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[Neonivek]

Someone's complaining about impossiblities in a forum dedicated to dwarf fortress?

  Your seriously out of context...

I was correcting him as he says "That's a clear indication of whatever your opponent is doing in the past" and I said "No, it only says he is manipulating the past. He could be doing in theory anything"

[Sean Mirrsen]

Actually, it tells you if he attacks you. That is, you see the graph of damage dealt/damage received appear. You can't tell what else he's doing, like his construction orders for instance, but I suspect the actual game will have sneaky ways of knowing that as well.

Back to quantum mechanics for a bit, yes I know that they are the smallest currently determinable level. If you look at it a little more globally, you'll notice the analogy. It is tied to the scientific advancement of the observer. If you were an overly complex robot with accurate omni-sensors, you could know the result of a coin flip or a die roll the moment the coin or die left the hands of the human, and likely even before that. If you have a starship with a myriad long-range FTL sensors giving you accurate details about everything in a star system, you can predict the position of every object in the system with pinpoint accuracy, without leaving a place for "chance", unless that "chance" originates from beyond your field of vision and interferes with the object. If you can somehow know every physical property of every object in the galaxy, you can predict a path of a single dust particle in a nebula, given enough processing power. I see no reason for this not to apply to the lowest possible level - if the smallest thing you can detect displays random behavior, then there must be an even smaller thing (or not necessarily smaller - it might simply be different) that affects it. If I'm allowed to make far-fetched theories (as if this one isn't), it could simply be Time. If there's something smaller than a quant, maybe it's the vibration of the three dimensions due to the continuous movement of the fourth?

Alright, let's try to keep this from falling down the scientific route. I mandate that any post discussing quantum mechanics must have some sort of on-topic comment as well. I got a custom-made padlock with this thread's name on it, and I'm not afraid to use it.

[Sowelu]

This could make an amusing retake on the "Age of Empires" concept.  Keep going farther and farther back in time, unwinding through the ages, to bash your enemy first.

[Karlito]

Darn, it seems I came a little to late for the quantum physics flamewar, but it seems that Sean just basically described Laplace's Demon, albeit in a sort of convoluted way.  Sadly, the theory seems to have been sort of disproven, and I'm sure that following the tree of links in wikipedia trying to understand everything could keep one occupied for hours.

That said, I'm really looking forward to the release of this game, and I highly suggest that anyone who wants to comment on it first check out the videos on the website because they are pretty informative and describe the game a lot better than words can.

[Asehujiko]

Someone needs to read up on the many worlds interpretation of quantummechanics

As for the amount of RAM it costs, I think that'll be less then expected. The video's they're using seem to work without hickups, and they're speaking of skirmishes. And remember that their graphics at least seem less then top-nothc, so they have more resources to spare for funky tricks like this

They have to preserve the state of the battlefield at every single point of time you could jump to. Say, you can go back 5 minutes and have 300 battlefield states(small ammount of detail loss arround projectiles that exist for less then a second already). If you have 2gb ram, that means that each saved state may be no larger then 66mb and even then it cripples the rest of your system, I tested the ram usage of TA:Sping - Kernel Panic and even that exeeded that ammount.

[Floirt]

Someone needs to read up on the many worlds interpretation of quantummechanics

As for the amount of RAM it costs, I think that'll be less then expected. The video's they're using seem to work without hickups, and they're speaking of skirmishes. And remember that their graphics at least seem less then top-nothc, so they have more resources to spare for funky tricks like this

They have to preserve the state of the battlefield at every single point of time you could jump to. Say, you can go back 5 minutes and have 300 battlefield states(small ammount of detail loss arround projectiles that exist for less then a second already). If you have 2gb ram, that means that each saved state may be no larger then 66mb and even then it cripples the rest of your system, I tested the ram usage of TA:Sping - Kernel Panic and even that exeeded that ammount.

They could also just save the location and stats of your units and the order you gave them at one time, and not save more states if those don't change, much like that nifty "partial print" DF does.

[Sean Mirrsen]

They don't. The same way you don't need to keep all positions of all vertices of all frames of a 3d animation in memory. You just have a skeleton, and keyframes. The engine extrapolates any given time moment from the timeline of orders you issue, and the last available map state. It's the way they are able to have you travel into the future - they simply take what orders exist for your units, and extrapolate their "present" position to wherever they would be if they followed your orders at the timepoint you jumped to. Speaking of which, this would be fun. Order a massive assault, jump to the future and your units are already pummeling the enemy, then you can slow time down (so the opponent gradually catches up to you) and give orders at a leisurely pace (until you run out of chronojuice that is), picking off his defencive installations. If he doesn't react in time (heh), he'll have to quickly scramble to the defence, working against your highly sped-up orders.

[Sowelu]

Hmm.  If it uses a keyframe model, I'd be concerned about quantum battles--like you'd get in Master of Magic etc.  IE if the battle happens in the background, it happens one way, but if you watch it get calculated for real, it happens a different way, even with no particular player input.

It's quite possible that they handled this well and there is no issue.

[Sean Mirrsen]

No, they handle it the same every time. It simply works with the same AI, and same principles. The difference between the quantum battle in Achron and an auto-calc battle in MoM or any other TBS in existence is that the quantum battle actually happens at normal play speed, you just don't look at it, whereas the auto-calc battles are designed to be instantaneous and therefore run with simplified rules.

[Sowelu]

I always have doubts when they talk about interpolations.  For example, let's say you're trying to move twenty tanks through a narrow canyon.  If it uses a keyframe model, I could see it abstracting away some of the pathfinding that would otherwise cause problems--so if you watch it in realtime, I could see tanks running into each other and holding each other up, which wouldn't happen if you weren't watching.  It is believable to me that they would simplify pathfinding in different times when they aren't being watched.  After all, we all know how big of a time sink pathfinding is.  And your tanks getting somewhere five seconds late can really be a deciding factor sometimes...

[Sean Mirrsen]

Not if they actually calculate the path along the interpolation... remember, you can jump right into the middle of the tanks getting through the canyon, which would mean they'd have to create a keyframe and make up positions for all the tanks at that moment. Another player can jump in five seconds before that and another keyframe would have to be made, running the same calculations again. I think it'd be much simpler to just let the pathfinding engine do its thing.

[Sowelu]

I was implying that pathfinding is likely to be simplified for things not actually being displayed, because there's usually some stochastic elements when you've got ten units trying to shove their way into a one-unit-wide space.  If you don't think it will be simplified...well, okay, cool.  It'll probably run slow, but be more accurate, which is good.

[umiman]

Huh...

How would you play this game? Every action is infinitely grand. For example, in the first post you mentioned going into the past to add units with units produced in the future. What's stopping you from doing that repeatedly, forever, infinitely? Not to mention all the time paradoxes that would cause...

If you could control time, I think the least of your worries would be trying to manage an army.

If two people control time, there would be no point in fighting a war. Whoever prevents the other guy from being born (or kills him before he gets his hands on a time machine) wins. Why would they be in a situation that would require giant armies or the like? And if you had the ability to transport things across different time planes, there should be no real need for war in the first place as the concept of scarcity no longer exists since we have an infinite of everything. Humanity could technically live forever in a nanosecond time span.

Even the concept of "chrono energy" would not be halted by this limitation. You could say, warp in a fly at time: 0.1 to time: 0. At time: 0, you'd have full energy because you didn't use it back then, so you warp back to time: 0.1 before you warped the fly and warp another fly to time: 0. Repeat for infinity until you have a fly swarm infinitely large and consume the enemy. The enemy, knowing this, does the exact same thing as you (because for some reason, fly swarms are the perfect weapon) only he does it between time: 0 and time: 0.01 so he consumes you before you do him. You knowing this, do the same except between time: 0.1 and time 0.001, etc etc etc for infinity. The Nash equilibrium of time travel war is to travel back in time to time negative infinity to defeat your opponent an infinite number of times... Or do nothing.

It would be cool though. Just quite stupid. It's like that FPS where you can morph land to whatever you want it to be. Why on earth are they fighting a war?

[Sowelu]

It would be cool though. Just quite stupid. It's like that FPS where you can morph land to whatever you want it to be. Why on earth are they fighting a war?

That is the best take on this concept ever.

[Servant Corps]

I really, REALLY should set up that war game where you fight in WWII, WWIII, and WWIV all at the same time, using time travel. Bah.

Essentially, the whole idea of an perpetual war, where "every action is infinitely grand" is PERFECT for an MMORPG. Since everything you do changes everything, you get perpetual activity.