Programming Contest that's begging for 4D games...

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Programming Contest that's begging for 4D games...

Postby pat » Fri Mar 03, 2006 8:58 am

GameDev.net is having a contest called "Seeing Double".

It's a short turn-around contest. Entries are due mid-March.

Here's the description:
Create a game prototype based around two simultaneous views of the game world. These could be as simple as two simultaneous camera angles (forwards and backwards, side and top, etc), or could look at presenting different families of information about the game world, such as an infra-red or x-ray view, visualisation of sound or smell, or even things entirely specific to a fictional game world. The views do not have to be equal sizes, but both views should be presented to the player at the same time throughout gameplay, and the game design should favour a player who will make use of both displays equally (so both views must be equally useful - a minimap in the corner of a regular game display is probably not sufficient). Views should be primarily graphical; text is permitted provided it is not over-used (i.e. a simple text listing of health and position of monsters in the level will not be acceptable).


There are plenty of extra-dimensional things that require more than one view. So, have at it.

I got started on an entry today. I'll post the game and screenshots here at a later time.
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Postby pat » Mon Mar 06, 2006 8:43 pm

Here's a very preliminary movie of a ship rotating. The ship is made of two distorted hypercubes (take a hypercube and pull on the corners). The upper view is the three-space perpendicular to the z-axis with the x-axis into the screen, the y-axis to the right, and the w-axis up. The lower view is the three-space perpendicular to the y-axis with the x-axis into the screen, the z-axis to the right, and the w-axis up.
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Postby pat » Wed Mar 08, 2006 7:24 pm

Here's my first movie with terrain

The terrain was created with the geometry of a 3D flat torus. I used a Voronoi region technique to determine the height at each lattice point. The lattice is 100x100x100.

The Voronoi region technique is... you randomly generate n control points (in my case, I did 10 points). Then, for each lattice point, you find the two closest control points. You subtract the distance from the closer from the distance from the farther to get a height. Then, you scale that height a bit.

For this movie, I used distance = max( |x1-x2|, |y1-y2|, |z1-z2| ). I also moved everything that was over 20units high up an extra 15 units to really separate the ground from the rest, but I'll probably tweak all of that in the coming days.

Next up is revamping the motion controls...
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Postby Nick » Thu Apr 20, 2006 11:04 pm

I dont get the one with the terrain... is the top the x, y, and z view and the bottom the w and x view, or what?
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Postby pat » Thu Apr 20, 2006 11:28 pm

The top view is x-forward, y-right, w-up.
The bottom view is x-forward, z-right, w-up.

You only get one forward. Gravity only gets one up (or down). But, you get two rights... 8^)

The 3D analogy would be that you're at the origin. The top screen is the x-y plane. The bottom screen is the x-z plane. x is forward, y is right, z is your other right. Of course, with this 3D analogy, I've run out of directions for gravity. *shrug*

Still, the 3D analogy gives you a little sense of what kind of blind spots you've got.

I suppose that I should update what went on with the contest. Pretty much, right after I got the whole zooming around the terrain thing working and smooth and such, I got horribly ill. The programming contest was about 16 days. I was "do-nothing" sick for the 10 days starting around day 7. So, I didn't get much further than what you've seen here. 8^(
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