Go ahead, try it!
The performance of this game varies greatly on different OS platforms.
("Java: Write once, run anywhere, experience anything.")
So if the game seems jumpy, try a different OS/browser.
Any comments whatsoever are welcome! (see bottom of page)
Known issues:
The best suggestion has been that it somehow let you take as long as you want, and then you compete against your own previous time records. This suggestion has merit, but I haven't worked on the program in a while and probably won't for a while (what I really want to do is change it so that I can include a relativistic space, but that will take a lot of rethinking and rewriting), so you have to live with the way it is for now.
So get good at it!
Get comfortable swooping around in your little ship, scooping up jewels
on the fly.
While you suck, stick to the Hemispheric level.
If you ever finish that level, try Euclidean.
If you ever finish that level, try Hyperbolic.
I find the time limits very easy to finish within, so don't give up hope. The entire reason I wrote a game for this was so that I could feel what hyperbolic space is like. And the only way you learn to feel what it's like is by getting good at it, so you'll need to get good at it anyway (i.e. not just so that you can finish levels, but so you can benefit from the whole point of the game). You wouldn't expect to get much of a feel for hyperbolic space if you only spent 20 minutes there, now would you. So if you're serious about feeling these spaces, go ahead and play around!
One of the reasons for doing this is that otherwise, one winds up thinking that the main weirdness about non-Euclidean space is how warped everything looks. But "warpedness" is of course just an artifact of whatever projection happens to be being used.
By experiencing a "warped" Euclidean projection, you should eventually see how the "warpedness" is not really part of the underlying geometry. Instead, you can discern the "real" differences, such as:
In fact, if you go far enough from the jewel field, the loss of precision will collapse your ship! (makes it hard to continue playing)