. Now I do maintain my previous statement that such a multitude of dimensions in the way you describe wouldn't necessarily be helpful or fun, and isn't intrinsically linked to quantum mechanics anyway.

But that's given me another idea, which would be for a space strategy game that actually incorporated special relativity. So you'd have to factor in time dilation, Lorentz contraction, and so on when it came to giving units orders or moving your own ship - things like having units further away taking longer to receive orders because of the speed of light, lack of an absolute definition of time progression, visual distortions when moving at significant fractions of c.
You could incorporate red- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_shift] and blue-shift [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueshift] in place of the chromas you were using to denote dimensionality, and it would actually be useful in determining the velocity (and thus power) of incoming projectiles, or movement of enemy ships.

And the beauty of it is that special relativity is mathematically incredibly simple (it's about 4 equations), but has some seriously mind-bending [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox] consequences.

---------

As for examples of existing dimension bending games, try AntiChamber, Portal, Quantum Conundrum. In that order of preference!

I very much like this idea. We should try this one. Educational, mind-bending, strategic.

 

[OneCatch]

Well I do enjoy your enthusiasm at fantasizing science, but out in the real world these things are only incomprehensible until adequately explained.

As for games with 4+ dimensions, yes they can be made because mathematics are in no way limited by real world concepts, however for anyone but the computer that would be just a load of gibberish (might as well just run binary code across the screen at that point), stuff we can't comprehend really doesn't make for good entertainment.
Heck even with the lowly 4 dimensions we fully comprehend you have to take extraordinary care to make sure the player got the proper context for everything or they become disoriented and annoyed.

This is basically what I wanted to say on the subject earlier, but I couldn't manage to find the words.

The hypothetical existence of dimensions beyond the ones we know exist in the world of mathematics and it's all logical to work out that. However if we were to explain the 4th dimension (or if we count time as a 4th, 5th) that would be like explaining 3 dimensions to someone who lives within a 2D universe. Basically, you have to explain a concept that for that being does not exist. As fascinating as the subject might be I don't think it would work as something entertaining.

I agree that this could be something of an issue as well. I mean, we can create various representations of different dimensional systems relatively easily, but they are by nature imperfect.

Take a tesseract (4D cube) for example:

You can very easily look at it and go; "huh, neat." But that picture doesn't really tell you anything profound about the structure of it, and is borked in representation.
All those straight lines are the same length mathematically, but we obviously can't draw it so we make them flexible as a interim solution, in the same way that when drawing a cube on a sheet of paper we draw the edges as different lengths even though in a true cube, they're all the same.
Mathematically, all these shapes are very well defined, but when you try to represent them, things can get imprecise (if you're being polite), or messy (if you aren't).
And in the words of Anchorman, these things escalate quickly [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube#Graphs].

I mean christ, we can't even settle on a decent projection for the earth's surface, and we've been trying for 500 fucking years!

Spoiler

EDIT: Pinched image without attribution initially and felt bad so... Go read XKCD [http://xkcd.com/], it's awesome [http://what-if.xkcd.com/]!

Spoiler: snip

The game would take the form of a tactical RPG with a plot and gameplay similar to Disgaea. Whereas most tactical RPGs are strictly four-dimensional, however, this game would feature a variable number of dimensions depending on map. Additional dimensions would be displayed on the 2D screen via either the option to adjust the camera along more than two axes via key combinations, or by indicating changes in dimension by optical effects.

For example, an enemy close in the second, third, sixth and seventh dimensions, but faraway in the fifth and eighth, would appear spatially close, and be illuminated in bright green and blue, but appear shadowed and lacking in red chroma (green and blue representing dimensions six and seven, red and lumina representing dimensions five and eight).

Coming back to this thread when it's not one in the morning, I want to be a little more constructive. Now I do maintain my previous statement that such a multitude of dimensions in the way you describe wouldn't necessarily be helpful or fun, and isn't intrinsically linked to quantum mechanics anyway.

But that's given me another idea, which would be for a space strategy game that actually incorporated special relativity. So you'd have to factor in time dilation, Lorentz contraction, and so on when it came to giving units orders or moving your own ship - things like having units further away taking longer to receive orders because of the speed of light, lack of an absolute definition of time progression, visual distortions when moving at significant fractions of c.
You could incorporate red- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_shift] and blue-shift [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueshift] in place of the chromas you were using to denote dimensionality, and it would actually be useful in determining the velocity (and thus power) of incoming projectiles, or movement of enemy ships.

And the beauty of it is that special relativity is mathematically incredibly simple (it's about 4 equations), but has some seriously mind-bending [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox] consequences.

---------

As for examples of existing dimension bending games, try AntiChamber, Portal, Quantum Conundrum. In that order of preference!

I very much like this idea. We should try this one. Educational, mind-bending, strategic.

Hey, thanks very much!

 

[Hero in a half shell]

The game would take the form of a tactical RPG with a plot and gameplay similar to Disgaea. Whereas most tactical RPGs are strictly four-dimensional, however, this game would feature a variable number of dimensions depending on map. Additional dimensions would be displayed on the 2D screen via either the option to adjust the camera along more than two axes via key combinations, or by indicating changes in dimension by optical effects.

Is it just me or is the game you've outlined effectively the same as 3D Chess:

I mean, it sounds like you've just taken a standard 3D map and each extra 'dimension' is just another slightly different axis that characters can jump onto to use as shortcuts between distances on the first map.