Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/07/non-euclidean-game-worlds.html
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A couple of preexisting art comes to mind.
The engine of Duke Nukem 3d was able to stitch euclidian subspaces that would normally overlap. There were two secret levels, one with 4 different rooms in the same space depending on the direction you entered from, and one with a circular corridor with a total angle of 720 degrees.
Antichamber had a couple of similar tricks as well, including a 3-sided room.
Also, HyperRogue plays in a true hyperbolic 2D plane, which is tiled with heptagons instead of hexagons.
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Neat concept, great demo, and excellent explanation of potential applications.
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House of Leaves: the video game
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I wonder if the “four-room house that only has three rooms” trick would fall apart if the modeling and rendering was more sophisticated. Hell, just stick a different sculpture in the center of each and see what your brain does. Or upgrade to dramatically different decor (this room is the library, this room is the Clock Collection, this room is the lair of the creepy insect broodqueen), and have windows showing some outdoors setting.
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Hm… needs more tentacles
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The excellent game Antichamber already has a number of puzzles reminiscent of these. [oops I was too slow mentioning]
I talked to the lead developer at Second Life about using hyperbolic geometry to pack more space into less distance using hyperbolic geometry, back during SL’s heyday. The issue was that lots of people were claiming territory, and on the one hand it’s tiresome to take all day to walk from one place to another, but on the other it breaks immersion to just let people teleport around all over. On a sufficiently hyperbolic space, though, the area contained with a given radius r is much more than pi r^2 (just as on a sphere it’s less than pi r^2), so you can get to lots of stuff without walking that far. We never made a mockup like this though.
As the OP video explains, it works by chaining a bunch of portals together. For a more continuous picture of what it’s like to move in hyperbolic space, check out the classic Not Knot.
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ZPC did this too, but now I can’t remember the precise details.
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Hunt the Wampus was non-Euclidean, IIRC
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Talk about thinking outside the box.
Of course with this engine, once you go inside the box you probably can’t think at all, or you grow two brains, or something else weird happens.
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It feels like a lot of early (late 80’s,90’s) computer games accidently did this…
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They all still do. It’s rare for an environment to be rendered to the same scale inside and out. What looks good as an exterior is way too small to interact with inside. You need room for cameras to swing around, and your character is a giant pill shaped blob moving in clumsy fashion with fixed animation curves and low precision physics. This means interior spaces have to be huge to feel good.
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ZPC? Zero Population Count with art by BRUTE! ?
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The tunnels feel a bit like Portal considering the camera trick - only it takes a bit to get through them.
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Yeah, loved that game.
Holy crap - I thought I was the only who who played it. I still have the box etc somewhere.
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I remember building custom levels for Descent back in the mid 90’s and if you did things wrong you would get the short box, long hallway effect. Or you could build levels that way, with essentially a room in a room, or a door to a place that doesn’t appear to exist on the outside.
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But they do it with teleporting. The point of this is you just walk between them.
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