Long Island

Chapter 19: Calm before the storm

Please Note: Statements between % something in italics % are game system messages. 

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Swamy woke up to find a video of the event quest. Someone named Caterpy had uploaded the video recordings from their game capsules on to the Long Island forums.

'Holy cow, its got four hundred thousand hits already!'

Swamy had often wondered how many players still stuck around after 3 months. 'Atleast these many are still there... and the view count was still increasing'.

Swamy clicked on the video and started watching it...but

'Oh! its like 2 and half hours long. Can't be helped...will watch it later.' And he started to get ready for class.

The class today was of his favorite professor again, Prof Samuel D'souza. And this time he was discussing about the mechanics of movement in a virtual reality environment.

"Especially when the virtual environment allows non humanoid type of characters. Non humanoid as in not simply having two hands and two feet. For example flying creatures. In the real world, the limbs of birds turn into wings. The skeletal composition changes and the bones become hollow, etc. But if we closely see the skeletal structure, we will see the similarities between the whale fins and the bird wings to the human hands.

So a similar argument can be made in the games that flying creatures will follow these rules and mathematically, it will be deemed possible. But you often see races which go contrary to the real world rules. A good example would be a dragon, which has all four limbs and wings. If you go by real world rules, we will have to assume that it actually has 6 limbs, with one pair being transformed into wings. Oh and lets forget the tail for bit. Do we have a real world creature like that to compare? Not really. Then how do we generate the mathematical rules of movement for that kind of creature?

This question can also be extended like this. A human brain only gives inputs to four limbs. How in the virtual world can you choose or transform into such a creature...and be able to move? Well think about it, the human brain should be ideally trained for four limb movement only, as nature intended. If we simply go by real world mathematics, you should not be able to move in a dragon's body."

A food for thought indeed.

"Separate into teams and come up with facts and arguments into what makes this possible. You will write a research paper on this due Friday next week."

And the class went on...

During lunch everyone was excited. Swamy was stumped for quite some time trying to understand what had happened.

"Wow...that was amazing Himali!" Sneha said.

"Yeah...bad for you Manish" Rajan added.

"True...it was an amazing experience! I felt real fear..." Himali was speaking.

"Yes yes...it was like lightning. One moment I saw them and the other moment I was dead" Manish was saying.

And Swamy simply sat silent pondering.

"Yeah yeah I had goosebumps even when watching. No doubt you must have felt quite afraid. It must be quite a thrill though" Sneha said.

"Yeah tell us about it" Rajan added.

"I am most sad.....I missed out on such an awesome thing." Manish sighed depressingly.

"Oh I don't know how to start describing it...."