Codename Project Minkowski

Is a multiplayer space battler with mathematically correct special (and a little bit general) relativity. No longer are you an omniscient oracle, your information, and perception, of your current situation will depend on a finite speed of light that's the same no matter how you look at it.

Note

Project Minkowski is in a very early stage, and needs a lot of code cleanup (especially from someone who understands relativity better than me).

Note

Project Minkowski is licensed under the AGPL-V3, except where otherwise noted.¹²

CURRENT FEATURES AND TODO:

Special Relativity (Complete)

Special relativity is the principal that light has a fixed finite speed regardless of your frame of reference. This results in some odd behaviour, which can seem unintuitive at first.
Project Minkowski, as the name implies, uses a Minkowski space system to model special relativity. Events exist 'absolutely' in Minkowski space, that is, frame-invarient.
Each simulation tick, the game computes for each player what events they can see in their own frame of reference. While an event is appended to Minkowski space immediately, a distant player must wait until the light reaches them before they can see it happen.
This is done by computing distance to event in 3-space * speed of light and comparing this to time since event. If it's less, the player can't see it yet. When it's equal, the player sees the event.
This approach avoids computationally expensive Lorentz transformations as well as simplifying the code. Since all of this is computed in Minkowski space, we don't need to take velocity into account here.

Effects of Special Relativity

• Time Dilation, an effect where observers at different velocities experience time slower, relative to eachother, naturally arises from the Minkowski space implementation. However, due to the architechture, adding a ship clock to show effects like the Twin Paradox is not currently planned.
• Lorentz Contraction/Terrel-Penrose Effect, where objects appear to contract and rotate in order to preserve causal interactions under time dilation.
• Doppler Effect, an effect where colors shift redder or bluer depending on velocity difference, is not currently implemented properly. As this is a purely visual effect, I am considering SR feature complete.

General Relativity (In Progress)

• During event sightline checks, take path topology into account
• • First, iterate over and distance check all masses
• • If any found, do full raytrace
• • If raytrace intersects curved space, roll forward/back on the worldline
• • • Analytical point sampling preferred over quantized scalar field
• • • Will break beyond singularity event horizons
• • • • Must decide what to do here
• Massive objects (planets and stars)
• • Automatic space curvature

World

• Asteroids or some kind of non-massive object fields (needs work, acceptable)
• • Currently, randomly generated grid offsets
• • • Prefer gridless approach
• • • Prefer less random approach
• • • • Noisemap?

Effects

• Animation and sound system (in progress)
• • Animation must be tied to worldline
• Unclear how sound should work in local splitscreen
• FM synthesis (partial)
• • Better synthesis system
• • Sound design such that sound effects modulate eachother
• • • I have no experience with FM synthesis?

Gameplay

• Doppler effect (hiatus)
• • How implement without obscuring player colors? (if possible?)
• More weapons (in progress)
• Better movement (in progress)
• • Needs tightening
• • • Increase speed of light?
• • Powerups/boosts
• • Possible FTL boost powerup for short periods of time
• Refactor entity/collision system for better performance
• • Implement chunking?
• • Or make worldgen deterministic
• Predictive aim reticule
• FTL?? There is engine support (in the sense it doesn't immediately crash)
• • Could cause paradoxes?
• • • Might not be a problem

Bugs

• None at the moment

Long Term

• Multithreading
• Online networking
• • Teams and Chat (with signal delay)

Footnotes

1. Motomangucode Font is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License ↩

2. Space Mono Font is licensed under the Open Font License (OFL) ↩