Gaming 'A Slower Speed of Light' Simulates a World Where c is Lowered to Walking Pace

[River Crab]

MIT has created a new open-source game in which relativity plays a pivotal role in the gameplay; as items are collected, the speed of light is slowed down drastically, and extreme relativistic effects occur.

http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

They are also working on a toolkit for the Unity engine to allow the creation of more games which simulate relativity.

Very cool stuff! I'm sure this will help a lot of people to understand the strangeness that is relativistic mechanics.

 

[RisingFury]

Very cool!

When does the quantum version of the game come out? :lol:

 

[sorindafabico]

Requirements

A Slower Speed of Light has been tested on computers with the configurations listed below.

• Intel Core 2 Duo T9900 or Core i7 (2.8GHz clock speed)
• Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)
• AMD Radeon HD 6970M/AMD Mobility Radeon HD 4850/Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT
• 8GB RAM

I need a better PC

 

[orb]

I need a better PC

Not real 'requirements'. They only tested it on such computers, probably because they haven't had other. You can read below these requirements:

Some users have reported that the game may run on Windows XP and 2GB RAM. A known bug will crash the game on computers with some Intel graphics chipsets.

 

[Cras]

Awesome awesome awesome. Cannot wait to give this a try.

 

[sorindafabico]

Not real 'requirements'. They only tested it on such computers, probably because they haven't had other. You can read below these requirements:

​

I need anyway. :lol:

I'll give a try at home.

 

[Rtyh-12]

I remember there was a similar program some time ago. It was called Real Time Relativity and I had a lot of fun with it. It wasn't exactly a game though, more like a plaything or a toy. I'll certainly take a look at this one when I get on my PC, thanks for sharing!

 

[FADEC]

Reminds me of virtual bicycling through a German town called Tuebingen. The idea was to lower c to 30 kmh in order to give people an impression how Tuebingen would look like if you would cycle through the town.

Just switch to 1:30

 

[kuddel]

Sadly it crashes after telling me the story ..
quote: "...A known bug will crash the game on computers with some Intel graphics chipsets...."
I might have one of the "some".

 

[statickid]

totally downloading... i only have i5, so heres hoping

 

[Quick_Nick]

This seems like a safe alternative to netmeg.
I don't know why I didn't post about it when I saw this the other day. I was looking for Robotany and noticed they had DOZENS of games since then.

 

[Artlav]

Nice, really nice.
Colours are somewhat confusing - from my experiments i'd expected them to be different, but MIT people likely know better.

I wonder if inertial controls were intentional - i expected FPS-like ones.
Would have made it too simple, maybe.

 

[astrosammy]

Lovely . :lol:
Very educational, I never knew that our vision changes when travelling at such big fractions of c.

It runs perfectly on my laptop compared to KSP, which also uses the Unity engine. I'll try it on my oldest (Geforce 2) computer soon.

 

[statickid]

dang this is too much for my laptop,its about 2 frames per second

 

[Moach]

boy! that was interesting!

curiously enough, it was built on Unity3D (you can tell by the standard options dialog on launch) - the same engine that runs KSP

now i wonder how it was achieved, being that Unity has no built-in support for things THAT extraordinary, and that's no simple camera effect - the whole world geometry morphs when you accelerate, excellently done i must say!


HarvesteR oughta see this - maybe KSP could feature this stuff someday.... now that'd be interesting, indeed :tiphat:

 

[Linguofreak]

Nice, really nice.
Colours are somewhat confusing - from my experiments i'd expected them to be different, but MIT people likely know better.

Experiments? What exact discrepancies are you finding?