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What ways exist to make infinite stairs (digitally or in real life)? Or at least the subjective impression of infinite stairs?
In Mario 64 there’s an example of infinite stairs.
Subjectively there’s an property to this implementation that is cool. Because the stairs are constantly hindering Mario’s progress, the average player can spend hours, or even if they wanted to an entire lifetime walking forward, with the sensation of traveling up the stairs.
Then at the end of their life they can turn backwards and find yourself the same distance away from the base of the stairs.
You have to actually turn around, and divert yourself from the task to know what type of system you are in.
NOTE
There are also ways around this system, as speed runners have gotten past this implementation of infinity.
This is a tangent but there was this image that was part of a show I was watching that seems to relate. People were chasing after this ring. It lands on this bird, that is in flight, directly on its beak. It is kept there, because the bird is in flight. It doesn’t realize it is there, because the bird is in flight. If it were to stop, it’d realize that a ring were around it all along.
Mario
With the Mario infinite staircase there’s a trick that it’s not infinite, it just teleports you back to the base of it when you reach a particular point. There’s a Shepard scale that plays, along with some black “distance fog” at the top of the stairs and a player fixated camera, regularly placed tiles, all that work towards the illusion. It’s an elegant solution because the stair isn’t really infinite…
Trying to think of other ways to do this. Maybe you have some
- hidden “conveyor belt” cyclical
- chunking stair segments, or individual stairs
- push stairs on bottom to top like a queue
- “grow” stairs constantly adding to top These are all pretty obvious though. I’m wondering if there are any other ways to achieve this.
Also how it would be done in real life (escalators, but also just engineering an infinite stairs). 1) Blinding the player/removing senses 2) I am fixated on the stairs and the problem. But is it possible to have a solution for an infinite stairs that uses things outside of the stairs, like growing things/proc gen outside of that staircase. Really far fetched but a solution where you’re building staircases or a world outside of this and a solution emerges Something like a Penrose staircase that I wouldn’t come up with on my own, but what’s keeping me from devising a new scheme for this staircase?
Who constructs buildings?
In games (virtual, or tabletop) you will take for granted who creates the dungeon? Who creates the buildings? Particularly with these fantastic architectures.
Imagine a part involves traveling deeper and deeper down into this circular brick stairwell, a dungeon. Just because it feels so real (but I have also had this sense when playing desolate games like ICO and Dark Souls) but when you examine the structures that exist in the dungeon, the piled upon stones and care you just have to wonder who constructed these things? All of these virtual worlds, in the virtual world are built. They were created. A thinking being presumably placed a stone for these massive engineering projects. It’s funny how it is never really addressed despite being always present.
The creators of it are unspoken for and absent.
Construction of large numbers
https://sites.google.com/site/largenumbers/home/4-3/4-3-1-foray Something to this process - addition → multiplication → exponentiation → tetration