Still sounds wonderful, but when's the damn thing coming out? I first heard about Miegakure in an xkcd from 6 years ago, and was immediately ready to hand over my money. It's been hard to maintain that enthusiasm through one and a half Presidential terms...
As the creator of a 4D game, I can attest how hard it is to make such a thing fun.
Even though simpler, I think what I built is only partially successful at this. In the end I think the audience for my toy and Marc's game will only be people excited about new concepts and toying with theoretical math ideas where the bulk of the fun is just from that rather than game play.
I believe much of a game's fun comes from matching the users existing abstract ideas about the world. I suspect that 4D manipulation of objects is so deeply counter intuitive that doing this is extremely difficult.
But I for one will be thrilled by any from of Miegakure that is ever released whatever it's state or level of fun.
This is amazing. It matches the description I read in Michio Kaku's Hyperspace as a kid. Except the visuals, although similar, were said to be blobs. I'm not sure.
I like that the game creates the ability to move through a 4D space while seeing the effects in 3D. The fundamental is great. Also, how a 4D person might move through walls via the fourth dimension. I think an even more interesting angle might happen if a game tries to break the assumption that 4D movement is wide open: put obstacles in the way where a person must use intuition to navigate it by making a 2D/3D map of that space as well. Maybe the game does that, too.
Thanks! Each puzzle is about doing some crazy thing that only a 4D being could do, such as binding two rings without breaking them, or stealing something from a building that is closed from all sides but not in the fourth dimension. We'll show more of that soon.
What I ended up thinking was how we can always see what's ahead in 2d / 3d (of course, without obstacles), and how we cannot see anything in the fourth dimension in this particular world. Could this ability be somehow recreated for 4D? Looking ahead/behind, being aware of what's happening "nearby" on the fourth axis?
Very interesting, look forward to more news about this game!
Most of the transcript of the video is on the main page (http://miegakure.com/), along with illustrative images and gifs.
They evoke how their inspiration was flatland, which when I read it I found strikingly unimaginative. To explain, the characters are 2D objects; the book describes some of the problems these beings encounter, but doesn't really solve them, so the described society doesn't really hold up. One instance is that their field of vision is just a line with a dimension for color, so you need to see a form move into space to understand what it is (maybe I'm wrong, but I think the author does not say clearly that points do bear some 'depth' and 'texture' information, otherwise this wouldn't work). But there are creative ways to solve these problems: for example the beings could 'see' using a bat-like interpretations of echoes to get a sense of the space around them (we see in 3D, not in 2D). Life under different constraints ends up having different features than us humans. So in a sense, it is a bit like somebody who would stumble upon a mathematical paradox (say, the barber's one) and would just deduce 'how funny are words and numbers' (well, a bit like Lewis Caroll).
I think the real cleverness of that book is the comparison of 2D creatures to 3D, and use that to guide our otherwise non-existent intuition of what 4D space would look like. I could imagine one thinking of that analogue before reading the book, making it seem less novel. But you have to remember that we've lived in a society that's had that book for nearly 150 years, so it would not be surprising if some of the ideas from the book became a mainstream meme.
But Erewhon came in 1872, and contained many ideas that are still very strong (emergent life, creation of the technological system and clash with the ancient order (Church))...
It's a bit like the 'Seinfeld is unfunny' trope; even at the time, some people found it unfunny. It does not mean that this effect does not play a role, but you seldom hear "well, Copernicus is such a greaaat guy for discovering that the Earth revolves around the Sun", while it does suffer from it.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks had devised such stories illustrating some mathematical concepts; it's just that more than 150 years ago, the audience for 'geeky stories' was not so big, as well as the potential writers for such stories weren't so numerous (although Gauss seems a bit cheeky on his portrait). HN just wasn't there.
Super Paper Mario does much the same when Paper Mario acquires the limited ability to rotate and move in a third spatial dimension as a 2-dimensional character.
Fez is similar.
We don't yet have a graphic game that makes a fourth spatial dimension more intuitive, but I do recall playing text adventures that had very limited 4-d interaction. The white cubes in Spellbreaker were all hyperfaces of a hypercube, after all.
As a non-native english speaker: He absolutely rushes through his explanation at break-neck pace, and he rarely changes the tone of his voice from a droning monotone. For me that makes it incredibly difficult to process and retain anything he talks about.
As a native speaker he was speaking at a fairly normal pace, and his intonation was fine, just more subtle. Voices like his are not uncommon, especially in engineering.
That being said, based on his accent it is possible that english is not be his first language.
if they make the argument that the 3D level geometry is a slice of 4D geometry, then a 3D animation frame of the character is also a slice of 4D geometry (the 4D geometry interpolated from 3D keyframes and timing curves)
I think it's not a slice. If you sliced reality in half you'd see the cross-section of whatever you sliced in half, as opposed to that multi-planer cow standing over there beyond the slice point. Our 2D version of the 3D world we perceive to inhabit is projecting (and mixing) light that falls on the back of our eye. It's a highly dynamic and contextual environment backed by the absolutely best encryption known anywhere. Other simulations, while cost effective, can't compete with our reality's reliability. Call today for your free trial!
Time is a different type of dimension than the spatial dimensions. If you're really going to bring time into it, you need to use a dimensional signature, wherein one number represents dimensions that square to a positive number, another represents dimensions that square to a negative number, and another represents dimensions that square to zero.
A video is either {2,1,0}-D or {1,2,0}-D, depending on the mathematical sign convention you chose for your spacelike dimensions.
When people use a single number, they invariably mean spacelike dimensions, as null dimensions and multiple timelike dimensions tend to give people the screaming jibblies when they try to visualize them.
