alt Hacker News4D Doom
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It's cool and all and I typically enjoy lowres renditions... unless, it actually impacts gameplay.
Since the gameplay is so much about 4D, clarity in what you see becomes more important and the extremely low resolution actually impairs the player rather than serve a positive (typically 'leaves more to the imagination').
It wouldn't take much of an effort to double or triple the resolution which I think would help the gameplay.
I read a novel when I was 14 or so who's premise is all about creatures inhabiting higher-dimensional space called "The Boy Who Reversed Himself" by William Sleator. I loved Sleator's books, they introduced me to really interesting concepts from theoretical physics as a youngun. If you find 4D Doom intriguing, I encourage you to borrow the book from your favorite ebook library, it's a quick fun read (at least, I remember it that way).
I just watched the associated dev video And if I understand it, what the author is doing is kind of interesting.
The sensor to see a 3d scene is 2d(eye or camera). What is being done here is simulating a 3d sensor(for a 4d world) then we are looking at this 3d sensor using our 2d sensors (eyes). I don't know if this is the common way of rendering these 4d physics simulations. But it is the first I have heard it described this way. It is also why the narrative of the game focuses on eyes, because that is what it is doing.
I feel like now that I'm older, my brain just can't fully understand it say as quickly if I were younger. Makes me wonder if younger more plastic brains can adjust to having to juggle more dimensions than crochety old ones like mine with very rigid 3D grooves baked in. Or brains from other animals.
I guess taken to the logical extreme, what does the brain of someone/thing that's good at playing this (or any game of N dimensions) look like?
I find it fascinating that it turns into a "descent like" (6dof fps) when using the ability to "peek" the 4th dimension.
It's not actually Doom, but a Doom-like.
If you're on firefox, go to about:config and set dom.webgpu.enabled to "true".
I found 4D Golf a great game to explore higher dimensional space.
Why does it require WebGPU when it looks like something that would run fine in software on a 386?
The problem with these attempts always seems to be that you can see in dimensions 1-3, but never in dimension 4, so any movement or exploration along that axis is always just blind fumbling. The extra dimension is not equivalent to the others
The only answer would seem to be an extra axis of rotation, but (a) doesnt work well with existing input methods, and (b) would be even more of a brain-breaker
His dev log linked from GitHub is really neat. Mind-bending stuff.
Shameless plug: Horizon (Before the name got saturated), a 4D third-person game https://youtu.be/R6qTi3TCM2U
this is visually interesting, but crucially it's also actually fun to play.
i managed to kill three enemies before succumbing to my fate
This is an awesome experience. Very useful tool to get exposure to thinking in "higher" dimensions!
Now waiting since 16 years for the release of Miegakure [1][2][3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miegakure
that was incredibly cool
Ok... he was right. It broke my brain.
The AI generated logo image is a very big put-off.