[HN Gopher] 4D Doom
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4D Doom
Author : chronolitus
Score : 277 points
Date : 2026-03-27 22:19 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| superxpro12 wrote:
| Ok... he was right. It broke my brain.
| scordata wrote:
| This is an awesome experience. Very useful tool to get exposure
| to thinking in "higher" dimensions!
| knolan wrote:
| I found 4D Golf a great game to explore higher dimensional space.
| noman-land wrote:
| Got a link?
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| I imagine they are taking about 4D golf by CodeParade, as
| seen here: https://youtu.be/y53UNskR-zU?si=iUfCkxYqkACx955t
|
| Steam link:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/2147950/4D_Golf
|
| The person goes over quite a few technical details on their
| Youtube, though they talk about a bunch of other coding
| experiments too.
| danbruc wrote:
| Some of the scenes from the video remind me of Manifold
| Garden [1] - only 3D but a 3-torus [2] and you can change
| the direction of gravity, i.e. what is up and down. And
| also visually beautiful.
|
| [1]
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/473950/Manifold_Garden/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-torus
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| The additional code he wrote to make a 4d game work in the
| Unity game engine is available on github and MIT licensed:
| https://github.com/HackerPoet/Engine4D
|
| When I first saw the title, I assumed this game was
| implemented in the same engine. I believe there are a few
| already.
| bstsb wrote:
| this is visually interesting, but crucially it's also actually
| fun to play.
|
| i managed to kill three enemies before succumbing to my fate
| danbruc wrote:
| Now waiting since 16 years for the release of Miegakure
| [1][2][3].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miegakure
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yW--eQaA2I
|
| [3] https://xkcd.com/721/
| mrmckizzle wrote:
| It's still on my steam wishlist.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/355750/Miegakure_Hide__Re...
| danbruc wrote:
| On mine, too, forgot that link.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Oh yeah. I remember it every couple of years just to go to
| wikipedia and see it's not been released yet.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I wish I could stay focused on a project that long.
| moralestapia wrote:
| The guy is just a troll. I doubt there's an actual game beyond
| a cool tech demo.
|
| They haven't showed anything for like a decade.
| saberience wrote:
| That's not 4D
| lanternfish wrote:
| Why not?
| bsza wrote:
| Then what is it? I'm seeing 4x5 transform matrices in the code,
| looks 4D enough to me.
| integralid wrote:
| That's exactly 4D. Just like "non euclidean"[1], this term is
| often abused in entertainment to mean something else, but the
| post here is about the real 4d world rendering.
|
| [1] For this check out zenorogue work btw
| braelyn wrote:
| that was incredibly cool
| somat wrote:
| I just watched the associated dev video And if I understand it,
| what the author is doing is kind of interesting.
|
| The sensor to see a 3d scene is 2d(eye or camera). What is being
| done here is simulating a 3d sensor(for a 4d world) then we are
| looking at this 3d sensor using our 2d sensors (eyes). I don't
| know if this is the common way of rendering these 4d physics
| simulations. But it is the first I have heard it described this
| way. It is also why the narrative of the game focuses on eyes,
| because that is what it is doing.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKDMcLW9OnI
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I don't want to be the guy who has to use this level editor
| (although, in a similar way, doom was 2.5d, and so the level
| editor could essentially be 2d, so maybe it's not so bad?)
|
| If this is 4d doom, i wonder what 4d quake could be
| UltraSane wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of a guy who created a functional virtual
| camera in Blender with lenses and film layers.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE9rEQAGpLw
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Nitpick - your eyes are, in combination, a 3d sensor.
| Individually they're 2d sensors, but together they can detect
| three dimensional information.
| dtj1123 wrote:
| Strictly speaking this doesn't make them a true 3d sensor,
| but rather a 2d sensor with an accompanying depth-map. In
| order for them to be true 3d sensors they'd be have to
| transmit information about both the near and far sides of an
| object simultaneously, for example.
| _main wrote:
| Very true, a 4 dimensional being with 3 dimensional eyes
| would be able to look inside closed boxes, and see every
| side of every object at once. (just like we can see every
| part of a 2d scene all at once)
|
| Not merely 2d + depth perspective.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Arguably, humans are 4-dimensional beings living in a
| 4-dimensional world--it's just that one of the dimensions
| is accessible with much fewer degrees of freedom.
|
| (Not unlike how a seemingly 2-dimensional world of a top-
| down FPS is actually 3-dimensional, you just have to
| follow way more rules when it comes to moving in the
| third one.)
| dickiedyce wrote:
| Hmmm... Agreed that they're mostly 2D sensors, but apart from
| near-field the post-processing brain can use depth-cues to
| for us 'see' in 3D. Also, you don't see in 3D unless your
| head/eyes/target is moving, right?
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| You definitely get 3D from just having twin perspectives on
| an object. You get even more when moving your head.
| xnx wrote:
| Better title: HYPERHELL, 4-Dimensional DOOM-Like
| gerdesj wrote:
| Is that the geordie version?
| gipp wrote:
| The problem with these attempts always seems to be that you can
| _see_ in dimensions 1-3, but never in dimension 4, so any
| movement or exploration along that axis is always just blind
| fumbling. The extra dimension is not equivalent to the others
|
| The only answer would seem to be an extra axis of rotation, but
| (a) doesnt work well with existing input methods, and (b) would
| be even more of a brain-breaker
| jitl wrote:
| I think you could approximate a 4d projection onto a 3d
| display, much like we approximate a 3d projection onto a 2d
| display. So perhaps one could enjoy a fun and intuitive game of
| 4d doom if you have an appropriately fancy volumetric display.
| Pity they're so rare/expensive.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Exactly. I prefer my 4D games projected into my Vision Pro's
| surrounding 3D space. Please.
| tenthirtyam wrote:
| I've commented elsewhere about an 4D maze
| (https://urticator.net/maze/ - I am not the author) which
| mimics this by creating two 3D retinas in red/blue
| stereoscopic mode - when you cross your eyes just right you
| see a single volumetric 3D retina.
| heyethan wrote:
| Feels like in 3D you can move continuously and build intuition.
|
| But in 4D there isn't really an equivalent control, so it ends
| up feeling more like toggling something you don't fully
| understand.
| martin-t wrote:
| Could transparency help?
|
| Ordinarily, a 3D scene rendered in 2D only allows you to see a
| cone from your eye up to the first surface the ray encounters,
| thus defining the 2D projection which you see.
|
| But you can make the surfaces transparent so the ray continues,
| and each additional surface adds a bit to the final pixel. This
| can look like a mess if you stand still but if you wiggle your
| movement left and right (or any other direction), your brain
| suddenly manages to process it into the full 3D structure.
|
| Can something like this be done in 4D?
| yetihehe wrote:
| Something like "wiggle stereoscopy"[1], but for 3d scenes
| instead of 2d images. Wiggle tesseroscopy?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiggle_stereoscopy
| pasquinelli wrote:
| no, you do see along the fourth dimension when you're pointing
| that way. i think you have a deep confusion here actually, but
| i can't really help because i don't actually understand your
| confusion. but, for whatever help it will be:
|
| - all the dimensions are treated the same
|
| - you only actually see two dimensions.
|
| (it goes without saying that it's actually me who's confused.)
| chronolitus wrote:
| You may need more than 1 extra axis of rotations,
| unfortunately. https://youtu.be/tKDMcLW9OnI?t=309
| keyle wrote:
| It's cool and all and I typically enjoy lowres renditions...
| unless, it actually impacts gameplay.
|
| Since the gameplay is so much about 4D, clarity in what you see
| becomes more important and the extremely low resolution actually
| impairs the player rather than serve a positive (typically
| 'leaves more to the imagination').
|
| It wouldn't take much of an effort to double or triple the
| resolution which I think would help the gameplay.
| adzm wrote:
| Agreed this is not even 4d Wolfenstein but still a really neat
| concept
| somat wrote:
| The reason it is so low res is actually more interesting than
| simple aesthetic choice. Think about the sensor(or eye) needed
| to view a 3d scene, it is 2d right. So this is a 3d
| sensor(voxels) for a simulated 4d camera. and then we are
| looking at the 3d sensor. (with our 2d sensor(eyes)), it's
| sensor inception.
|
| So it is as low res as it is because it is a bunch of voxels
| simulating a 4d camera.
|
| The dev put out an interesting video on the topic.
| __alexs wrote:
| There have been other 4D video games with actually good
| performance though.
| Citizen_Lame wrote:
| They should have used Gaussian Splats, surely this would
| reduce processing overhead.
| ninju wrote:
| Here the video (from the bottom of the page)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKDMcLW9OnI
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Fully agree. The low-res makes this unnecessarily hard to
| navigate. Which is a downside if your core gameplay is to teach
| players to navigate in a challenging environment.
| isomorphic- wrote:
| The low resolution didn't bother me too much, but the controls
| made this completely unplayable for me.
| chronolitus wrote:
| I really appreciate your feedback!
|
| I tried pretty hard to increase the rendering efficiency on
| consumer GPUs. The biggest issue is that the main view is
| actually a 96x96x96 grid of "pixels" (or voxels). This makes
| scaling brutal: going up to 128x128x128 we'd double the total
| amount of pixels, to around as much as 1920x1080 resolution.
| Doubling the grid res to 256 would get us 16M voxels, which is
| about the same as two 4K displays. On top of that simple 4D
| object meshes scale much worse in terms of tetras than 3D
| objects do.
|
| A quick solution could be to give the user a few resolution
| options, so they can bravely test the limits of their hardware.
|
| So I've just modified the engine to allow you to specify a
| custom resolution in the URL:
|
| https://dugas.ch/hyperhell/levels/the_bargain.html?vox_resol...
|
| (Higher resolutions might break rendering entirely if the accel
| structure doesn't fit in allowed memory anymore. I was able to
| push it to 160x160x160 on my machines)
|
| I'll also try to think of other ways to make the rendering more
| efficient, maybe a BVH instead of my simpler grid-based
| acceleration structure? My background is not in computer
| graphics, so others here might have better ideas.
| jitl wrote:
| I read a novel when I was 14 or so who's premise is all about
| creatures inhabiting higher-dimensional space called "The Boy Who
| Reversed Himself" by William Sleator. I loved Sleator's books,
| they introduced me to really interesting concepts from
| theoretical physics as a youngun. If you find 4D Doom intriguing,
| I encourage you to borrow the book from your favorite ebook
| library, it's a quick fun read (at least, I remember it that
| way).
| Darmani wrote:
| Fun fact: William Sleator's brother is the famous computer
| scientist Danny Sleator, inventor of the splay tree.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Part of Greg Egan novel Diaspora takes place in a universe with
| 5 spatial dimensions.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| I'm still trying to wrap my head around the statement in the
| book (IIRC) that it takes 8 legs to be stable in 5
| dimensions. I'd assumed it would be 6, but this is a layman's
| intuition. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong.
|
| Awesome book regardless.
| chronolitus wrote:
| Loved this book! Part of this project started from wanting to
| make 4D creatures and train them to walk with RL. One
| interesting fact I learned is that ants would probably have 8
| legs in 4D.
|
| Why? Well, apparently ants have 6 legs because this allows
| tripod-gait, a simple leg movement that always keeps 3 stable
| points on the ground[1]
|
| In 4D, you'd need 4 points on the ground, hence tetra-pod
| gait (4+4 legs).
|
| You could of course do with less, I'd guess even as low as
| 1-2 if you have lots of muscles and good balance.
|
| [1] https://dugas.ch/4d_creatures/tripod_gait.html
| forthac wrote:
| If you're on firefox, go to about:config and set
| dom.webgpu.enabled to "true".
| omershapira wrote:
| Shameless plug: Horizon (Before the name got saturated), a 4D
| third-person game https://youtu.be/R6qTi3TCM2U
| Brendinooo wrote:
| His dev log linked from GitHub is really neat. Mind-bending
| stuff.
| Narishma wrote:
| Why does it require WebGPU when it looks like something that
| would run fine in software on a 386?
| amlib wrote:
| I find it fascinating that it turns into a "descent like" (6dof
| fps) when using the ability to "peek" the 4th dimension.
| heftig wrote:
| The perspective shifts so that the up-down direction becomes
| the hidden dimension. So the ceiling and floor disappear (and
| you have trouble avoiding lava) and you only see the walls of
| the space.
| dluan wrote:
| I feel like now that I'm older, my brain just can't fully
| understand it say as quickly if I were younger. Makes me wonder
| if younger more plastic brains can adjust to having to juggle
| more dimensions than crochety old ones like mine with very rigid
| 3D grooves baked in. Or brains from other animals.
|
| I guess taken to the logical extreme, what does the brain of
| someone/thing that's good at playing this (or any game of N
| dimensions) look like?
| fredrikholm wrote:
| If you don't mind me asking, how old are you, and how did this
| progress? I'm in my mid thirties and am noticing some minor
| deterioration, but I'm writing it off to loss of sleep due to
| having small kids.
|
| My curiosity is if this is like you suggest, ingrained
| patterns, or if there is actual slow down with age. I hear
| different opinions and am finding it difficult to navigate as I
| deal with my own, albeit mild, aging.
| dluan wrote:
| Mid 30s, also have kid and sleep loss but not as bad as
| before.
|
| I actually noticed serious mental decline when I was burned
| out in my late 20s. There were real physical symptoms like
| not being able to look at a text editor for more than 2
| minutes. Post recovery of that, I actually feel like my brain
| recovered a lot once I started learning languages very
| seriously (mandarin and japanese), starting a few years ago.
| Brain feels healthy now but I'm acutely aware of where it's
| not as sharp as before. Playing around with this felt a
| little like when my brain is trying to build a new grammar
| dictionary.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| I feel the opposite. I'm 61 and I feel like I understand ideas
| more quickly than I ever did before, so much so that I'm
| surprised at how shallowly I thought about some things in the
| past.
|
| While there is definitely something to the plasticity of young
| brains, for example in language acquisition, or the fact that
| the Fields Medal eligibility ages out at 40, I believe it's not
| a linear thing and not a one-way thing.
| gloflo wrote:
| It's not actually Doom, but a Doom- _like_.
| backspace_ wrote:
| with those low res graphics, I'd say Wolfenstein like
| razorbeamz wrote:
| The AI generated logo image is a very big put-off.
| chronolitus wrote:
| I'd definitely prefer a human made one. If you know any artists
| willing to make a proper version of the cover art, I'd be happy
| to commission one (paid, of course).
| amelius wrote:
| At least project it onto a 3D screen.
| chronolitus wrote:
| Can't wait for the hardware. Only a matter of time until
| someone makes the first 4D game projected to a 3D hologram.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| Reminds me of this 4D minecraft clone:
|
| https://youtu.be/u8LMyWcKL_c?si=XZrCdSSSk9PtpNIP
| tenthirtyam wrote:
| I can't play this online (no webgpu) but from the description and
| comments here it sounds like the 4D Maze from 2002!
|
| https://urticator.net/maze/
|
| The advantage of this one is that it offers a stereoscopic
| (red/blue) view of the 3D retina. Not sure if this one does too.
| chronolitus wrote:
| Thanks for the link, 4D Maze is amazing and I had somehow never
| seen it.
|
| Also, here's a CPU-based prototype that led to the Hyperhell
| engine:
|
| https://dugas.ch/4d_creatures/4d_camera.html
| npodbielski wrote:
| Enabling webGPU on Firefox still does not allow it to run. It
| worked on Chrome but I feels kinda like it was not worth it.
| Maybe if you could change resolution to something better. And
| starting every time from the same room, through some conversation
| with NPC? Feels like I have better things to do.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Perhaps Ive been missing out on the 4D gaming revolution but I do
| not understand what the 4th dimension is here. Feels like I am
| missing out on a lot of context.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| it's a fourth spatial dimension. if you imagine a cube, it has
| width, height, and depth. a 4d cube would have width, height,
| depth, and zhlerp, which is its size along a fourth spatial
| dimension. in three dimensions you can go forward and backward,
| left and right, up and down. in four dimensions you can go
| forward and backward, left and right, up and down, and zlep and
| wizz, moving along the fourth spatial dimension.
| DoctorMacArthur wrote:
| Cant wait to see ZeroMaster speedrun this
| gray_wolf_99 wrote:
| Its really a cool project, i loved playing doom game in my
| childhood hood, and i loved this fast paced Action FPP game....
| plus the retro looks great,
|
| Hey , did any one played "Total over dose"?
| komodo99 wrote:
| interesting, very cool demo, but its not the 4d that hurts my
| brain and/or soul, its an FPS with an inverted X mouse axis...
| its like the backwards bike, sure it can be done, but my wiring
| isn't rigged for that!
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