OcktoByte

Are you a Pinball Wizard?

While this topic isn't directly associated with video games, graphics cards do have some physics related to them. A gpu (graphics processing unit) is a component of a computer that, as you may guess, is what allows images to be displayed. A gpu can be integrated into the cpu (central processing unit), or as part of a graphics card, something that can be added into a desktop computer if the motherboard supports it. One company that designs gpus, NVIDIA, names most of their gpu microarchitectures after prominent scientists, mathematicians, and innovators. These include Tesla, Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell, and most recently, Pascal. All of these people had incredible impacts on the world of science and mathematics, providing theories and ideas we still use today.

Most of us can understand that video games are not meant to be realistic. Some games, however, ignore certain aspects of physics. For example, the classic Mega Man franchise is about a future society that has widely accepted robots and artificial intelligence. The game is all about running, jumping, and shooting at robots to destroy them. However, two of these elements contradict each other in terms of physics. These two are jumping and shooting. In the game, Mega Man is clearly affected by gravity, as when he jumps, he reaches a peak and stops for a moment. However, most projectiles you can fire (aside from a few that simulate gravity) travel in the direction you fire with a constant speed and height. Logically, throwing a sawblade upright should end poorly (both in terms of safety, and replicating this attack).

Happy halloween! I decided to look at a spooky game today. In Luigi's Mansion, Luigi carries a vaccuum to capture ghosts. However, he can also use it to suck up gold bars. A gold bar weighs about 12.4 kilograms. If the vaccuum lifted the gold bars straight upward, the vaccuum would have to exert a force of suction greater than 121.644 newtons.

I agree that some liberties have to be taken when designing a game to make the game more fun, but it is interesting to see how video game physics relate to those of the real world.

Pong is a simple game that most can understand. It behaves similarly to a game of table tennis, and has had numerous iterations over the years. In its simplest form, the ball moves with constant velocity between two paddles until one misses it. In real life, the ball would have to exist on a frictionless surface and face purely elastic collisions with both paddles in order to retain a constant velocity without any forces acting on it. The closest we can come to this is air hockey, and even then the puck eventually slows down and does not retain velocity upon collision.

Thanks! Some games try to find ways around the physics, only stay true to certain aspects, or completely ignore them. It's an interesting thing to see developers do!

Tetris is a game about falling blocks. They fall at a constant velocity, or at a much faster rate. Realistically, gravity would cause the blocks to accelerate. Two options exist for Tetris to realistically exist, assuming the board is set up vertically. One, the game is set in space, and each block has a constant force acting towards the ground, or two, a force is acting against gravity such that there is no acceleration on the block. However, each round the blocks fall at a faster velocity, therefore we can determine that the force acting on the tetris pieces is changing.

Today I want to talk about Portal's Long Fall Boots. In the game, these boots are a way around the concept of "fall damage". This is necessary due to the amount of falling done in the game, allowing you to reach terminal velocity when falling through two portals and launching yourself across a room. Realistically, the force of gravity would accelerating you to terminal velocity, and would crush your body. The Long Fall Boots completely negate this, allowing you to fall from impossible heights, decelerating you when you hit the ground leaving you completely safe. This is nearly impossible, but necessary for the game to maintain fun gameplay. Dying every time you fall wouldn't make for a fun game.

Welcome back! Today's just gonna be a simple discussion as to why the Mirror Shield from the Legend of Zelda games is inaccurate as to the way light works in real life. This is the Mirror Shield as shown in the game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This shield has appeared in several other incarnations in the series, but most share one feature. They reflect light in order to solve puzzles. Now, although it has a highly polygonal model, you can clearly see that the "mirror" surface is convex. In the games, the player reflects a straight beam of light when standing under a light source. However, due to the convex nature of the mirror, the light should be dispersed. The only way a straight beam of light would be achieved would be with a flat surface. A convex mirror disperses light, whereas a concave one brings it to a point. Most of the shields in the series act the same way. They are convex, but direct light in a straight path. That should conclude this post. Let me know your thoughts, and I'll talk to you next time!

Minecraft is one of the most well-known video games of this age. While not as popular as it once was, the game still updates and provides new content to players. The developers provide frequent "Snapshot" updates, and while not official releases, allow players to test new features before they are fully launched. Others have discussed before how much weight your player character can hold. However, the most recent snapshots of the game have added a new item called a Shulker Box. These items have 27 item slots, and allow a character to hold items within them and transport them in their inventory. Before, there was no way to transport items within containers. However, this effectively increases a player's inventory space. Previously, a player had 36 inventory slots, with a maximum of 64 items per slot for certain items. I wanted to find out, with this new item, how much force can one character hold? I figured that gold would be one of the heaviest items in the game, so I decided to fill 36 Shulker Boxes with 27 stacks of Gold Blocks. Each block in Minecraft is 1 cubic meter, so each chest contains 64 cubic meters * 27 slots per Box * 36 Inventory slots. This equates to 62,208 cubic meters of gold. Assuming this is pure gold, and disregarding the mass of ourselves and the Shulker Boxes, we can determine how much mass you can carry. The density of gold is equal to 19.32 grams per cubic centimeter, so each Minecraft block has a density of 19,320 kilograms per cubic meter. Multiplying this by our maximum amount of Gold Blocks that we can carry, we get 62,208 cubic meters * 19,320 kilograms per cubic meter, we get 1,201,858,560 kilograms. I determined experimentally the acceleration of a player by building a 10 meter tall tower and walking off. Recording time, I calculated a constant acceleration of 25.8 meters per second squared. Plugging this and our mass into Net Force = Mass * Acceleration, we can determine that 1,201,858,560 kg * 25.8 m/s2 = 31,007,950,848 Newtons of Force acting on your player character with no ill effects. A cursory Google search shows that only 3,300 Newtons has a 25% chance of breaking bone, and a Jet Engine can only produce around 44,000 Newtons. This is the type of reality that could only be created in video games. I suspect that this is part of the reason people enjoy games so much. Video games don't have to be bound by natural laws, and thus have more creative freedom. Thanks for reading! Feel free to comment with any suggestions for future posts, criticisms for this post, or feedback in general. See you next time!

Ever since I heard about this blogging assignment, this was the first idea to come to mind. I used to play the game Super Mario Sunshine frequently in my childhood. The game stars Mario in a tropical setting, using a water-fueled jetpack to hover over large gaps for a few seconds. Using this jetpack, he can hover over characters and spray water on them to clean them off. Sounds harmless enough, but I wanted to see just how powerful this water pack could be. Many have assumed that Mario weighs somewhere around 165 pounds, so I will be using this for my calculations. Converting this to kilograms, we get 74.8427 kg. In order to calculate the force needed to hold Mario in place in the air, we need the force exerted by gravity on Mario. Using the equation Force = Mass * Acceleration, we can plug in the numbers 74.8427 kg for mass, and 9.81 m/s2 for acceleration due to gravity. This gives us a force of 734.206887 Newtons of force. In order to compare this device to something realistic, we need to determine its pressure. One way of doing this would be to find its PSI, or Pound-force per Square Inch. Since we have an answer in newtons, we can convert this to PSI using a different value for pressure, Newtons per Square Meter. This requires us to find the area of the water stream. Assuming that the stream of water is perfectly circular, and that its diameter is equal to the diameter of the nozzle at its widest point, all we need is the area of the nozzle. To do this, I can measure based on an actual model taken directly from the game's files. Doing this, I compared the backpack to Mario's official height of 5'1", and scaled it accordingly. Then, I measured the nozzle's diameter, and got a measurement of 30 centimeters. Using the equation Area = Pi * Radius2, substituting in .15 m for radius, we get an area of .070686 m2. The pressure unit is Newtons per Meter Squared, so dividing 734.206887 N by .070686 m2 will give us a pressure we can convert to PSI. This gives us 10386.90269 N/m2. Converting this to PSI gives us...1.5 PSI. This seems pretty underwhelming. For comparison, some garden hoses are rated for maximum PSIs of 150. Did I do something wrong? That's about all the time I have for now. Let me know what you think, and if there are any ways I could improve or simplify my calculations! For now, I'll leave you a video of a real-life water jetpack. See you next time!

This is cool, it's something you don't really think about too much, but it has a ton of physics behind it!

Hi! So, I'm a Physics-C student, I'll just be going by OcktoByte. I like working with computers, and playing games. Eventually, I'd like to go to college for Computer Science. I'm taking Physics because I enjoyed AP-Physics last year, and the other options didn't really appeal to me. I hope that I'll be able to learn and become more comfortable with more difficult physics, and I'm excited to see how what we learn can be applied. So far, I feel most anxious about the difficulty of the class. I've heard it from others, and I knew going into it that the class would be tough, but I'm sure I'll get through it fine. Thanks for reading, and I'll be back in the following weeks to take a look at some video game physics!