Some Braid designs…

Hi,

So.. I’ve been thinking *alot* about how to best design Braid if I wanted to have a proper time manipulation feature in the game that would ressemble Braid, but still avoid using up MBs of RAM per second… I think I’ve got something, and I’ll try to explain it!

First: do not store the position of every object in the world at every timestamp, instead, only store the events, and let the objects interpolate on the event’s timestamp, their current timestamp/state to know what their new status should be.

I also realized today that I do not need to keep every object of the world in memory, even after they disappear.. all I need to do is make the object’s creation/destruction events get registered in the ‘timeline’ and let the rewind/fast forward feature recreate objects as needed. I should probably have a unique name generated per object in order to know which event goes to what object (instead of linking the event to the object’s address).

I also realized that I’d need multiple timelines, dependent on each other.. so for example, we could have the “world” timeline for the world (for time independent objects), then the “current” timeline that could get rewinded/forwarded (for normal objects), we could also have a “player timeline” that would have its timestamp generated depending on the player’s position in the world (for Braid’s world 4), and a “shadow” timeline that would be used by ‘shadow’ objects for world 5, also probably a ‘timewarp’ timeline to emulate the time-warp feature of the ring, so it could translate the timestamp of other timelines depending on the object’s position relative to the ring..

These timelines would be linked to each other.. For example, imagine a time dependent key in world 4. The world would request the key to update its state (position/broken or not/being held or not, etc..) to the new timestamp X on timeline “world”, this will cause it to ask the “current” timeline for the ‘current’ timestamp at time X, which would translate to timestamp Y (depending on whether or not you rewinded or not), this would cause the timeline to ask the “player” timeline for the new timestamp associated with timestamp Y (in other words, where was the player located at timestamp Y), which would give us a timestamp of Z, now that’s where the key should be.. so the key tries to go into its new state at timestamp Z, it realizes that it was ‘hooked’ (being held) to another object “abc” (player or monster) at that timestamp, so it asks that object (the world actually, since the object could have been destroyed) to get the status of object “abc” at timestamp Z, which could again chain up multiple timestamps (depending on whether it was the player, a time independent monster, or a normal monster) until it gets the state of the object at that timestamp, at that point, it will be able to know the position of that object, and set its own position to the same position as that object (with an offset depending also on the direction of the object)!

Ouff, now that sounded complicated! And we didn’t even start adding a ‘maybe there was a time warping ring in the path of that object between now and timestamp Z..’ Either way it seems to fit so far, holding only events, destroying unneeded objects, and chaining timelines together with each timeline holding its own objects/events, seems to make sense so far.. we do get the correct behavior apparently, and with minimal memory usage…

Now I still have to get my brain into a stable enough state to figure out questions like “what happens if the user gets inside a time-independent platform?” or “what happens when you need to figure out the position of an object when a ring might be in the way?” or “how to interpolate correctly our new state when the requested timestamp is not the old timestamp +/- 1 time unit?”

I’ll start designing some uml diagrams soon to try and make it fit, then I’ll start coding the basic structure… Assuming I don’t see any flaws in the design…

If you have comments about this design, feel free to share! 🙂

See you soon!

KaKaRoTo

9 thoughts on “Some Braid designs…

    • Yeah, I would go with C using GObjects for the Object-Oriented features.
      Otherwise, I would have chosen python, but I’m not sure how a opengl game would work on python, and I think C will make it more efficient in terms of speed and memory usage.

  1. pyglet is there for python, but i never used it, so i can’t tell

    you can use both :D, C for the core/opengl and python for the scripting, it’s really easy embed the interpreter

    there’s lua too, less footprint but featureless compared to python.

    There’s some comercial games using those interpreters for the scripting.

    well.. that’s my two cents

  2. Thanks, yes, I thought about it, but like I might have said before, I don’t really plan on making the game, only the core engine for the time manipulation stuff, and I’ll leave the UI/art/opengl/etc.. to someone else who has more experience in that field!
    The core would be in C, then bindings can be made and whatever wants to be used for the game can then be used 🙂

  3. exactly, lol 🙂 Just the challenging part…
    I’m even a bit afraid of not coding anything once I think I have a good design that would work, hehe..
    By the way, I suppose you’ve played the game, right? Would you be interested in joining me?
    Also, out of curiosity.. How did you find my blog? :p

  4. No, i did not play the game, but i really like what i saw on youtube.

    I were reading about audio/video changes in msn protocol, i’m a one of emesene’s devs, hehe

    Actually i never did nothing like a game, but i were thinking in make a point an click engine(like scumm), thats why i was reading about pyglet, and games stuff

    So, yeah, i really like the idea of helping you with this project

  5. Ah ok, cool!
    The game is really worth it. And it runs ‘flawlessly’ on wine if you want to try it out on Linux.

    I’ve seen your link to emesene.org, so I knew who you were, but was wondering how you ended up here 😀

    It would be awesome if we could collaborate on this. But first, you gotta play the game! :p

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