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Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

Also check out the game "A Slower Speed of Light" [0] if you are interested in visualization of relativistic effects. It includes effects like Doppler shifting of colors, perceived warping of space and time dilation. Good luck at not getting nauseous.

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

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Although if you’re on macOS Catalina or higher, the game no longer runs. And since the team abandoned it without open sourcing it[0], it can’t be recompiled for 64-bit.

[0] Although they did open source some of their scripts and shaders as a Unity plugin called OpenRelativity, which was cool.

Strange, I'm on Catalina and it runs fine. I did have to override the security settings [1], but everything else was fine.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/open-a-mac-app-from...

Was about to post this. This demonstration helped me understand the abstract physics at high speeds better than any book ever did.

I didn't suffer any motion sickness, but if there's a game that can induce it in you from just a monitor, this is probably that game.

Just tried it (Arch Linux AUR: assol). One thing I liked is the option to use de-saturated colors. Sadly, it crashed when I reached 99/100 orbs...

It definitely is a funny game.

Would be interesting to see a multiplayer version that handled multiple relativistic observers.

I'm not sure how that would work with time dilation.

You could make different player’s in-game clocks appear slower or faster, but you obviously couldn’t affect the players’ actual subjective clocks, so you obviously couldn’t do any of the interesting things like the twin paradox, unless the entire in-game simulation was sped up significantly and you could do something interesting with in-game characters aging at different rates.

'elite dangerous' offers a very rudimentary version of that.

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