I was thinking about this the other day and I wondered about how many dimensions you could put in a game before it becomes too complicated. The standard three dimensions are length,width and height. This is what the user sees. So the limit is 3 to the user. What if there are more dimension actually in the game logic like: time,magic or something else. I was wondering about the affect that this would have on the game and whether anything new and innovative would come out of having something like 5 dimensions in a game and only objects of similar dimensions could affect each other. What do you think should be the limit of 'dimensions'in a computer game?

If I remember correctly, there is a blinx game on the x-box where you can manipulate time (4th dimension?). And Prey has something similar going on with dimensions, don't know exactly.. So I have no idea how many dimensions you could put in a game, but I do know that it IS an option, and it can be a really cool/important feature of the game =]

You could even have something visual in more than three dimensions. If you convert it to be displayed in three dimensions, it might look a bit funny though. Just grab a decent math book, and you'll find something about coordinates in the eigth dimension or so ;)

Check this out.

Its a 4d rubix cube. There is also a link to a 5d version on the site.

Not so easy to get your head around though :)

//Emil

There exist acceleration structures in Ray Tracing with >3 dimensions (e.g. a 3d-space + 1d-time kd-tree, and I've glimpsed on a 5d kd-tree some time ago, and I've heard of (afair) 6d years ago on flipcode, and in maths and thus math-programming (maybe), there are those infernal Sedenions).

sorry, you were asking on 3+ dimensions in gaming, am spamming to much :(

What do you mean by a "dimension"? Mathematically speaking, HP, MP, XP, and skill levels are all extra dimensions.

even the color on the screen and the game time are dimensions.

Super Mario Brothers is truely a 3-d game due to a time element. If none of the enemies moved, then it could be considered 2-d.

i think they decided that the 4-d in gaming was complex shadowing .. because they have no hieght or would that be comsidered 2d... all i know is that they have a 4d

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Original post by cannonicus Check this out. Its a 4d rubix cube. There is also a link to a 5d version on the site. Not so easy to get your head around though :) //Emil

That picture doesnt look right( http://www.superliminal.com/cube/cube.gif ). Shouldnt th 4D rubik have each of the 6 lobes be its own rubics cube (dif color on each face) and to solve it you have to get solid color on each face of the super cube (and probably not have a center cube....) ?????

There are four-dimensional structures that the mathologists around here can describe far better than I can. A few years ago there were a couple sweet threads here and in the math forum about tesserae in games, and we talked a little bit about 4-D physical worlds being viewed with a 3-D presentation. Stories like Heinlein's "And he Built a Crooked House" and "The Boy Who Reversed Himself" do a good job of describing what it would be like to be a person with 3D perception in a 4D universe. Heinlein's story is about a 3D house that's folded up to be the surface of a tesseract, with rooms connected in seemingly impossible (but mathematically accurate) ways. TBWRH shows a universe of stacked realms, where our own 3D universe exists on the surface of a 4D object in the 4D universe, and somewhere in our world (a dude's basement, actually) there's an orb that is the entire 2D universe bent into a sphere.

With the fanciness that the Steam engine shows off in Portal, I'll bet you could make a Half-Life deathmatch map that's a believable approximation of the 3D surface of a 4D object.