If the skybox is the "top" cube, how can you climb "down" into it? Unless you''re using personal gravity, which would preclude any cube being on top, there wouldn''t be a cube above the skybox in the tessaract, just as no face is above the top of a cube.

What kind of system are you using for gravity in this world? Will it be 3D gravity affecting the 3D surface of the hypercube, or will it be 4D gravity affecting the whole thing, or will it be 3D gravity only affecting the player? None of the above?

The skybox is the center of the hypercube, right? Anyway, great thread! We need more thinkers like you in the industry, OrigamiMan.

I dont know if this was said, i dont have time to read it all, its so damn lonf, but...Have you read Ender''s Game? you could put puzzels like the Giant''s Drink in some, where you put others like End of the World puzzel in others, and so on and so forth. Just an idea, i dont know if its good or not.

thanks, Naaga :D

alright, time to go back to the 2D analogy. Here is a big box :D

      ___________________     /                  /|    /|     _____       / |   / |    /____/      /  |  /  |               /   | /__________________/    ||    |              |    ||    |              |    ||    |              |    ||    |______________|____||    /              |    /|   /       O       |   /|  /      []\_      |  /| /        []       | /|/_________LL_______|/  

..and a 2D person in the front room. (with a backpack because it made the art easier). Now, as he moves about, he should never feel a 'change' in gravity. So long as he walks around the four outside faces, gravity will remain consistent upon returning to each room. He can see the 'hole' in the sky from any room, and 'above' that, the opposite room upside down. (Just think about unfolding it) Now, say he moves to the right most face, then goes through the floor. His 'down' stays constant, so in our model, his feet would be pointed left and the left side would be the floor of the bottom face. If he walks out of the room via the 'wall' on his right, he will end up walking on the left wall of the room in which he started. Now, start over agtain. Say that he is upright in any of the outside 4 faces. Climbing through the floor lands him in the bottom face. If he goes through 'his' floor there, he will enter one of the outside faces upside down, making it's ceiling his floor. Except there is no ceiling. So he falls into the sky and escapes via the 'hole':D

[edited by - origamiman64 on December 8, 2003 11:25:29 PM]

Betrayer of Code, you posted while I was I have not read that... can you describe some of the puzzles?

I've been thinking about the vertex puzzle idea... and I realized that a sphere built into the 'corner' would actually be exactly half the size of a normal sphere. Still trying to figure out how it would need to be divied up to rotate pieces of...

[edited by - origamiman64 on December 9, 2003 11:15:06 PM]

Wait... Half the size? Hmm... I think you''re right. Wierd.

it seems to me that there are two ways of doing the "gravity" system. Relative to the tesseract or relative to the character.

What OrigamiMan describes is relative to the character. If you go around a vertex, you''re personal gravity rotates 90 degrees. So if that backpacker climbed down into the "bottom" of the cube and then turned and walked out, he would see a cliff where once he saw the ground, and if he jumped off, he would "fall" around the cube forever. That would be rough, and so I think that personal gravity is best applied to interior environments.

Gravity relative to the tesseract, though, would mean that everything would be drawn toward the center of the bottom square in the backpacker''s cube, and pushed away from the portal in the center of the top square. He could still trek across the four side squares, and if he climbed down that ladder and made a turn, he''d feel as though he was laying down, and have to climb out of the bottom square. If makes for better outdoor environments, since the sky is never a bottomless hole, but it precludes some of the more clever puzzles that 4-space could make possible.

After all, what could be more fun than getting a rock, tying a rope to it, then climbing a few sets of stairs, grabbing the rope off of the ceiling, and carrying the rock around like a helium ballon? Sweet.

But in the end, one must be chosen, and the other left behind. I think that game design will decide this one. Heck, you might even want to make two tesseracts in the same game. One could be a constant-gravity tesseract in which you find the temple (folded out of 3-space to hide it, for instance) and the other a smaller, variable-gravity tesseract inside the temple, with some more mysterious significance.

Man, this is such a cool idea. You rock, OrigamiMan64!

I don''t want to be the unhelpful poster, but debugging is gonna be stressful...B-)

You could probably put together a quick (small) hypercube to play with using Crystal Space - Open Source 3D engine. It works based on convex sectors with portals between them - so you only need to stick the faces of the cubes to each other with appropriate portals to make your tesseract. It renders by rendering the walls of the current sector, then any objects within the current sector using a z-buffer. Portals are treated like any texture, so can be attached to walls or to objects within a sector, but when a portal comes up to be rendered, the engine recursively renders the sector visible through the portal, then sticks a (transparent) texture over the top. You''d probably still want some obstacles to control the recursion, but demos have been made with rooms which just cycle a small cube to infinity (with some slowdown on a PIII)

As to the gravity issue, the simplest solution (apart from no gravity) I can think of is to just give each object its own gravity vector, which then gets taken with it through all its travels.

Sounds good, rmsgrey. If we were working with cubic cells, and had the entire side designated as a "portal", would it cause any trouble?