4D Games...

It would obviously take a lot of scripting to give the illusion of having a game where you could appear to have time moving, or it would take some pretty sophisticated AI and World editing tools... Or it would have to be extremely limited.

I think there are a lot of cool concepts that could be done if we could work with a non-static time element and a world that reacts according to actual input... Like imagine having a game where you have to solve/prevent a crime and capture a criminal, but you have to prevent damaging the time line as much as possible.

I think that type of game would be awesome. I don't think it's impossible though, as there are a few examples I can point to. In The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask, you play in a 72 hour time period. There are day-night cycles, and time is constantly ticking. I haven't played it lately, but I believe you can also turn back time in that game. I don't think it has the time element; but Watch Dogs allows you to prevent crimes, and the people appear to react to you based on what you do. It's definitely possible if enough work is put into it.

Games are already 4D, they just don't allow you to control the first or fourth dimension (time). I first thought you were talking about being able to go through another extra dimension where everything changes. I guess this really, really, depends on how you work out the idea... Some of them, like the idea you're describing, sound fun to me.

It would obviously take a lot of scripting to give the illusion of having a game where you could appear to have time moving, or it would take some pretty sophisticated AI and World editing tools... Or it would have to be extremely limited.

I think there are a lot of cool concepts that could be done if we could work with a non-static time element and a world that reacts according to actual input... Like imagine having a game where you have to solve/prevent a crime and capture a criminal, but you have to prevent damaging the time line as much as possible.

I think that type of game would be awesome. I don't think it's impossible though, as there are a few examples I can point to. In The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask, you play in a 72 hour time period. There are day-night cycles, and time is constantly ticking. I haven't played it lately, but I believe you can also turn back time in that game. I don't think it has the time element; but Watch Dogs allows you to prevent crimes, and the people appear to react to you based on what you do. It's definitely possible if enough work is put into it.

I wasn't talking about just have a timer tick and being able to go back and forth in time... and I specifically didn't name Majora's Mask because I'm fairly certain it's more or less static, but a clock ticks down. Obviously things happen in games, but I mean more in the sense that there is a flow of events that have occurred and can be reversed or fast forwarded and isn't unalterable and act like as though time passes... for example a character what repeatedly introduce themselves, they'll know they already introduced themself and say something else... and not a cycle through a list of responses either.

You might want to play Braid; it does a very good job of leveraging delta T in its game mechanics; it's also one of the best presented games I've ever played.

A much more straightforward use is Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, using the dagger to "rewind" the game state a few moments, primarily to undo missteps in platformer puzzles or in combat.

It would have to be constrained somewhat, since the players will themselves be limited to a single timestream (here in the really real world) while playing the game. Changes would have to be scripted, or else limited in their scope.

4D time-jumping works well in books and movies because you can give audiences that "A-ha!" moment where they discover the true cause of something. You can present the result of an event, then show the event itself later on in a flashback and it will always fit together correctly. It's not so easy in a non-linear videogame where the player's decisions and actions cause variations in the world and narrative. You can't collect evidence from a crime scene and then flash back and play through the crime unless the whole thing is on rails.

It would obviously take a lot of scripting to give the illusion of having a game where you could appear to have time moving, or it would take some pretty sophisticated AI and World editing tools... Or it would have to be extremely limited.

I think there are a lot of cool concepts that could be done if we could work with a non-static time element and a world that reacts according to actual input... Like imagine having a game where you have to solve/prevent a crime and capture a criminal, but you have to prevent damaging the time line as much as possible.

I think that type of game would be awesome. I don't think it's impossible though, as there are a few examples I can point to. In The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask, you play in a 72 hour time period. There are day-night cycles, and time is constantly ticking. I haven't played it lately, but I believe you can also turn back time in that game. I don't think it has the time element; but Watch Dogs allows you to prevent crimes, and the people appear to react to you based on what you do. It's definitely possible if enough work is put into it.

I wasn't talking about just have a timer tick and being able to go back and forth in time... and I specifically didn't name Majora's Mask because I'm fairly certain it's more or less static, but a clock ticks down. Obviously things happen in games, but I mean more in the sense that there is a flow of events that have occurred and can be reversed or fast forwarded and isn't unalterable and act like as though time passes... for example a character what repeatedly introduce themselves, they'll know they already introduced themself and say something else... and not a cycle through a list of responses either.

In order for that to happen though (not cycle through a list of responses), you'd have to develop natural language processing and implement it in your game. To date, everything in most video games must be prescripted unless you're playing with other humans.

In order for that to happen though (not cycle through a list of responses), you'd have to develop natural language processing and implement it in your game. To date, everything in most video games must be prescripted unless you're playing with other humans.

As weird as it sounds I think there is a way to pre-script without the language processing. It would require a lot of work as you'd have to create characters with an immense number of personality variables and have dialogue triggered based on context and those variables. So it can be "pre-scripted' but more hidden. At that point though it becomes impractical with todays technology.

To do it in an adventure game, yeah, it would pretty much require really hefty AI, or more likely, a ton of scripting for a few set events. (Chrono Trigger style, where yes, you can go back, but most of time your actions don't change things unless scripted to do so, like leaving your robot friend behind to populate a forest and then jumping to the future to pick him up and see how they did.)

You can do it in an RTS, like Achron, but it's mostly just going to make people's heads hurt.

First, just a note on time travel in general. There are several theories to this, but it seems to me that you are subscribing to the idea that you can change the past. Based on that every time you jump to the past, you essentially create another time-stream that runs parallel to the previous time stream, and then jumping back to the present time would only allow you to move along the current and newly created time-stream. So essentially jumping back and forth could change everything as you are essentially in a new timeline.

Another theory is that you can not change the past, and that any actions taken upon jumping back in time will have in fact already occurred (almost like fate). With this there would not be any scripting or logic change required, but the story would essentially be predetermined, which I think you do not want. This method however, would be much easier to achieve in a game.

With the scenario you are imagining, every jump from the past to the present would require a massive amount of calculation and processing in order to determine what actions the player took and what their final consequence would be. Like you said, this would probably be best achieved with some sort of advanced AI. But no matter what, there will be limits, because AI is not in fact intelligence, but merely the illusion of such. Each scenario must be understood by the AI in order for him to take the appropriate action.

So in short, it is possible, but it is massively complicated and the user may be confused when some of his actions cause changes and others do not. It may be important to allow the player to understand what types of actions in the past will affect the present, and set obvious parameters within which the player can operate.

Stephen Hawking presents what I take as the textbook interpretation on time travel: i.e. it's impossible due to a cosmic radiation feedback loop. (Into the Universe, S1:E2.) But that's not a very fun interpretation for gameplay :) unless you can make a game of looking back which is more like a "Flashback/Clairvoyance" power than it is a "Time Travel" power.

That said, if you want to eschew Hawking's (nigh irrefutable) views, you should have a look at Continuum. It's a tabletop roleplaying game that "assumes that time travelers (spanners) would eventually evolve their own society, with its own laws, rules, slang, groups, art movements, and the like." It might be of interest to you for setting.

Stephen Hawking presents what I take as the textbook interpretation on time travel: i.e. it's impossible due to a cosmic radiation feedback loop. (Into the Universe, S1:E2.) But that's not a very fun interpretation for gameplay unless you can make a game of looking back which is more like a "Flashback/Clairvoyance" power than it is a "Time Travel" power.

There are other interpretations that allow for it, and get around the feedback loop. I just read one earlier this month by Michio Kaku, but I can't recall the details. To be fair I was mostly skimming that chapter in his book, Physics of the Impossible.

Check out Miegakure.

Unlike what people are saying about time being the fourth dimension, Miegakure has an actual 4th spacial dimension (technically making the game 5-dimensional, if you will).

Stephen Hawking presents what I take as the textbook interpretation on time travel: i.e. it's impossible due to a cosmic radiation feedback loop. (Into the Universe, S1:E2.) But that's not a very fun interpretation for gameplay unless you can make a game of looking back which is more like a "Flashback/Clairvoyance" power than it is a "Time Travel" power.

There are other interpretations that allow for it, and get around the feedback loop. I just read one earlier this month by Michio Kaku, but I can't recall the details. To be fair I was mostly skimming that chapter in his book, Physics of the Impossible.

If only some time travelers came to Mr. Hawking's party, I might believe it. :)

There was a game concept I had worked on with a student a while back. I don't mind sharing it.

The idea was to allow time travel to affect a game, and allow multiplayer in different instances.

Premisis: You are a detective in a crime squad. You are teleported to a city where a bomb just went off. You have the ability to teleport back in time, up to 2 hours from the present track of time. You can bounce around to any 15 minute increment between there. You quickly get the clues you can. 1 thing is that you know the location, but you don't know what the bomb looks like.

Most of the time, you are investigating clues. If you change something in the past, it changes things in the future. Your team can talk to each other if they are in different time zones. once your target a suspect, you can have another team member go back and try to track them, see what they are doing. If they make changes in the world, things might snap out of place in the future. If the police/detective hover too closely to the bomb site, the terrorist might set the bomb somewhere else. Causing the explosion to have happened in a different point of time in the future. I.e. it blows up a building that one of your team in the future happens to be on the second floor. The drop as there is suddenly no second floor and only rubble left.

Never jump times in a car or the street. A car could be their, traffic will change. don't cross the street when someone on your team in the past is about to change something.

The coding premise is that a closed off sand-box city, has 9 stages of time (Time Zone = current time, or a 15 increment up to 2 hours in the past. Initially, the enemy AI/AI's have event times, where they are walking, talking to people, buying things, setting up the device and escaping. Each time zone becomes a mirror of the previous time zone + whatever changes have happened to it. this can include parked cars, locked doors, broken things, accident scenes, etc... When someone in TimeZone 9:15 gets in a car and crashes it, it might take the cops 30 minutes to clean up the scene. which means that any player at timezone 9:30 or 9:45 standing near by, would suddenly see a crashed car their, with police taking care of it.

If a door was kicked in early in the investigation time zones, that door will still be off the hinges in the later time zones.

Its a much different interaction in time than I have seen any other game have.

I don't think it's possible to do this accurately for any significant scale of time.

There are some games that allow you to rewind the latest x seconds or so, prince of persia, braid. And if you "send" the player back in time to accomplish a specific task with a predetermined result you can do that... but to allow the player to arbitrarily go back in time and make arbitrary changes is I think, impossible. This is because in order to accurately determine what effects their actions had requires that you Simulate the entire span of time they skip. Depending on the scale of change the simulation has to run in high resolution... for example, if a player goes back in time 20 years and sets a trap in some random alley and then returns... it nearly impossible for that trap to go undiscovered the entire time, it's also fairly impossible to determine who will find the trap and how. It could be someone finds the trap, and disarms it resulting in no significant time line alteration... or some important figure could spring the trap as a child and die, significantly altering the time line... you wouldn't be able to determine this without simulating the AI for the entire population for the entire 20 years... not to mention the AI would have to be pretty complex for changes to be meaningful.

So, sending the player back to specific points in time, to accomplish specific actions which result in specific results would be possible, but allowing arbitrary time travel making arbitrary modifications for emergent results would not.

it could be done.

if changes in the past change the future, you've created a new "timeline-universe" as mentioned above.

then you have to model the impacts of the new past event on the new future, to figure out what the new future looks like.

like everything else, its all just modeling and simulation.

granted, modeling the impacts of a wide variety of past actions could be a daunting task.

Perhaps remodelling the future doesn't need to be a Real-Time operation. Perhaps it sits on a lower thread, processing the changes to the model, and the player would have a meter indicating how 'caught up' they were in the time shifts happening. then in front of their eyes, see the changes unfold piece by piece. Once the model has determined that a car should be at position 2 instead of position 1, Instead of just 'snapping' into position, it could set some kind of gravity like pull that visually shifts it into place.

Only the characters interacting with multiple times notice the changes. Everyone else is oblivious. You could get away with larger more interactive worlds this way. You could even process time travel the same way, so when you jump into the future by ten minutes, you see things shift around you until you are settled in your new time. Could make for some great visuals.

Remodeling doesn't need to to be intense process if you don't want that, especially for something like a detective.

Because first you "model" the presented/current timeline, then copy it and make a little change to it,

then that change will have certain implications and only calculate those;

in a detective the killer/suspect will be this "little change" and he/she should try to hide it as well,

so the suspect will try to make this real timeline(in which he killed someone) look like the presented timeline

(where the body just dropped from the sky).

Ps i recall some platform game(i think before sands of time) having a whole bunch options( pause/reverse etc.) i think on PS2, but can't remember the title,

anyway it seems to me there was some experimenting with this kind of concept and then it died down.

You could, in theory have a timeline of events scripted out from beginning to end. Then run the timeline forward from where the changes have been made where things that are changed get tracked and those things that are changed by those changes are tracked as well. I think doing it like this would lower the processing and all that, but not sure by how much.