A 4D video game?

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Started by Legend, Feb 27, 2018, 04:58 AM

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Legend

Worked on this again last night, but i think it's time to put it on the shelf until I'm ready to dedicate a lot of time with it. The 4D engine is all set up and is ready to have a game built using it.


Graphics are currently way too slow and my test scene runs at 20 fps (without shadows). I'll need to really optimize the shader and use some hacks to get it running faster. Also playing the game in VR or at the very least in 3D is pretty important so increasing performance is my number 1 concern.

Rotations are working too. 4D is hard to think about because there are just so many ways to rotate and so few online articles giving specifics. I found a method to rotate a point by a 4D rotation and used that to engineer all the other functions a game needs.

With that I also set up a very basic physics engine. It is not even close to being capable of calculating true physics, but it's enough to keep objects from falling through the ground. All of my functions are set up using double precision floats since 4D geometry has more room for errors to build up.

Playing in 4D is interesting. Left right, up down, and forward backward quickly map to your brain. Ana and kata kinda map too, but it's just a game mechanic you get used to. Rotations are similar but take more time to adjust to. Ana and kata rotations are really confusing and hard to understand. Things move around the screen in a predictable way but the shape objects make as they rotate feels random.


So the short of it is that I'm really excited by this and it's definitly possible, both to create and to play. I'm suprised how quickly my brain was adapting to 4D geometry so maybe I'll need a more complex game to go with it.