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KaVir · 07-04-2003, 09:07 AM

I was talking to a friend about first-person shooters recently, and their progress from 2D to 3D over the years. I half-jokingly made a comment about the next generation being 4D. He responded along the lines of "Yeah, except that there's no way to represent it", to which I answered "Characters in the game could leave a blurred trail after themselves, representing time, and you could kill someone by shooting their blur - ie, shooting where they used to be".

However it also got me thinking about other possibilities. I know I've discussed in the past the idea of having multiple parallel planes of existence effectively in the same place (in fact I implement a vague simulation of such on the old GW - ie the shadowplane). But that seems to barely scratch the surface of the possibilities available.

I've recently been reading the Amber novels by Roger Zelazny. For those who haven't read them, one of the concepts of the book is that Amber represents the "real world" of sorts (actually there are also the Chaos courts, but I'll keep it simple for the purposes of this post). However Amber also casts infinate "shadows" - other worlds which become more and more different the further away from Amber they are.

My current project includes an extremely world, which (because of it's size) is pseudo-randomly generated. I currently have it working in only two dimensions, but will soon be adding the third, and while thinking about today I thought "why not add a fourth?". Just as different characters have different reaches (it's coordinate based) which allow them to hit people within a certain range, so the same could apply to crossing over dimensions. A wraith might exist in a slightly different dimension but be able to reach across, thus hurting regular humans who couldn't hit back - unless they had (say) a magic sword, which would extend into the wraith's dimension. Different creatures might appear differently depending on their dimension offset, too - so a werebeast might "change form" by effectively slipping into a different (but nearby) dimension, which would then make them appear as a werewolf in the "main" dimension.

I pretty much dismissed that idea as not really fitting the mud I'm working on, but going back to the Amber it did make me think a bit about how the people travel. The royalty of Amber are able to travel through the shadow worlds by focusing on a feature of the world around them and changing it (in fact, they shift to another shadow world which is more like the one they envision). They do this a bit at a time until eventually they're at the place they want to be.

Well, in a pseudo-randomly generated world like the one I'm developing it might well be possible to apply a similar concept. By allowing each character to apply their own offsets to the various seeds used to generate the world, it would be possible to let people effectively shift the world around them. But by storing these offsets on each character, it would ensure that the world only changed for that character. Thus you could focus on the nearby forest and change it into a plain, turn the city into a small village, make an island rise up out of the ocean - but you'd effectively be in a different world to the rest of the players. Giving directions to other players would then become more complex than just "go north to the forest, then east to the side of the ocean" - you'd have to say things like "go over the river towards the forest, then change the forest into a desert, focus on making the mobs smaller and the sun larger", etc.

I'm still really mulling over this idea, but I think it could have some definite possibilities. I'd be interested to hear any thoughts anyone else has on the matter.

07-04-2003, 09:07 AM	#1
KaVir Legend Join Date: Apr 2002 Name: Richard Home MUD: God Wars II Posts: 2,052	I was talking to a friend about first-person shooters recently, and their progress from 2D to 3D over the years. I half-jokingly made a comment about the next generation being 4D. He responded along the lines of "Yeah, except that there's no way to represent it", to which I answered "Characters in the game could leave a blurred trail after themselves, representing time, and you could kill someone by shooting their blur - ie, shooting where they used to be". However it also got me thinking about other possibilities. I know I've discussed in the past the idea of having multiple parallel planes of existence effectively in the same place (in fact I implement a vague simulation of such on the old GW - ie the shadowplane). But that seems to barely scratch the surface of the possibilities available. I've recently been reading the Amber novels by Roger Zelazny. For those who haven't read them, one of the concepts of the book is that Amber represents the "real world" of sorts (actually there are also the Chaos courts, but I'll keep it simple for the purposes of this post). However Amber also casts infinate "shadows" - other worlds which become more and more different the further away from Amber they are. My current project includes an extremely world, which (because of it's size) is pseudo-randomly generated. I currently have it working in only two dimensions, but will soon be adding the third, and while thinking about today I thought "why not add a fourth?". Just as different characters have different reaches (it's coordinate based) which allow them to hit people within a certain range, so the same could apply to crossing over dimensions. A wraith might exist in a slightly different dimension but be able to reach across, thus hurting regular humans who couldn't hit back - unless they had (say) a magic sword, which would extend into the wraith's dimension. Different creatures might appear differently depending on their dimension offset, too - so a werebeast might "change form" by effectively slipping into a different (but nearby) dimension, which would then make them appear as a werewolf in the "main" dimension. I pretty much dismissed that idea as not really fitting the mud I'm working on, but going back to the Amber it did make me think a bit about how the people travel. The royalty of Amber are able to travel through the shadow worlds by focusing on a feature of the world around them and changing it (in fact, they shift to another shadow world which is more like the one they envision). They do this a bit at a time until eventually they're at the place they want to be. Well, in a pseudo-randomly generated world like the one I'm developing it might well be possible to apply a similar concept. By allowing each character to apply their own offsets to the various seeds used to generate the world, it would be possible to let people effectively shift the world around them. But by storing these offsets on each character, it would ensure that the world only changed for that character. Thus you could focus on the nearby forest and change it into a plain, turn the city into a small village, make an island rise up out of the ocean - but you'd effectively be in a different world to the rest of the players. Giving directions to other players would then become more complex than just "go north to the forest, then east to the side of the ocean" - you'd have to say things like "go over the river towards the forest, then change the forest into a desert, focus on making the mobs smaller and the sun larger", etc. I'm still really mulling over this idea, but I think it could have some definite possibilities. I'd be interested to hear any thoughts anyone else has on the matter.