relativisticgame

Week 15 progress update

I started the week working on my game engine. I considered it a bit of a vacation: I needed a break from the animation and video work. In two days I made good progress and implemented features I had been thinking about for a long time. I modified the engine to be more dynamic and allow Lua code to dynamically create (ECS) entities and systems. While this functionality is not strictly necessary right ...

Week 13-14 progress update

I spent the last two weeks creating animations for my video about length contraction. This is by far the longest and most ambitious video I have created so far. It’ll be around 10 minutes long and will be narrated.

I am doing my best to make the video entertaining and instructive. It is proving to be quite hard, though. A lot of the skills required to complete this work are new to me. Art and graphics design, storytelling, video editing, voice acting, audio editing. It is now clear to...

Week 12 progress update

I started the week experimenting with Social Media. I took the video I shared on Twitter last week and shared it on TikTok, YouTube (as a short) and 2023-01-20 14:42:17 +0000 UTC View Post

Week 11 progress update

This week I did a lot of work on the game engine’s script code. I ended up mostly writing Lua code and a moderate amount of C++ code. I introduced a new API to handle shader uniforms, I introduced several generic abstractions (for example, I created a core.ExtendEntity function that captures the code required to extend an engine’s entity from Lua, thus removing code duplication), I added tracebacks to help debugging uncaught exceptions from Lua and more. I also added more animation capabi...

Week 10 progress update

I finally uploaded my first video to YouTube, which is now embedded into my blog post at relativisticgame.net. I don’t expect this video to win any Oscar nominations. Realistically, it will have a two digits view number for quite a while. Uploading the video was nonetheless a learning opportunity for me....

Week 9 progress update

Propagators are elements of my relativistic game framework. They carry information between two points of space-time at the speed of light. They are used, for example, to bring an "open-command" to a door.

There is one game element that is able to visualize what some propagators are doing. I call it "light guide". It is basically a cable where light can flow. The light inside the cable is nothing else than the "wave fronts" associated with some propagators. So far I have been building th...

Week 8 progress update

This week I focused on 2D SDF and 2D animation. My aim was to create an animation to illustrate some properties of the classical solution to the analytical positioning problem. I developed a bit of animation infrastructure that will be useful for other videos in the future. I also arranged things so that I could easily try different palettes. I used 2023-01-06 10:37:33 +0000 UTC View Post

Week 7 progress update

I spent some time setting up my blog site relativisticgame.net and wrote the first posts. This site is using GitHub Pages, you can inspect the sources yourself here. I am using MathJax for the formulas and it seems to work like a charm.  It could render very well almost all Latex constructs I gave it so far! Overall GitHub Pages (...

Week 6 progress update

I was on holiday, so I haven't done much this week. I spent time thinking about the analytical positioning problem, though. I found this problem much harder than I expected. You can follow my progress at relativisticgame.net.

Week 5 progress update

I took a break and went on holiday in December. As a result, I got a bit behind with the status updates. I took some notes before leaving, though. So here is the update for week 5.

I did a lot of bug-fixing in week 5. I started looking into the code I was using to generate normal maps and fixed issues in there. Hopefully, the calculations are all correct now. These fixes were prompted by experiments I did with lighting, in particular the Blinn-Phong implementation.

I also added mo...

Week 4 progress update

I started on Monday writing the script for the train-tunnel paradox video. As I mentioned in earlier posts, this is my short-term objective. I decided to spend time on this, as I believe that having the script can be very useful for planning the work required to complete the video. In truth, I wrote half of the script. I hope to finish the script next week.

I also spent some time improving the light model used in my game engine and learning about physical based rendering. For now I just...

Week 3 progress update

Before this week my game engine was entirely controlled by hand. In the train-tunnel paradox demo, for example, I had to use keyboard or controller to either move the train or select items from a menu. The menu enables doing various things, such as slowing time down, showing and hiding the tunnel interior, changing the reference frame from landscape to train and back, etc.

For the upcoming demo, however, I need to be able to automatically control the entities in the game. This way I can...

Week 2 progress update

Here is the first weekly update. This is for the previous week, 7-11 Nov 2022.

BTW, I’ll be numbering weeks from the 31st of October 2022, the day I started working full-time on this project.

I started the week working on creating assets for the ladder paradox demo. I spent some time dealing with problems with coordinate transformations, which I chose unwisely a long time ago. In particular, I created assets outside the game, choosing arbitrary lengths, etc. It turns out this is...

Short-term and long-term goals

Before I post my first weekly update, let me explain briefly what I have been trying to achieve in the past days.

I gave myself this short-term goal: use the technologies I have developed so far to produce a demo of the train-tunnel paradox in SR (Special Relativity), also called ladder paradox. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_paradox. While videos on the subject exist already (search “train ...

Status update: about this page

I thought a bit in the last few days about what I should do with my Patreon page. In particular, what content I should produce and post to Patreon and what I should instead post to other places, like the project website, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter.

For Patreon it makes sense to focus on status updates, I think. I will therefore commit to posting, every Friday, weekly updates with a summary of the work I did, including pictures, videos and considerations on how the week went.

I belie...

A relativistic Mario

Sometime at the end of 2018 I had the idea of putting together a game based on relativistic Physics. Imagine Super Mario going at nearly the speed of light, experiencing Lorentz contraction and time dilation! I was super excited imagining how such a game would look like. Since then, I have devoted a big part of my free time working on the game.

It felt more a research project than game development, though. While I have a background in Physics (degree, PhD, PostDoc), I had a lot to learn...