!!Con 2017: Simulated Gravity Comes from Within!! by Paul Frazee

247 views · Published 18 May 2017 · 8:37 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Confreaks · 2017 · Science & Technology

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Simulated Gravity Comes from Within!! by Paul Frazee

The massively-multiplayer game Eve Online slows down the in-game clock when there are too many players in a region. That way, the network has enough time to process all those players.

So here’s a question: What if you slowed down the clock – not in regions, but variably throughout the entire game, as one big region? Wouldn’t that screw with your physics engine? I got curious, so I wrote a simulation with this time dilation added and… well, objects started orbiting each other!! The weird thing? I didn’t include gravity in my program.

Paul’s a lifelong hacker with a love for games, music, history, and design. Paul cofounded Blue Link Labs and the Beaker Browser project.

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