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Geek Culture / Real life Incredible Machines, Rube Goldberg style!

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Jeku
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Posted: 16th Apr 2006 04:07
http://www.pistolwimp.com/media/44210/

I came across this from my StumbleUpon Firefox extension. They sure get inventive in some parts, using magnets, elastics, and tracks. A few of them are really short, but even those ones would be complex to think up and invent.

Beware the pseudo-catchy Japanese jingle!

Jess T
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Posted: 16th Apr 2006 06:42
Holy batman, batman!

That stuff rocked! I've always loved the Incredible Machine, and little bits of machinery like that that just worked...

That's just... WOW!

Good find

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Aoneweb
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Posted: 16th Apr 2006 07:02
what a lot of balls.


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Fallout
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Posted: 16th Apr 2006 12:39
That jingle is perhaps the most annoying jingle I have ever heard in my life. Impressive though, to come up with really creative ways of getting from a to b.

Saikoro
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Posted: 16th Apr 2006 12:49
Annoying jingle, but it was interesting to see how they incorporated the jingle musically into some of the contraptions.

"One World, One Web, One Program" -Microsoft ad.
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer"(One People, One Kingdom, One Leader)-Adolf Hitler.
Pincho Paxton
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Posted: 16th Apr 2006 16:54
The singing was worse than the jingles.

Hawkeye
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Posted: 16th Apr 2006 17:06
That was pretty nifteh There were a couple of lame ones, a bunch of cool ones, and a couple of really really cool ones.


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Megaton Cat
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Posted: 16th Apr 2006 17:52 Edited at: 16th Apr 2006 19:43
This is cool. They should do one involving live animals.

(Say a hamster gets a small prob and his hatch opens and he runs through a tube to grab a peice of cheese that triggers the rest of the contraption)

Also, here's a wicked one made in Flash. And it has a cat!!!

http://www.powerhouseanimation.com/


It's like a Megaton Cat radar, 24 hours a day.
Fallout
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Posted: 16th Apr 2006 22:00
Folly to your flash one, vector boy.

Yes, that's right! I called you vector boy!!!

Jeku
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Posted: 16th Apr 2006 23:35
Somebody *needs* to remake The Incredible Machine in DBP using Newton or Fizz if it's 2D...

I was thinking of doing a 2D version with 3D objects--- on the fixed Z plane.

Fallout
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Posted: 17th Apr 2006 00:12
I was thinking the same thing actually. I wonder if PhysX will have enough joints and accuracy to make something similar. Could be interesting. The only problem would be finding the Japenese girl to sing the incredible annoying jingle. I suppose we could do an english version ....

How about "Tiny little balls!"??

Jess T
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Posted: 17th Apr 2006 09:35 Edited at: 17th Apr 2006 09:38
I started one for the compo before the Puzzle one... Called it Bounce - the Program announcement is still there.

It was with Newton, but between exactly the same test on multiple runs, it would give different results every time, which basically made it unworkable so I gave up.

I am making a new one for the latest Caimen compo - It's the TPS Packaging system set up like the Incredible machine, in 3D, but without physics this time, just using standard responses and movements based on the current position and objects its interacting with ( so, psuedo-physics sorta )...

I'm not sure about PhysX's consistency, but if it doesn't give the same results every time, you'll quickly find yourself getting very, VERY annoyed with it

Jess.

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Jeku
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Posted: 17th Apr 2006 21:18
But real-life physics shouldn't give you the exact same results everytime either, right?

I remember in some extreme cases in TIM where something different happened once in a while.

Fallout
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Posted: 17th Apr 2006 21:23
I dont think real life physics should give you the same results, but I'm surprised the physics systems on compos don't. I'd have thought the results should be exactly the same unless some random number generator is used somewhere (which doesnt seem logical in a physics plugin).

Manic
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Posted: 17th Apr 2006 21:29
physics should give you the same result everytime, so long as everything is exactly the same as before. so fallout's right, on a computer, it should give you the same results, as you can control everything.

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Les Horribres
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Posted: 17th Apr 2006 22:14
Simple Collisions is only a fraction of these things... what about the flames and heat? How about chemical reactions. The biggest part of Simple Collisions is transpher of energy, and that is one thing that alot of those ignore, meaning sure they 'transpher' to the environment, but the starter typically is the traveler through out the film.

The second question is why would you use a 3D Plug In for 2D interactions... sounds... limiting.

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Freddy 007
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Posted: 17th Apr 2006 23:00
Some of those things are pretty clever!

Fallout
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Posted: 17th Apr 2006 23:34
I like the lil hammers that smack the ball up hill. Clever.

Killswitch
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Posted: 18th Apr 2006 01:42
Chaos theory - identical systems can produce different results!

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Jess T
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Posted: 18th Apr 2006 11:34
Killswitch;
We're in a finite system, though.

Based on the rules layed down by the Physics system, and the identical nature of the tests, they should produce ( in theory ) exactly the same results.

And, just to clear it up, I'm not talking about tiny little differences, I'm talking about big ones... Sometimes, the ball would bounce so much it'd completely miss the end basket, other times it would bounce so little it would not even reach the end basket.

Of course, there is always the possibilty of human-error here, but I remember Walaber had a look for me, and he couldn't see why it was happening either

At any rate, like I said, I think I'll write my own system for this next one, where by it has very simplistic rules to follow, of which, the end-result can be pre-determined.


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Pincho Paxton
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Posted: 18th Apr 2006 11:53
You could make a game from this idea. You have a partially built machine, and some parts for the player to fit together. By limiting the parts that the player has, you are making a puzzle element.

Eric T
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Posted: 18th Apr 2006 14:37 Edited at: 18th Apr 2006 14:37
My friend had to do one of these rube goldberg for her physics class that I pretty much designed. Its very similar to the first one that incorparates music, in which I had a 2 marbles run down tracks and also hitting into shot glasses filled with different amounts of liquid (water) which produced the song mary had a little lamb (presented in stereo!), and they flips into a glass at the bottom for the last sound... All of this rested on a peice of 6'x3' peice of ply wood which was tilted by having 2 peices of 2x4 stacked together on the back, and 1 piece of plywood on the front...

Her friends carrying it out from school after it being graded an A w/ extra credit (Even though in my design I screwed up the timing, so it was more like "Ma-----ry hadalitt--le la---mb"). Somewhere along the line, I guess they decided it'd be interesting to drop it and then take aluminum bats to it or something, because when I next saw my designed masterpeice, it was in shambled ruins.

Jeku
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Posted: 18th Apr 2006 19:19
Quote: "You could make a game from this idea. You have a partially built machine, and some parts for the player to fit together. By limiting the parts that the player has, you are making a puzzle element."


Yah, that's pretty much how the Incredible Machine worked. There were at least 100 puzzles starting from extremely easy to mind-numbingly difficult. Ahhh, it was one of the last games I remember to bring so much joy from one single diskette

They also added a cool sandbox mode where you could use unlimited amounts of all the parts, and then save your creation. That was very cool.

RUCCUS
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Posted: 18th Apr 2006 19:59
There are a few things that could've changed without human interaction though; computers aren't perfect, sometimes positioning an object at 0,10,0 will end up being 0,10.03,0 one time and 0,10.04,0 the next. The other culprate could have been the system's speed. In a lot of cases a small amount of lag will jolt the system and skip a loop, causing a collision to be recorded one loop later than supposed to be, causing a second collision later on to be "off", screwing up everything. Its like Killswitch said, the chaos theory, the smallest thing could cause an enourmous problem down the line.

Though most likely it was logic error with the code (no offense Jess).

Still a cool idea though.

Fallout
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Posted: 18th Apr 2006 21:34
I suppose if a system is developed to use the timer and to work on a "as fast as possible" basis, then that is true. If a physics system is programmed to try to do 30 calculations per second, but to do fewer if the CPU begins to lag, then that would result in different outcomes.

As for positioning objects, yeah, floating point numbers aren't infinitly precise, and because they're base 2, something like 1.35 which seems easy for us to write down in 2 decimal places might require 100 decimal places in binary. So 1.35 might actually be stored as 1.3497685, but it should always store it the same way. I dont think a compo would vary the final number.

Pincho Paxton
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Posted: 19th Apr 2006 03:16
Physics like ragdoll have some random elements. Otherwise the falls waould always be the same.

Les Horribres
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Posted: 19th Apr 2006 04:14
As for positioning objects, yeah, floating point numbers aren't infinitly precise, and because they're base 2, something like 1.35 which seems easy for us to write down in 2 decimal places might require 100 decimal places in binary. So 1.35 might actually be stored as 1.3497685, but it should always store it the same way. I dont think a compo would vary the final number.


correct me if I am wrong, but aren't floats 2 bytes not 2 decimal places?

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dark coder
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Posted: 19th Apr 2006 06:58
i thought floats were 4 bytes, they have to be right?

also to make a physics style game you cant use timer based movement, so you would have to simulate like 30fps but any slowdowns would just result in slow motion, this should make all simulations very similar, unless they are very complex then the room for error goes up.

but i cant imagine it being very hard to do, with some good meshes and a nice menu system its could easily be done, perhaps tgc could even make a physics game compo once the novodex plugin is out, that would be quite fun (adds to list of compos that will never get made)

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Fallout
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Posted: 19th Apr 2006 12:38
I'm pretty sure newton has a system of simplifying the physics based on how many cycles you want to assign to it. You call the update function and pass it the timer, so it knows how much time has elapsed and adjusts the physics accordingly. I've not used it though - just looked at the demo examples.

And yep, I think floats are 4 bytes too. I was using decimal places as an example of precision difference. Fractional numbers that can be represented in 3 decimal places in denary, for example, often can't be represented in a 4 byte float because of the precision difference with a different number base. Vice versa as well.

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