Orthogonal - game based on Greg Egan's novel

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Orthogonal - game based on Greg Egan's novel

Postby Mrrl » Fri Sep 26, 2014 9:25 am

Hi all,
meet another game that may be called multidimensional: https://www.dropbox.com/s/azieu9cglbv2c ... e.exe?dl=0
You are in the ship that flies across the space-time shaped as 4-dimensional sphere. There are some stars in the space, their trajectories are big circles in this sphere. Photons emitted by stars are also travel by big circles, and if trajectory of some photon passes by your position, you see the light - but only when the angle between you current direction and photon's direction is between 27 and 54 degrees (you will see color from red to violet depending on the angle). Every star emits light in all directions of its front 4D hemisphere. You task is to hunt every star in the Universe: when you fly close enough to the star (1/2500 of Universe radius), screen blinks in red and star is being removed from the Universe.
At start you get the special arrangement of stasr: there are 40 stars that are moving along projections of edges of augmented 5-D cube. Stars are "double-sided": they emit photons both forward and backward in time. If you want another configuration, you may select number of "clusters" and stars in cluster. Cluster is the set of stars that travel in the narrow band in the space-time, so they are always not far from each other (but their relative position is permanently changing). After that click "Start"/"Restart" button and you will get new stars configuration.
All ship control is by keyboard. Use E/Q to accelerate forward/backward, ASDW for side accelerations, arrow keys to change ship's orientation (to look around). "Ship Turn Time" box controls acceleration value (it shows time required for full 360-deg turn of the ship) and "Universe Size" it the time required for the ship to return to the same point of space-time without acceleration.
Remember that space-time has Riemannian metric!
Program requires .NET 3.5. I hope that it will work under Mono as well.
Mrrl
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Re: Orthogonal - game based on Greg Egan's novel

Postby Secret » Thu Oct 02, 2014 12:48 pm

I still don't get it

I tried orient my ship so that it is head on at one of the photons (and saw it pass through me at the centre) but after travelling some time I still hit no star

And then there's this angle which I have no idea how to interpret
Where's the star as viewed form this angle?
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Secret
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Re: Orthogonal - game based on Greg Egan's novel

Postby Mrrl » Thu Oct 02, 2014 2:24 pm

Now star is far on the right. Start turn right (by D key), soon you'll see that trace is reduced almost to the point (better to keep it as short line to see colors). Use arrow keys to move star to the center of screen, then carefully use E key to increase speed in the direction of the star. Keep star on the edge of blue/violet color: if you fly too fast, star will disappear in the ultraviolet area. When you see that star becomes brighter/larger, start slow down (by Q key). It's difficult: you have about 5 seconds to change speed from "full forward" to "full back". Use arrows to keep star in the center and ASDW keys to align speed with it (to keep it as the point).
It took 5 attempts for me to catch the star. Video of hunting is here: https://yadi.sk/i/sYdTg28HbnFGe
Mrrl
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Re: Orthogonal - game based on Greg Egan's novel

Postby Mrrl » Thu Oct 02, 2014 6:34 pm

Also, I suggest to set Ship Turn Time to 20 sec (and Universe size to 40-60 sec). It will make the final stage of hunting more easy.
And if you can't find the star at all you can turn on time Reverse camera - it will show photons arriving from the future (from time-reverse stars). Traces of these stars have slightly different behavior, but it's more difficult to lose them.
Mrrl
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