Devlog #6 - Time and space
Hello guys!
I have to apologize in advance for causing the headache. The thing is complicated because I'm going to be talking about time travel.
We are surrounded by a three-dimensional environment that is easy for us to imagine. In the games themselves, we also often deal with gameplay in two dimensions or a various combination of both. Four-dimensional games are much less common. The very idea of figuring out how the world should be viewed in such a four-dimensional world is problematic.
There are 2 most common ways to interpret the fourth dimension as spatial and as temporal.
Spatial / geometric interpretation
There are games, such as Antichamber, which play with the convention of changing space. In the game, it may turn out that there may be something completely new behind the corner from which we came, and the stairs leading up lead us to the floor from which we started.
To understand this concept easily, you can imagine a flat space, a table or a piece of paper with a ball suddenly appearing on it. When the ball touches the surface, it is visible as a point in the two-dimensional world that is the surface of the table. As the ball sinks, it becomes a circle of increasing circumference, reaches its maximum size in the center, and then shrinks.
Flatland: The Movie!
There is a theory that assumes that our universe is just a three-dimensional bubble (ball) passing through the surface of time (table). The point of contact is considered a big bang while the fact that the universe is expanding means that we are still in the first half of the bubble. When we reach a certain edge, the universe will shrink.
Time interpretation
Another type of games are those that view the fourth dimension as having fun with the times. "Timelie" is an example of a puzzle that neatly hides the fact that it is a turn-based game based on a grid, under appropriately designed movement animations and precisely the time shifting mechanics. In this game, whenever our heroine is about to get hurt, time stops and we can rewind the game to the point where everything was fine. The time backward actually replaces what the undo-last-step mechanic is found in a lot of puzzle games, especially brain teasers. The difference between "Timelie" and other puzzles is that when we start to move back, our character does not jump to the previous step, teleporting to the previous field, but is smoothly transferred.
Reversing mechanics
The computer, like people, cannot go back in time, so game developers have to do what they always do, that is, deceive the player by selling him a "fairy tale" that what he sees is just turning back time.
What game developers do is employ a secret technique known in most software by the shortcut Ctrl + Z.
How is such Ctrl + Z constructed? For example, let's take a graphics program.
When we draw a straight line, we do not save the entire previous image and the "after change" image.
The program only saves the colors of pixels that have changed. After all 10 lines were drawn, of course, we wouldn't be able to jump straight to the picture before drawing the lines. We would have to step back line by line to reveal the original drawing, with CTRL + Z used 10 times.
Why can't we save all ten versions of the image and what it looked like at the beginning? The problem is the amount of available memory on the computer. A single FULL HD image (1920x1080 pixels) may take up to about 150 KB to 1 MB, depending on the storage method. On the other hand, information about changes from a dozen bytes to, of course, in some extreme situations, the same as the image, but usually several dozen bytes or 1 KB. How easy it can be counted is a few hundred or several thousand times less occupied space.
Since our real time and time in the game are always moving forward, what actually happens when turning back time is pasting the last steps. It is the same as going backwards parroting all our movements from the end.
1.Beginning of Fraud:
We also don't save the entire game in games. Since we cannot go back in time all hundreds or thousands of objects that are around the player, we choose only those for which it is important. These are usually all characters, doors, moving platforms, items or elevators. Worse, if the game contains destruction of the environment and particles splashing in all directions. What we will need is the position and rotation of the elements in the world. With characters, there is still a need to remember what animation they are playing and information such as when he shot.
2. Continuation of the fraud:
Sampling is another major segment of operation of such a system. The whole thing is how often we should save the player's position. There are also 2 approaches to the topic here. The first is to choose a fixed amount of time, which is the saved position and the other things mentioned above, but for the sake of simplicity I will call it the position. Such a state should, at best, save as often as the frames on the screen are changed, i.e. the famous 30 and 60 FPS, although many people also like to set as much as the factory gave. In practice, we don't need that much accuracy and we can save every other frame or some other constant amount. The second way is to save only the changes. So when the character is only standing, the game saves the moment when we did nothing and waits for our action, and when we move, as in the previous case, from time to time what we do is recorded. In the second case, it is also important to save the time between successive saved changes, so that the game knows how to recreate them in the process of undoing.
3. Finalizing the Fraud:
You can add some graphic effects during the act of undoing, such as: distortions, noise, and give the appropriate sound to suggest that time is moving backwards.
Paradoxes
Perhaps the most popular paradox of time travel is that of the movie Terminator (1984), which involves going back in time to kill someone's ancestor so that a person cannot be born.
In "Split" there is a mechanic of putting up your holographic copies. You can use them as the proverbial paperweight. However, in addition to that, they have the ability to repeat the movement after us.
We'll start with something simple, which is to leave the clone behind and go back in time so that it never existed.
Well, this is the next step, setting up clone A, taking a few steps, going back in time so that the clone never exists, but releasing a new clone B that will recreate our path. This will make our new B clone set that previous A clone.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Well, let's complicate it more :) and let's release more moving clones that make up other clones.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
These and many other combinations should be anticipated and handled somehow by the game.
* At the end, a task for those willing with an asterisk. What's going on in this chart?
We would also like to invite everyone to our Discord where we will be happy to answer all your questions about the current work - DISCORD
I have to apologize in advance for causing the headache. The thing is complicated because I'm going to be talking about time travel.
We are surrounded by a three-dimensional environment that is easy for us to imagine. In the games themselves, we also often deal with gameplay in two dimensions or a various combination of both. Four-dimensional games are much less common. The very idea of figuring out how the world should be viewed in such a four-dimensional world is problematic.
There are 2 most common ways to interpret the fourth dimension as spatial and as temporal.
Spatial / geometric interpretation
There are games, such as Antichamber, which play with the convention of changing space. In the game, it may turn out that there may be something completely new behind the corner from which we came, and the stairs leading up lead us to the floor from which we started.
To understand this concept easily, you can imagine a flat space, a table or a piece of paper with a ball suddenly appearing on it. When the ball touches the surface, it is visible as a point in the two-dimensional world that is the surface of the table. As the ball sinks, it becomes a circle of increasing circumference, reaches its maximum size in the center, and then shrinks.
Flatland: The Movie!
There is a theory that assumes that our universe is just a three-dimensional bubble (ball) passing through the surface of time (table). The point of contact is considered a big bang while the fact that the universe is expanding means that we are still in the first half of the bubble. When we reach a certain edge, the universe will shrink.
Time interpretation
Another type of games are those that view the fourth dimension as having fun with the times. "Timelie" is an example of a puzzle that neatly hides the fact that it is a turn-based game based on a grid, under appropriately designed movement animations and precisely the time shifting mechanics. In this game, whenever our heroine is about to get hurt, time stops and we can rewind the game to the point where everything was fine. The time backward actually replaces what the undo-last-step mechanic is found in a lot of puzzle games, especially brain teasers. The difference between "Timelie" and other puzzles is that when we start to move back, our character does not jump to the previous step, teleporting to the previous field, but is smoothly transferred.
Reversing mechanics
The computer, like people, cannot go back in time, so game developers have to do what they always do, that is, deceive the player by selling him a "fairy tale" that what he sees is just turning back time.
What game developers do is employ a secret technique known in most software by the shortcut Ctrl + Z.
How is such Ctrl + Z constructed? For example, let's take a graphics program.
When we draw a straight line, we do not save the entire previous image and the "after change" image.
The program only saves the colors of pixels that have changed. After all 10 lines were drawn, of course, we wouldn't be able to jump straight to the picture before drawing the lines. We would have to step back line by line to reveal the original drawing, with CTRL + Z used 10 times.
Why can't we save all ten versions of the image and what it looked like at the beginning? The problem is the amount of available memory on the computer. A single FULL HD image (1920x1080 pixels) may take up to about 150 KB to 1 MB, depending on the storage method. On the other hand, information about changes from a dozen bytes to, of course, in some extreme situations, the same as the image, but usually several dozen bytes or 1 KB. How easy it can be counted is a few hundred or several thousand times less occupied space.
Since our real time and time in the game are always moving forward, what actually happens when turning back time is pasting the last steps. It is the same as going backwards parroting all our movements from the end.
1.Beginning of Fraud:
We also don't save the entire game in games. Since we cannot go back in time all hundreds or thousands of objects that are around the player, we choose only those for which it is important. These are usually all characters, doors, moving platforms, items or elevators. Worse, if the game contains destruction of the environment and particles splashing in all directions. What we will need is the position and rotation of the elements in the world. With characters, there is still a need to remember what animation they are playing and information such as when he shot.
2. Continuation of the fraud:
Sampling is another major segment of operation of such a system. The whole thing is how often we should save the player's position. There are also 2 approaches to the topic here. The first is to choose a fixed amount of time, which is the saved position and the other things mentioned above, but for the sake of simplicity I will call it the position. Such a state should, at best, save as often as the frames on the screen are changed, i.e. the famous 30 and 60 FPS, although many people also like to set as much as the factory gave. In practice, we don't need that much accuracy and we can save every other frame or some other constant amount. The second way is to save only the changes. So when the character is only standing, the game saves the moment when we did nothing and waits for our action, and when we move, as in the previous case, from time to time what we do is recorded. In the second case, it is also important to save the time between successive saved changes, so that the game knows how to recreate them in the process of undoing.
3. Finalizing the Fraud:
You can add some graphic effects during the act of undoing, such as: distortions, noise, and give the appropriate sound to suggest that time is moving backwards.
Paradoxes
Perhaps the most popular paradox of time travel is that of the movie Terminator (1984), which involves going back in time to kill someone's ancestor so that a person cannot be born.
In "Split" there is a mechanic of putting up your holographic copies. You can use them as the proverbial paperweight. However, in addition to that, they have the ability to repeat the movement after us.
We'll start with something simple, which is to leave the clone behind and go back in time so that it never existed.
Well, this is the next step, setting up clone A, taking a few steps, going back in time so that the clone never exists, but releasing a new clone B that will recreate our path. This will make our new B clone set that previous A clone.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Well, let's complicate it more :) and let's release more moving clones that make up other clones.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
These and many other combinations should be anticipated and handled somehow by the game.
* At the end, a task for those willing with an asterisk. What's going on in this chart?
We would also like to invite everyone to our Discord where we will be happy to answer all your questions about the current work - DISCORD