I exchanged a couple emails with him years ago, as I wanted to share an interface I designed for viewing 4D (or higher) geometry. It runs in the browser and you can try it at
http://transdimensional.xyz
The each column is a slider with previews of how it will look when the slider is rotated
I met him at Dynamicland last year and he was pretty excited about developing the game, but I guess things slowed down? I hope it still gets developed, I love the idea of the game.
Am I understanding correctly that this visualizes a 3d cross-section of a 4d cube? Is so, it might be interesting to put together a tool that shows a 2d cross-section of a 3d cube so people get the intuition.
The most popular Counter-Strike maps of all time (de_dust and dust2) were visual copies of a map from a trailer for TF2, and were released in 2000. TF2 finally came out in 2007, sporting a completely different look.
That was my experience too. I mostly got the idea but still failed to anticipate what would happen when I made the shape move in some particular way. We don’t think in 4D and it’s just not easy.
Looking at the 4d toys video, it occurs to me that we can't really see in 3d, we only see these 2d projections. But it's far more information rich than a slice, and we can mentally model 3d. Some of this is certainly an innate ability to model 3d, and familiarity with the component shapes. But it also comes from shading and other surface area effects.
Could 4d be projected onto 2d in this fashion? Not a slice, but more like a shadow with surface effects. Maybe with red/green/blue lights in different positions in 4d space?
There's a hard-to-get-running-due-to-age Java applet there which, when it used to run easily, was very powerful for getting me to understand 4D in an intuitive way.
It has a variety of stereo viewing modes, ranging from eye-crossed 3D (and wall-eye), to red/blue glasses, and so forth. It also has an excellent option for "thick" lines, that accentuates the position of the 4D object by making lines closer to the camera thicker.
The trick is to use your brain's two different depth perception mechanisms in different ways. You have hardware depth perception in the form of parallax difference between your two eyes, and you have software depth perception in the form of your brain's image analysis capabilities that, given a 2D wireframe, can determine a 3D projection of it. This is always fun with optical illusions, where you can see that your brain only really uses small localities for these calculations - observe the traditional "blivet" fork for an example.
Anyone who has looked at an isometric rendering of a wireframe 3D cube on paper knows that there are two ways you can perceive this shape, and that's the key to getting 4D intuitive perception going. You should already be accomplished at mentally switching the cube back and forth without even closing your eyes before you move on to another dimension!
If you use a hardware stereo mechanism like crossing your eyes to get one depth axis, you can concentrate and use that software depth perception to get the second depth axis. In particular, it's important to note that different mouse buttons and key combos will rotate the shape in different axes, so just make gentle movements with each to get a feeling for the range of motion. One set of axes will rotate the cube as though its 3D projection was one of the two possible software-depth-perception interpretations of it, and the other set of axes will rotate it as though the other interpretation was correct. You can seamlessly move back and forth between those states!
Perlin's applet features a variety of shapes, from the classic hypercube, to a simplex with the fewest possible edges (akin to a triangular pyramid in 3D) on to a sort of Klein bottle. It's really tricky to figure that one out, but in the end it's basically a sort of hypertorus where the inside and outside can become one another. Yeah, that's not really conveying very well in text, is it....
The dev is terrified to release anything less than perfection and is insanely good at adding more content and can always justify to themselves procrastinating on release by working on more content.
What? I'm not projecting. You're projecting. Shut up.
But this is also fine! It's also unexplored territory. In the words of Mr. Miyamoto: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."
Releasing it when it is ready rather than releasing it to release it is probably better in this case. Especially if the creator ever plans on other 4D game projects, since he has his own game engine to create them now. Better to not have someone's first experience with a 4D game be "This was garbage." in that case.
Duke Nukem Forever would beg to differ. The risk with delaying is that you may not be prioritizing the important things. Because you just bought yourself more time, it's easier to do the part you enjoy, instead of the part that's needed.
DNF was fine, it just wasn't the amazing masterpiece people expected. Miyamoto's quote can be true, but it can also be true that while delays can get you to 'good', that doesn't mean they can get you to 'great', and 'great' might sometimes only be achievable through aggressive cutting to the core experience. Not necessarily rushed, but not without deadlines and hard choices either.
For games pushing a new gimmick this seems even more true, and especially the idea of iterating on things that maybe aren't even quite "good" in order to learn more and eventually understand how to make something great even if a lot of the time greatness seems accidental. Two examples come to mind... Doom was made in a year, but was a culmination of even shorter projects successively refining what FPS meant. Portal was done in a little over 2 years, but was also built on the experience of Digipen students' project game that introduced the gimmick mechanic along with others at Valve with experience making FPSes (along with some writers who knew what they were doing).
Duke Nukem Forever was far from fine. They'd spent over a decade switching engines, rearranging progression and changing scenarios until they had no more money and nothing even close to a finished project.
Then Gearbox stepped in, wrapped it up in near passable form and shipped it. But the final product is very clearly not a good game. Level design is bad, graphics are terribly inconsistent, ranging from looking modern for its time to looking ten years dated. Gameplay is poorly balanced and the pacing is just not there.
I loved Duke Nukem 3D and was very much looking forward to Forever when it was announced. By the time it launched I had no expectations on it and bought it as a fun thing. It's amusing that they wrapped it up and published it, but it's not a finished game.
What it is, however, is fodder for some great conversation at work when we're discussing project management.
DNF had nothing to do with what made D3D actually good: amazing level design, creative weapons and enemies, fantastic music, tons of secrets, and a variety of weird environments. D3D took all the joys of shareware, episodic DOS gaming and brought them to 3D. DNF took all the juvenile bits and wrapped them in a half-baked CoD shell.
If only the game was as good as the 2001 E3 trailer.
It really depends on the game. The issue with DNF is that by the time it came out, the whole game felt very dated. This is definitely an issue for 3D games. Another post from the same author talks about Reset [0], which in 2012 looked absolutely gorgeous, but if it came out today it would look like a normal game.
For a puzzle game, I would say that there's less risk for that, although I do recall other games copying the 4D mechanic since.
This quote gets thrown quite often in the gaming community but I'm pretty sure it's taken out of context (In fact I can't find the source for it). But I'm sure Miyamoto context was 1 to 2 years max and not 10 years. I say this because Nintendo has a history of brutal work to meet deadlines. See the history of Mr Satoru Iwata and why be became the CEO of Nintendo.
It matters for the same reason first impressions matter. It's a lot harder to succeed in a relationship with someone if you start off on the wrong foot.
I know many others, and myself, who won't be playing Fallout:76 or No Man's Sky because both games were colossal train wrecks on launch that over-promised (or over-hyped) and under-delivered. It doesn't matter much if these issues are eventually fixed, most of the player base will have already moved on. Some many go back and try it out when they hear "it's better now" but many won't.
The games will be remembered poorly by most people, even if they eventually do become good and that is what the quote means.
On this note, even when the game "is better now" to a new-comer the game almost always still possesses the characteristic flaws that it always did, albeit muted in the new release. At least this has been my experience in such matters.
Delayed game > rushed game > game that never ships at all.
One of the key challenges is that it is so hard to distinguish the first case from the last. In practice, there are many more games that never get finished than those that do.
i met marc about 7 years ago and he was hard at work on it then and it looked fairly polished and I thought for sure it would be released within a year or two. he really did seem like a perfectionist type... but its kind of unfortunate that he didn't release sooner since the indie game market is much more crowded now and it won't get as much attention.
His analysis of the game is great — he says it parallels early sci-fi and speculative fiction, which started by asking “what if?” questions to build stories around worlds constructed from the answer (“What if the world was four dimensional?” in the case of Miegakure, or “what if the world was two dimensional?” in Flatland.)
Braid was born of asking similar questions. (“What if you could play with the flow of time?”) Jonathan suggests that games elevate the art of asking that question further than fiction because you actually have to _build_ the world spawned from your “what if?” question rather than write it. But it creates some of the most interesting games — he demos some others in his talk.
It's great to learn that Marc ten Bosch is still working on Miegakure. I really enjoyed the previews and the concept art on his own site: http://marctenbosch.com/news/
A first I thought this was a time shifting game like Braid, but this feels sorta like FEZ, except instead of a character learning about a 3D world from his 2D origins (which most people can understand playing SNES/Genesis games vs modern console games) into something way more bizarre that we can't even visualize.
The 2nd video on the page is really great at explaining this.
I haven't heard of this game before .. hopefully I'll forgot about it until it gets released. :)
This reminded me of the enormous mess surrounding Fez 2 and Phil Fish's exit of the game industry At Speed.
Regardless of any other opinions I may have about the game industry's toxicity, I'm always somewhat sad to recall that, as I wonder what it might or might not have turned out to be.
Short story is the same ol, same ol. Creator creates beloved thing, People want to get to know the creator, Non PR savvy creator says awkward things with good intentions, People recoil and Creator recoils from reaction.Creator self destruct - in this case Phil Fish cancels Fez 2 in a reactionary manner. Phil still works in game dev as a consultant from what i remember of my cursory web stalking
I remember seeing one post then, another post later, about the journey the developer was making when coding it.
I was attracted by the ideas used, but that "4th dimension" thing, really didn't seem so solidify much.
I'm guessing that in the end, it was all about playability, and that probably the novelty of the game dynamics wore off rather fast, leaving behind a dull game.
I think the developer probably got a lot out of the journey as well, thus making releasing the game very likely irrelevant.
This article didn't really say that much, aside from that the game still isn't out and still doesn't have tangible details about a release.
I really do hope to play it one day, but I'm starting to think that the game is on a death march and will end up unsatisfactory no matter what. I am eagerly waiting to be proven wrong.
Afaik Mr. Bosch has finally engaged an artist sometime in the past couple years, when the levels were done or nearly so. They went on looking for the final look of the game—which is quite different from the earlier shots, judging by illustrations on the blog (though it's unclear how close they will be to the finished product): http://marctenbosch.com/news/
So it seems that currently it's time or art, implementation of said art, and polish.
I wonder if it would be more intuitive to display a projection of the 4D scene in 3 dimensions (then projected onto a 2d screen), rather than a 3D cross section of the 4D scene.
I have been wondering, what would be the major challenges to create a 4d "space" in virtual reality with some kind of sensors that would let sense the orientation and maybe even speed/acceleration in the 4th dimension?
IMO the big example is WarCraft III mods. While they often did have an inner circle of maintainers for each one, the nature of making mods made it easy for any player to open up the mod, take pieces, make edits, post their own versions, etc, and that it's not a coincidence that this lead to a Cambrian explosion in game design, including popularizing genres like MOBAs and tower defense games.
With Warcraft 3 mods, you're building on top of highly polished and already-fun game features, more akin to taking one complete game and recombining it into other games. With a highly polished scenario editor.
I don't see how that has much in common with a "bazaar" approach to a game that is still in early development.
Well, the most famous Warcraft 3 mod is DotA; it always had very different gameplay from the base game, and it was eventually made into a standalone game (Dota 2) as well as inspiring many copycat games (like League of Legends). Now the same is happening in turn to Dota 2 with the popular mod Dota Auto Chess, which is even more different in gameplay than DotA was from Warcraft; it was recently announced that both the mod's original creators and Valve have separate efforts to make it into a standalone game. Similarly, in a slightly different genre, quite a few famous FPS games started as mods: Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, DayZ – even PUBG, the game that set off the battle royale craze (it was based on a DayZ mod).
In other words, mods can effectively serve as "early development" versions of what eventually become new games, while being developed in bazaar style.
I don't think you nor the other person that responded to me give nearly enough credit to building on top of something compared to coming together to build something from scratch.
For example, open the original DotA in the scenario editor and look how simple it is. Some of the hardest things in game development are already done for them. The DotA creator could basically churn on their idea trivially at that level of abstraction.
Of course, coming up and implementing a fun game is the "other 90%" of game development, but the WC3 kit also heavily constrains you the same way RPG Maker 2000 does.
I just don't think this has much relation to the original claim that bazaar-style development would help this game along. Scenario editors are just worlds different. Consider how much work Miegakure's creator would have to do to arrive at the sort of custom game concept or Half-Life mod we're even talking about. WC3 and HL both already existed, for example.
Anyways, my guess is that Miegakure was a cute tech demo, but the developer has trouble lifting it into an actual game. For example, they also created http://4dtoys.com/, and it looks really interesting, but it's also hard to see how to advance from that concept to a more polished game. As opposed to, say, a tech demo based on portals.
Well... I wasn't actually intending to address the original claim you mentioned, only to refute the child comment, "I am not aware of any good game that has been developed bazaar-style."
But it's interesting: I feel like you're describing two halves of a coin.
Mods take existing tech and iterate on gameplay rules to make a fun game.
Miegakure, in your supposition, has tech but no game.
Certainly, Miegakure's creator could not have developed it as a mod to an existing game. But once they wrote their engine, perhaps they could have released it and let mod creators experiment with the game part.
...In practice, that probably wouldn't actually work, just because it's hard to attract a modding community to a game that isn't already popular. But if a community somehow came to exist, the kind of trial and error that modders do sounds like a great way to stumble on the right gameplay concept that makes 4D actually fun. If such a concept exists. :)
Mods like Dota or Legion TD are so different (from a gameplay/design perspective) from the base game, that it really makes sense to think of them as new games built using a very high level/accessible toolchain. You can have bazaar-style development of a webapp that makes use of components (like databases, web frameworks, libraries) that were originally built in a cathedral-style context for a different webapp.
This comic mentions Flatland, which is an excellent book. Reading it might give some insight as to what observing our 3D world would be like from a 4D context. You have to extrapolate it from the idea of viewing a 2D world from our perspective. Honestly, it would probably be disturbing. You'd be able to see everything at once. Like, inside and outside of everything from all perspectives at once. I'll pass.
This probably won't help you figure out how to play Miegakure, though. Although I thought the comparison to FEZ was apropos.
Nobody refers to our own world as “4D” or flat cartoons as “3D” though. In colloquial speech, the number before the D is the number of spatial dimensions, so “4D” is correct here.
You're absolutely correct. But notice how I used the term technically?
I just wanted to point out that time is basically a spatial dimension and we have alot of experience with 4D objects. The temporal aspect of time is entropy; that is the only difference.
Other than that the equations literally call it spacetime and treat it as the same thing.
The 4th dimension you experience in the game is literally time with the arrow of time removed.
So far, every "3D" game is actually 4D. This game could be a 5th dimensional game, but then the main character needs to see all other 4th dimensional realties (like in Rick and Morty). I had the same problem with Rick and Morty's "A Rickle in Time". However, they got the monster (who is actually a 5th dimensional being not a 4th dimensional) right by being able to see all the uncertain possibilities. This game would need that type of awareness to be considered 5D. Otherwise, it's a normal 4D game.
Saying that "the fourth dimension is time" when people bring up the idea of things with 4 dimensions of space, is a frustratingly common confusion.
No. One can think of "3 dimensions of space and one dimension of time" as a 4 dimensional thing, but that does not mean that every time that someone talks about 4 dimensions, that they would be properly interpreted as talking about time.
4 spatial dimensions usually just means that it takes 4 coordinates to pick out the points (though one could also be talking about, like, the Hausdorff Dimension of something, but whatever.)
I’m not confusing anything. The game has time interwoven into the game play. Therefore the fourth dimension of space is the fifth dimension of the game. I really hope you are joking.
Dimensions aren’t ordered like that. There isn’t a dimension which is “the fourth one”. The game has 4 spatial dimensions, and, like basically all games, has 1 time dimension.
People don’t talk about the time dimension because it is irrelevant (edit: because there is always 1 time dimension, so no new information is conveyed by mentioning that the game has a time dimension).
Do you really think, when someone talks about a “2D game” that they mean that the game world has one dimension of space and another dimension of time? Of course you do not! That would be foolish! They are obviously talking about a game with 2 dimensions of space.
The whole “the 4’th’ dimension always means time” idea is a stupid convention from bad sci-fi, which also brings us nonsense like “a journey into the seventh dimension”.
Call time “a” 4th dimension, as in, other than the 3 of space, sure, fine, people can tell what you are talking about. That just is imposing an order based on the order you are referring to things at the time.
I actually get really annoyed by the misnomers! Just because you think time is irrelevant doesn’t mean it is. Without it there would be NO movement. Btw, space and time aren’t separate. That’s why we call it space-time.
The each column is a slider with previews of how it will look when the slider is rotated