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Hynad on 07 October 2020
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The_Liquid_Laser said:
JWeinCom said:

I've never seen a game like that. Closest I've seen is a game where you could only move in one direction like Pong, but the ball, which is indirectly under your control half the time, moves in two dimensions. And the paddles and the balls are definitely two dimensions since they have measurable length and width. 

That's my take... like I said, if a geometry expert comes in, he can correct me.

The paddles are 1 dimensional and technically the ball is 0 dimensional.  (A point is zero dimensional.)  Two dimensional objects have an interior.  Their borders are one dimensional.  That is what makes something a two dimensional object.  It has to have an interior.  Also, the controller on Pong is one dimensional.  You can only move up or down. 

That is why I'm saying Pong is a 1D game.  It has nothing to do with what happens on screen.  We call Mario 64 a 3D game, but it is still on a 2D screen.    I'm saying Pong is 1D, because the graphics and controls are 1D.  The graphics of Mario 64 are 3D, and it uses an analogue stick.  That is why we call it 3D.  Pong uses 1D graphics and 1D controls.  

DroidKnight said:

In one dimension you wouldn't move.  You would only exist in a single point.  No up, no down, no left, no right,.  Invisible, even stared at dead on.

One dimension is like the x-axis.  You could move left-right only or maybe up-down only.  Moving in all 4 directions is 2D.

Ka-pi96 said:

Nope. The dot still has both a height and a width, therefore it's 2D.

1D isn't even possible.

Actually, I misspoke.  A dot has no dimension.  It is 0D.  In any math class, your teacher has to make the dot big enough for you to see, so it technically has a height and width.  But your math teacher is still going to tell you it has no dimension, because they are talking about the concept of a shape and not the literal height and width.

RolStoppable said:

No, it's an argument I faced because we had people here who insisted that Other M feels very much like a Super Metroid sequel.

If I claimed that 2+2=7, would you need a mathematician in here?

While Pong's controls are indeed 1D (movement only possible on the Y-axis), the gameplay is 2D because the ball that it is all about moves on the X-axis and Y-axis.

What The_Liquid_Laser calls a dot in Adventure is actually a square, and what he calls a stick (as in, a line) is actually a rectangle. Dots and lines are one-dimensional, but squares and rectangles are two-dimensional. He is making an argument that is based on intellectual dishonesty to begin with. The square that represents the player character in Adventure can move left, right, up and down, so that's movement on two dimensions. Primitive 2D games are still 2D games, including Pong and Arkanoid which use 1D controls.

At most, you can make the concession that Pong is a 1.5D game, similar to what we call 2.5D games where graphics are displayed in 3D, but the gameplay is limited to only two dimensions. However, Pong is part of a small minority in generation 2 because most games at the time had gameplay on two dimensions.

No, I am being perfectly honest.  The biggest mistake I've made is that I misjudged how much (or little) people understand geometry.

A square has an interior, and so does a rectangle.  That is why the objects in Pong are not 2D.  The controls are clearly not 2D either.  Gaming started out as purely 1D in the sense that the graphics and controls were purely in 1D.

Here is a quick geometry lesson.  Go ask any mathematician and you may be shocked that they tell you the exact same thing.

0 Dimensional - a point (a dot)
1 Dimensional - part of a line; a line segment (a stick)
2 Dimensional - part of a plane; often polygons (especially in video games).  Two dimensional shapes have a one dimensional border like a line segment or a curve.  This defines the two dimensional interior.
3 Dimensional - part of space, often polyhedrons (especially in video games).  Three dimensional shapes have two dimensional borders such polygons.  These borders define the three dimensional interior.  When you see calculations about number of polygons rendered they are talking about the exterior of a shape.  More polygons enables more smoothness and definition.

So if you look at Pong, Generation 1, it is limited by 1D graphics and controls.  It is just two line segments (1D) hitting a dot (0D), and you can only move up or down (1D).  This is very similar to how the NES is limited by 2D graphics and controls.  There isn't much 1D or 3D in NES games.  It as pure 2D as you can get. (Some late games had parallax scrolling.  That's about it.)  The SNES is also considered a 2D system, but it is starting to push the envelope into 3D: crude games like Star Fox, character models like Donkey Kong, and tons and tons of parallax scrolling.  It's trying to push into 3D, but it's still very limited to fundamentally 2D graphics and controls.  The Atari 2600 is very much like this with respect to 1D.  It really is trying to push into 2D, probably even more than the SNES is pushing into 3D, but so many games are limited to line segments and dots, 1 dimensional graphics.  There are also plenty of games where you can only move left or right, 1 dimensional controls.  It's trying hard to be 2D, but there are still lots of 1D limitations on the games.

Graphics are not really 2D until you have an interior though.  One big reason that Dragon Quest became popular was because of the art of Akira Toriyama, who also created Dragon Ball.  The NES was the first system where his art could have been relevant.  NES characters had an interior and that allowed him to make all of those Dragon Quest creatures that are still used today.  His art would have been wasted on a system like the Atari 2600 where the characters do not have an interior, and he would most have had to work with something like stick figures or other crude shapes.  Graphically, an interior is a very important distinction.

I haven’t read this much stupid shit condensed in a single post here in forever.