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Hypercube

Started by November 26, 2003 12:15 PM
113 comments, last by OrigamiMan64 20 years, 11 months ago
BTW, there is a way to make this game 5D: 10 hypercubic faces. they would be joined in the same way that we would join this hypercube to the real world, via little cubic holes in the center of rooms. However, this leads to 80 3D 'edges' of the 5D cube, and that becomes too large to be much more than a maze.

[edited by - origamiman64 on December 7, 2003 10:59:08 PM]
With Bryce, you would have to be clever. If you have walls with small spaces, you render the scene you would see through the space seperately, then include part of it as a 2D picture in the space in a different scene.

I wish my coding abailites were up to making this. It seems that if you could render a basic 3D FPV engine, then extrapolating it to 4D wouldn''t be too hard...
------------------------------------------------Don't give me strength until I'm weak,Don't let me wake until I dream,But let me thirst until I drink from the river,not from a stream. - Mortal
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I think that I should be able to create the hypercube relatively easily... I just need to cut through some cubes and piece them together each frame. Something like this:
_______________________________________\XXXXXX\# XXXXXXXXX ./XXXXXX/ XXXXXXX/#.\XXXXX\# XXXXXXXXX ./XXXXX/# XXXXX/###..\XXXXX\ XXXXXXXXX /XXXXX/## XXX/#####...\XXXX\ XXXXXXXXX /XXXX/### X/#######....\XXXX\XXXXXXXXX/XXXX/####/#########~~~~~\### ~~~~~~~~~ .../~~~~~ XXXXXXXXX~~~~~~\## ~~~~~~~~~ ../~~~~~~ XXXXXXXX/~~~~~~~\# ~~~~~~~~~ ./~~~~~~~ XXXXX/~~~~~~~~~~~\ ~~~~~~~~~ /~~~~~~~~ XX/~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\~~~~~~~~~/~~~~~~~~~/~~~~~~~~~#########           ......... XXXXXXXXX#########           ......... XXXXXXXXX#########           ......... XXXXXXXXX#########           ......... XXXXXXXXX#########_____O_____........._XXXXXXXXX  


alright, I admit its yucky looking... but thats only if there are very few things in the cubes to obstruct the view.

[edited by - origamiman64 on December 8, 2003 11:32:36 AM]
Well I know you have tried to discourage the insanity idea because the hypercube is extremely ordered and what not, but the whole time I''ve been reading this thread I''ve had one thought in my head. Have you ever seen the movie "Monkeybone", I admit it is not the best movie ever, but the concept is really great. The protagonist is in a coma from some accident (car accident whatever really) but he''s suffering from amnesia internally and all his memories are scattered across his mental landscape (the hypercube) and he must explore his mental landscape and get his memories back before he can come out of his coma.

Just my 2 cents,
The_Ethernopian
I've tried to program a quick hypercube navigation demo and i'd have to say im stumped. How are you planning on doing this? I was thinking of having a tree of all the "rooms" and for every "connection" between rooms have a matrix and say the room you are in is the identity and multiply that matricies as you move to rendering the other rooms, when you leave the room save the matrix of that room to be multiplied again the next time that room is adjacent to yours. Huh? haha. Is anyone working on even some base code?

edit:

I think this game would be sweet if it was a multiplayer FPS. How cool would that be to run around a paint ball style arena of rooms, and depending on the order your, your enemys end up on adjacent walls with differnt gravity.

Some levels could have glass walls deviding the room, so you can see your enemys on the ceiling but you can't hit them until you get to the same orientation as them. But other rooms it would be cool to shoot someone on the ceiling and see them fall up, blood spraying "up" out of they're neck falling back to the ceiling but if it came in contact with you it would stain your clothes.

[edited by - honayboyz on December 8, 2003 2:19:27 PM]
First off, there needs to be a maximum viewing distance, which I think should be about three room lengths, so that you can just see to the ''floor'' of the room above you. Each room has 6 specific rooms adjacent to it. Each of these has 6 rooms adjacent. Thus, my method would be to create six separate ''worlds'' so to speak, and then render only parts of each that are visible through the face required for entry from the current cube. You consider each face in your room to be a separate ''screen'', so to speak. This can act recursively to give you as much viewing depth as you like, but the important thing is starting with the farthest cubes and working inward.
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I''ll have to take your word for it on the coding, but I expect you''ll figure somthing out that works. Will that sort of thing kill the frame rate?

As to puzzles, I think the best puzzels will be the ones that take place at vertices. You could have tetrahedrons with all perpendicular sides, and rotate things by pushing them around the vertex. That would be sweet. Remember in "Contact", when the 2D plans were incoherent until someone discovered that the three semicircular images in the corners of three of the pages matched up when those pages were the sides of a cube? You could get four items that featured three perpendicular "legs", and have to join them together to form an item. You can never get all the little pieces to fit in 3D, but if you take them to a vertex, you can match them up in folded space. Could rock.

I definitely think that at least one of the cubes should be a network of tunnels, the "bottom" cube, with a gravity-well center. That way, you''d be able to "fall" into the bottom of the world, and just hang there. Of course you''d need some way to get out. Or maybe that could be an endgame scenario, with your ancient corpse/mummy/skeleton suspended in the void.

Perhaps the "top" cube could feature a series of platforms and weaker gravity (since you''re at maximum distance from the gravitic center), so you could "jump" straight up, do a half-somersault, land on the "ceiling", and climb back down on the other side of the hypercube. Sweet.
I love the idea for the rotating vertex puzzles... these could perhaps be used as combination locks that open doors to other cubes.

As for gravity, I have thought a good deal about the problem of having acurate physical gravity... the problem is that gravity is caused by massive objects, and the only place there is really room for these is outside of the cube, so they would cause you to fall ''out'' all the time. Making gravity a property of individual objects would allow for (IMO) more interesting topilogical uses of the hypercube. Gravity never changes relative to you, so if you enter the bottom cube, the way in which you exit it determines your orientation when you re-enter the ''regular'' rooms. Thus, only by getting into the undercube can you walk on walls... or by climbing all the way down, fall into the sky.
Of course. If would be silly to suppose that gravity would be limited to the 3D surface of the hypercube. Hmm... That complicates matters. Personal gravity is naturally an equally absurd concept, physically, but it lends itself to this application very well, and would certainly contribute to the whimsy of the universe. Of course, that largely precludes the idea of a skybox, and requires that the world be confined indoors, where there will always be six solid "floors" on which to walk. Or perhaps a window could become a bottomless chasm. Hrm. Time to do a little more noodling.
actually, it amplifies the purpose of the skybox... because the ''hole'' or ''fold'' that is the exit is in the center of the sky box, so the only way out is to go through the floor of one of the six ''normal'' cubes, climb straight down to the oposite side, and jump out, falling into the sky, which is the exit.

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