Relativity the Online Video Game

[arkain101]

Video game with relativity

 

 

___I had an idea going recently about creating a video game, be it for console or for pc online, that displayed the concept of relativity, both as for education and entertainment.

 

___For example; On a console if you are play multiplayer games, sometimes you have up to 4 people all playing on the same tv screen. On this screen we a cross section that devides the screen into 4 squares, one designated for each player.

 

 

Now, if we used this setup and created a game that included special relativity effects, players could see the various dilations from various locations, of various frames!

 

___Yet, on an online pc game there could be thousands of players connected to the same world in a relativistic enviroment.

 

 

___The games purpose would be to teach science in one of the funnest ways possible for kids. Relativity scares average people out the room when they start seeing math equations and the strange concepts in it. Also to experience it for ourselves beyond a boring thought experiment!

 

 

Game Concept:

 

 

___The game concept would need to include space travel of course, but as for the games genre its open field. You could remain on earth all you wanted in the game, however with the opportunity to jump in a rocket that goes to space, not many players would stick around :lol:. The game would be designed around the idea of having a life in space where you could do many things, but be capable to travel the universe.

 

My own thoughts were to create a multi person selective game. That is First person view, outside first person, and other views of choice.

 

___The game would start you on the earth, in year ####. You start out as a character who needs to accomplish a few goals to gain the points/credits to become worthy to get into the main game. You would have choices like, to build your own customized spaceship capable of near the speed of light travel, to save up money to buy your own small ship. To save up money with friends and clans to buy a larger ship. Or to meet friends and join crews of already existing ships and crews that run it. and so forth.

 

___If you wanted to take on the task of building your own ship then it woudl go something liek this.

Eventually you get rewarded for you newbie efforts by doing some test launches into space. You being the Houstin control center, and having control of the rockets destiny :hihi: aim it, put it in orbit. You would have to configure a correct weight setup, and power plant. Or if you wanted to take the easier route, you could earn credits to buy a pre-fabbed vehicle and go through a few simulators untill you feel confident to start up your Lightspeeding space ship and head out into the final frontier!! :hyper: Hoping to god you dont crash it on your take off.

 

___Once in space the real point of the game would come into sight. The average player would not know what to expect about relativity effects :lol:. So your goal is to survive. Alot like the game Ultima Online. You need to find a career that you enjoy to gain wealth and success. These would include finding minning operations on mars or the moon. Engineering space stations. Engineering power mirrors that orbit the sun and direct sun energy to stations and other uses. You could go into reasearch to develope and design better ships and sell those parts to other online players.

 

___Meanwhile, societies amongst the players will form. A software program to build homes, and buildings of your own would be included. Groups of players would form organizations and sociteies on sections of their own planets. Building cities and armies. Or whatever interests them.

 

___The game would have very little limit of physics research. Players could learn about the equations and maths and use those to design new things. One would have to introduce a dynamic software that could be updated on demand, so players could create their new devices.

 

___Anyhow, once you get into the game and take your first trip into space, alot of the players might get some extremely confused looks on their face as they see time speeding up and slowing down as they view the many camera angles. An onboardship computer would be keeping track of the dilations:

 

Time dilation: |Frame # ____ |------|Frame # ____ |------|Frame # ____ |

Length dilation: |Frame # ____ |------|Frame # ____ |------|Frame # ____ |

Mass dilation: |Frame # ____ |------|Frame # ____ |------|Frame # ____ |

 

etc.

 

 

___Ships could include powerful telescopes that zoom in on other ships and planets and what have you. So you could observe relativistic affects all around you as things traveled fast, and as you travelled fast.

 

 

All in all I propse the game to be like Ultima Online except moder times, and the freedom to roam a universe.

 

___Of course we wouldnt want to wait around for days to get to certain destinations, so one would have to implement an auto pilot deal, that flies your ship to where you want to go, while your character can sleep in a "hi-tech sleep machine" almost like a cryogenic freezer. Or something to at least save the person time. However, if you happen to fly past a player who is hunting for travellers he may engauge you and force you to wake up.

 

___Some ships might require a crew of players...

 

 

Anyhow, this is just an opening thought, and what do you think of this idea?

 

Please add your own thoughts.

[skuzie]

That sounds pretty cool! .. its original at least :)

Even having a 3d FPS with relativity in mind would be interesting and less in depth .. like if someone is approaching you they be blue-shifted .. or away from you red shifted. As you would look ahead of you, you would see things in the past since the light hasn't gotten to you yet. Your body mass would warp space-time and increase the pace at which time flows .. and all those goodies .. it would be interesting to experience this to say the least.

[pgrmdave]

How about a normal FPS, but with the speed of light greatly reduced (to, say, merely 100mph), thus producing relativistic effects at 'normal' speeds?

[anglepose]

Well tie it with my idea a bit....

you seem very keen to have people building there own ships so why not have a wikigame where people starting from a basic manual building up to a complex programmer. They program there own ships and parts of the game but have a governing set of rules eg relativity which people have to abide by and depending on your level in the game depends how much freedom you have within these rules and to add to the exitement have two teams against each other and trust me that doubles the thrill being a gaming addict myself. Ands the teaching would be in the math which people can veiw that govern these rules oh and if you wanted concept art/ graphics help give me a shout I am a* artist.

[arkain101]

Relativity Video Game Impossible? Also, What is up with real reality?

 

 

I had some really interesting thoughts about this last night when I was considering how to create such a design.

 

I came to realise I dont think it is possible to do such a thing!

 

Please help if you see anything wrong with my logic but, something is interesting here.

 

No matter how I looked at the way to design a game with relativistic effects I could not find a way to do it without affecting the universal time of the game and affecting other players.

 

How can a player go into the future or observe time speed up in its surroundings without the game overall accelerating through time?

 

Also how can your players frame slow down in time to others without you being forced to see yourself in slow motion?

 

I came to realise you could cause a clock to slow down relative to other players without affecting the entire games universe, but you can not literally speed up or slow down someones time zone while remaining in first person view.

 

It appears that because you are physically not inside a moving frame inside the game you can not experience effects first hand, and problems arrise from this.

 

Considering this also provokes some interesting thoughts. For example, if you consider the game enviroment and how it can not be done as the real world works, and you see how the time must remain the same for all players or else someone is going to experience game manipulation from an observing view. That is there is no constant, and it doesnt seem to be able to be made in the game. That because of this, you can look at time dilation in relativistic effects from a bit of a new perspective.

 

If time can change relative to an observer than it appears time and space is independent amongst all frames of reference. The time and space for one frame is not the same time and space of another frame. Its almost as if, all frames are their own universe, if time can be observed to physically change inside other frames. IE, seeing people move faster, into the future. If you observed such a thing your time and your space is not shared with theirs, because their frame as we know would remain constant.

 

This is certaintly agrees with my theory of relativity, that there is no space, and there is no dimensions, only independent zero dimension frames of observatoin.

 

I am very intrigued by this what is your comments.

[anglepose]

well i guess you could invent a machine to change the relavtive time for each user :evil:

[arkain101]

A machine? Like playing on a space ship? heh.

 

I find the fact that it is quite profound to consider an observer is there own universe perspective. It considers the idea of no space, which is what the theory I've been working on concludes.

[pgrmdave]

Make it single player...that gets around a lot of the sticky situations.

[arkain101]

Right, good thinking.

 

So apply this to reality. This life in this universe we all experience is a single player game. Everything else we observer is the cpu.

 

I can't think of a way to connect players (space-time) in one realm and have it work.

 

The same as here in real life. I can't prove there is space because I am stuck in my infinite now present moment. I can only feel myself and experience myself. Everything else is observation, that is my future, my time, but my frame is constant.

 

This may seem like a foolish comparison, but I think it does hold some integredry.

[IDMclean]

I can think of a solution for multiple player games. I don't think it's a good solution but it is what you would experience. Lag. People would be given specific latency times. The problem here would be frames per second, and setting up so that each world object was rendered at difference frequencies. The rate of everything stays invariant, but the frequency and wavelength changes.

[arkain101]

Designing Virtual physics Universe to work on explaining this real physical universe we live in:

 

Note a Game:

 

 

Well I suppose one would have to make a list for all the effects involved for a minimum of two frames.

 

Time slow down

Time speed up

length contraction

mass dilation

 

Of course there are solutions one could use to make the game.

 

But to make it 100% accurate, there comes alot of issues, and sorry to go a little off topic but it really got my attention.

 

How could one frame(1) view time to speed up around it, and not cause the other players to notice any change, and all the while keep their (1) frame constant, while it even appears to run as a slower clock, and all the while allow them to remain in the same time zone.

 

The reason I find this so interesting is how it applies to real life, this universe, reality.

 

We can apply this understanding that there is some kind of seperation amongst frames of reference. Alike each having their own game console.

 

One solution is as someone said, is to make it a single player so that each player can play it on their own game system against cpu code. Then, what I was thinking was to take each independant gaming system and hook it up to a mother cpu. This cpu would run a world of no time and no space, so that it could take in data from all sorts of game systems store that information on a memory that would be its time line. When Each individual player reaches certain points on a time line they recieve that data and a world is drawn on their screen with other 'players' existing in their timeline, but are infact far off into the future.(?)

The player furthest back in the time line would be the last reciever of that specific data, and so, the mother system would need to save memory space, so to erase that data from its memory once the last player has reached that point would be efficient.

 

Yet this is all to confusing. What this idea is, is a Simulator of a universe. Not full scale, but large. What is confusing is, Will some players be capable to get ahead in time of other players? remember we may aswell be talking about reality here, but instead of saying observation frame we say player and his first person screen.

 

Really I am at this point taking the application of factual theories on reality in physics, and explaining it through a virtual program instead of performing thought experiments.

 

Which theoretically allows us to test or observe things we can not test or observe in reality at this time..

 

 

So we need several observers 'players' (gaming systems) that run a time clock that is constant. Then we need a heck of a mother system that is able to run all versions of time at any time all the time (like the g-d source for this virtual universe)

 

Each player is observing their very own universe completely seperate from all other players.

 

Each player is a frame of zero dimension. That is, they are recieving a constant infinite now from the timeless mother system

 

All observations are dimensional. That is, what a player/observer, observes is a perception of dimension.

 

How accurately would we suppose we could apply this concept to real life, this reality? As to 1) testing and creating theory that explains physics.

 

This has got me slightly intrigued.

 

The mother system would need only to record moments of data on a 1 dimensional timeline.

 

Each individual system would be responsible for its own server, bandwidth, and frame rate.

 

The mother system may not require that much demand. It may just need to write and erase data that the player systems can read along through as it were.

 

But, how could one player1 observe the future to speed up around it if the other players only play at rest, while the player1 continues to see its own frame in rest. :doh:

 

Reality is weirder than I think we can design. I am not sure we can design a virutal program inside this universe we live in.

 

This has got to say something about theory on physics.

[IDMclean]

I would also like to note that as I have said before. Time does not change. Not for the observer relative to themselves. Nor do they notice length contraction relative to themselves.

 

What does happen is that the universe around them is seen to contract along their axis of motion (x'), and the contracted length results in a related contraction of time (t').

 

[math] x' = \frac{x - vt}{\sqrt{1 - \frac{v^2}{c^2}}}[/math]

 

[math] t' = \frac{t - \frac{vx}{c^2}}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}[/math]

 

I do believe is the setup.

[arkain101]

You are saying that an observers frame (all that which at rest relative to the observer) remains constant and unchanged. Correct?

 

Agreed, that is what sr postulates, so okay.

Thanks kick.

 

Time does not change.

As in, things moving along different points of a time line?

 

I do not believe time changes either, but I was going with what I read, not my opinion.

 

For example, clocks that run at different rates of time. They could be said to be running at different values of mass, so one clicks faster than the other. But they remain in the same point in time.

 

This is why I guess it is said, one ages slower, lives longer, but they do not travel through time.

 

Okay, so I'll discard that previous concept of SR where there is different points of time line.

[arkain101]

I gather there is 3 types of time dilation:

 

1) Dilation of clock syncronization time in acceleration between two frames.

 

2)Dilation of observed time from velocity, or change of distance, between two frames.

 

3)Dilation of time from gravity differentials between two frames.

 

explainations:

1) Change in mass, affects time interval of clocks

 

2)Change in time it takes for data to traverse distance of a dynamic posistion of source of data.

 

3)Change in curviture of space which stretches and contracts data between two frames.

 

Only #1 can make one age slower.

 

 

How accurate would one agree with this list for starters?

[arkain101]

"It is not good to introduce the concept of the mass of a moving body for which no clear definition can be given. It is better to introduce no other mass concept than the 'rest mass' m. Instead of introducing M it is better to mention the expression for the momentum and energy of a body in motion."-einstein.

 

 

 

Upon being introduced to special relativity for the first time, it is easier to contemplate concepts like the speed of light as the speed limit of the universe by envisioning the mass as increasing to infinity at velocity c. However, when one has become familiar with the concepts of relativistic momentum and relativistic energy, there is no real need for the variable mass concept. - Hyperphysics