The Incredible Machine and a Billiard Ball Computer

By Kevin Ryan

Posted on August 9th, 2016

The Incredible Machine (TIM) is a computer game released in 1992 that is driven by custom physics and is very similar to Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson machines. There were a few games in the series and it got a surprisingly large and loyal following. We won an “Honored Developer” award at the 1993 Game Developers Conference for it which I think was the first year that they gave out any sort of awards. I think I still have it somewhere – it was a pin or something like that. Later on TIM was inducted into Computer Gaming World’s Hall of Fame which was a very pleasant surprise.

Oh this looks neat!

In the summer of 1992 when I was partway through implementing the original group of parts in The Incredible Machine, I read about Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli’s Billiard Ball Computer. Roger Penrose also discussed it in his book The Emperor’s New Mind which I was reading at the time. Along with a technical description it had a nifty graphic showing a billiard ball model for an AND gate similar to the one pictured below.

Wow, that would be cool to implement! I realized that I already had the basic physics and collision frameworks in place and I could implement the needed parts in TIM without too much effort. Walls, incline, and balls were already working. Finding enough free time before shipping would be the constraint on whether I could get it done in time by the ship date or not. TIM had a very tight development schedule.

Coding The Incredible Machine

Coding on TIM started on March 26, 1992. I know that exact date from the title page of my design. On the day that I finished the design, I wrote the date on the title page, printed it out, went “whew, finally” and then immediately started coding in the unheated and unfinished basement of my home in Eugene. Note: this was not my parents’ basement – I was married and had three young kids at the time. Once I week I’d walk over to Jeff Tunnell’s office with the latest build on a floppy disk and show the build to everyone.

Collision System

The first order of business when I started coding was getting a collision system in place. No Google, no big Internet search space, so I ended up writing the collision code from scratch. I decided to go with polygon borders for all the parts. Everything had to be integers because at the time the speed of floating point operations on CPUs was slow.

The conversion factor for the 16-bit integers was: 1,024 in the physics space was equal to 1 in the screen space. A shift of 10 bits left or right would convert between the two coordinate systems. The 360 degrees of a circle were covered by 16-bits and went from 0 (0 degrees) to 65536 (360 degrees). In hex it came out as: 0x0000 flat facing up, 0x4000 vertical on left, 0x08000 flat facing down, and 0xc0000 vertical facing left.

All the parts collision shapes were defined by polygons which could be either concave or convex. The collision checks were line segment to line segment – projecting each point of the polygon to where the new position would be based upon the velocity, creating a line segment, and checking for collisions with other polygons. If a collision was found, then the projected line would be adjusted to the point of first collision.

As an aside, there are now terms for most all of this stuff which in many cases didn’t exist at the time. Lots of ad-hoc development here – making it up as I went along. So the segment-to-segment check would be what is now called swept collisions. There was also a broad-phase collision check. The way collisions were implemented allowed me to do a bit check on the high bit and reject roughly half the checks – less calculations – important because frame rate was a big concern. The fastest code is the code that isn’t executed.

The collision polygons for the Balloon and Birdcage became my debug test cases. I created graph paper version that exactly matched how they were represented in the game data. I would move the paper cutouts around by hand in various collision scenarios to verify that the code was working correctly. The hex values in the balloon and birdcage photos are the slopes of the line.

Physics Code

Written in parallel with the collision code was the physics code to apply forces to resolve collisions. Every part was a point mass with some parts being static and some dynamic. Each part had a density, mass, elasticity, friction, terminal velocity, and various other parameters. Sir Isaac Newton wrote the physics code for me roughly 300 years before TIM. I just had to put it in modern C code and make it fast and use only integers.

The structure for how the basic properties of the parts were defined is listed below. (Ugh, I don’t like the code style I used back then). Those last elements in the struct are function pointers. They pointed to general routines for the parts and I would override them with pointers to specific functions for parts that needed them. TIM was written in C and this is similar to overridable methods in C++ although I wasn’t familiar with C++ at the time.

struct part_elements
{
   short          density;
   short          mass;
   short          elasticity;
   short          friction;
   short          acel;
   short          terminal_velocity;
   TIM_VEC        max_size;
   TIM_VEC        min_size;
   struct shape   **part_shapes;
   SSHAPE         **super_shapes;
   TIM_SCVEC      *shp_offset;
   TIM_VEC        *shape_size;
   unsigned char  plane_num[2];
   short          num_borders;
   short          part_bin_order;
   VOID_BPARTFPTR bounce_func;
   VOID_PARTFPTR  internal_func;
   VOID_PARTFPTR  reinit_func;
   VOID_FPARTFPTR flip_func;
   VOID_PARTFPTR  resize_func;
   VOID_RPARTFPTR rope_func;
};

 

So Where is the Billiard Ball Gate in TIM

Short answer: It’s not there. I ran out of time.

Slightly longer answer: I really wanted to make an adder just like the picture below instead of just making an AND gate. Defining the elasticity and borders needed for the billiard balls would have been very quick and easy, but getting all the parts lined up correctly even for just the simpler AND gate would have been more time consuming than defining the needed parts.

Game Dev Weight Loss Program

As best as I can remember, we shipped the first version of The Incredible Machine in mid-November of 1992. I remember that at the time getting to gold by mid-September was important for the Christmas season. Big orders by the distributors and stores were being made in September and then they’d duplicate a whole bunch of floppies and print up all the boxes. There was a lead time for all this so we would usually be shooting for mid-September to have a gold disk ready for shipment. It was a very bad thing to have bugs in the shipping floppy disk version because there was no simple way to get out an update.

So the summer of 1992 was a mix of implementing all the parts, tweaking the collision and physics code, and creating all the puzzles that would ship with the game. Creating new puzzles started becoming harder and harder. I was very busy and over that summer my weight dropped from 155 to a little below 140. It was fun! Really! I wouldn’t still be doing games for all these years if it wasn’t fun. But it was tiring too. Near the end of TIM development I started referring to it as a 6 month sprint.

I just played the first version of TIM for the first time in a long time – a very long time. I had to buy it from the Good Old Games website because I don’t have a running copy here. I see that Billiard Balls aren’t even in the first version, but they did make it into the “Even More’” version where more parts and puzzles were added. And they aren’t affected by gravity and are perfectly elastic so they had the correct physics attributes to implement the AND gate. But they would have still needed work to give each of them the exact same initial velocity when entering the gate and then there would have been lots of tweaking of position to get them working correctly.

Over the last year few of years I’ve been working on Contraption Maker with Spotkin. It is published on Steam and we continue to make updates for it. There is a different publishing paradigm in place. Now it is easy to do updates seamlessly to the end user. A Billiard Ball Computer is on my to-do list for Contraption Maker although the physics system being used would make it just a little harder because it doesn’t use swept collisions. Maybe someday in an update I’ll get it in there.

More Reading:

Conservative Logic a paper by Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli.

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A Good Egg Named Alice – Physics and Design of the Egg in Contraption Maker

By Kevin Ryan

Posted on May 16th, 2016

One of the parts in Contraption Maker is an egg. I’m going to write just a little here about its gestation and implementation.

I was looking through some old emails and chats to refresh my memory and found the chat listed below. The egg was originally going to be a breakable ball, but I decided to make it an egg instead.

I thought that an egg would have more whimsy and character than a ball. It is obvious what it is to the end user and it is also very obvious that it is fragile. In addition to that it also has a different rolling motion than a ball has which gives the opportunity for more variety in the puzzles created.

One thing that I wanted to do to give the egg more personality was to have multiple versions with different names. And each of them also had a different look so they looked better and would give a more varied look on the screen than just a single white colored egg. Here are all the eggs along with the pop up window that lets the user select which egg to use.

One other nice side benefit was that I was able to name the eggs after friends and acquaintances and let them be in game – if only as a egg. Once I had the egg implemented it seemed only natural to have it attract the dog Tinker if it broke.  Once you’ve added a new part then suddenly more possibilities open up about how it can interact with all the other parts in the game. As you add more and more parts you end up with a rich cacophony of interactions between them all.

Here is a short animation of how the egg attracts the dog when it breaks.

If you look underneath the hood you’ll see that this is accomplished by a method in the egg class that is called when any other part sees it. If the calling part is a dog then the egg returns the dog attract info, otherwise it returns NULL which means no attraction.

CMPartAttractsInfo *CMPartEgg::getAttractsInfo(CMPart *part)
{
    if (mCracked && (part->mType == PART_DOG || part->mType == PART_SCAREDY_DOG))
        return &sDogAttractsInfo;

    return NULL;
}

This is the structure that is returned to let the dog know how attractive the egg is to it. Since the dog may see multiple other items besides the egg, it is up to the dog’s AI to take this attracts info along with any other attracts info it gets from other parts and then figure out what to do. (I’m formatting code below to look okay within this blog post.)

// Constructor for the attracts info returned
// - Att postfix is the attracts values
// - Rep postfix is the repulses values
CMPartAttractsInfo(
   int minDistFrontAtt, int maxDistFrontAtt, int minDistFrontRep, int maxDistFrontRep,
   int minDistBehindAtt, int maxDistBehindAtt, int minDistBehindRep, int maxDistBehindRep,
   int priorityAtt, int priorityRep,
   bool canLookBehind, bool shouldRun, bool edible,
   int repulseHighPriorityDist=FLOAT_TO_INT32(50))

// The attracts info for the egg attraction for dog
// Only attracted to eggs in front of it that aren't more than 230 units away
static CMPartAttractsInfo sDogAttractsInfo(
   FLOAT_TO_INT32(0),FLOAT_TO_INT32(230), 0,0,
   0,0, 0,0,
   ATTRACTS_PRIORITY_ONE,ATTRACTS_PRIORITY_ONE,
   ATTRACTS_CANT_LOOK_BEHIND,ATTRACTS_SHOULDNT_RUN,ATTRACTS_EDIBLE );

One last thing on how the design evolves. These are all “good eggs.” If there are “good eggs” then shouldn’t there be “bad eggs?” It is on my internal list of parts to someday implement. Bad eggs would be smelly and repulse lots of other creature/character parts.

In closing here is the code that implements the egg:

CMPartEgg.h

CMPartEgg.cpp

 

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Aidan’s Cooler in Contraption Maker – Implementation Details

By Kevin Ryan

Posted on April 22nd, 2016

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Aidan’s Cooler in Contraption Maker – The Backstory

By Kevin Ryan

Posted on March 28th, 2016

Part two is now posted here: Aidan’s Cooler in Contraption Maker – Implementation Details

This is Aidan’s story and an explanation of how and why the cooler is one of the parts in Contraption Maker. It is the story of a brave cheerful boy and my friends from work that did something nice for him.

Sometime soon I am going to write another post that describes in some technical detail how I went about implementing Aidan’s Cooler in Contraption Make. When I do I’ll add a link to it right here at the top of this post.

 

Aidan

Aidan is my son and he was born in the first half of June 1999. He was underweight and obviously sick so he stayed in our local hospital for a few weeks while they tried to figure out what was wrong. When he was four weeks old his heart stopped for a few minutes before the doctors got it going again. He was then transferred by ambulance to UCSF (University of California, San Francisco – a research hospital) and soon after was diagnosed with Neonatal Hemochromatosis which is a liver disease that is almost always fatal (“The prognosis is extremely poor. Some infants recover with supportive care, but this rarely occurs.”). In addition to that he also had acute respiratory distress syndrome.

The doctors did not expect him to survive, but they worked heroically over many months to save him and get him to the point where he could receive a liver transplant. He had the liver transplant when he was four months old and spent most of his first year in the PICU (Pediatric Intensive Care Unit) and the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) at UCSF with various complications – very bad and scary complications. There were a handful of times where I thought he was dying in front of my wife and me.

 

 

Post Transplant

Post transplant he had numerous problems including collapsed lungs, heart problems, kidney problems, possible fungal infection in the brain, a bleed in the brain that affected his left side, acquired hydrocephalus, deaf in left ear, and more. There were occasional crises.  He wasn’t able to eat by mouth and so he had surgery to have a permanent g-tube placed. He was also on supplemental oxygen because his lungs had been damaged. He spent much of the next five years in and out of the hospital. His last major surgery was in January of 2004 where he had brain surgery (Endoscopic third ventriculostomy) which cured his hydrocephalus and allowed them to remove his shunt which was draining fluid from his brain.

We were very happy that that surgery succeeded because the fluid that was being drained by the shunt was not being absorbed in his abdomen because he had so much scar tissue there from his many surgeries. In a hospital stay previous to the brain surgery they had drained 5 lbs of fluid from his abdomen. His weight dropped from 32 to 27 lbs. This was when he was four years old.

I want to break from Aidan’s story here for a couple of paragraphs to write a short bit about his nurses. I stayed with Aidan for many weeks in the PICU, sleeping in a chair next to his bed and over the course of all those times I saw many very sick kids there. Sometimes they don’t make it. You can tell because they draw all the curtains on the room – all the walls in the PICU rooms are glass – you can see into every room. It is a tough place to be.

There are certain jobs where you are exposed to human misery and there are people that do those jobs – like the PICU nurses that became our friends. Big kudos and love to them for being a balm in such a hard place.

As he stabilized Aidan had less and less extended hospital stays and got to spend more and more time at home. When he was home he needed some supplemental oxygen. We a had big machine that would concentrate oxygen out of the air and Aidan was hooked up to it all the time with a very long tube so he could wander around the house. If we wanted to find Aidan all we had to do was follow the follow the clear plastic tube.

 

The Highway Patrolman

We lived up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains at 5,500 feet (and still do) so when we were down at sea level he didn’t need the extra oxygen. One day when he was three we were driving back from San Francisco from a visit with his liver doctors at UCSF when we were pulled over by the highway patrol near Gilroy. We hadn’t yet put on the license plate sticker for the next year – it was in the glove compartment – showed it to patrolman – all fine. Aidan was sitting in his car seat with an oxygen tank next to him – not hooked up because he didn’t need it until we got back up to altitude at Shaver Lake. The conversation with the highway patrolman went like this:

Patrolman:  Is that hooked up?
Me:  No he doesn’t need it.
Patrolman:  It really should be hooked up.
Me:  He doesn’t need it at sea level.
Patrolman:  Uh, you really should hook it up now.
Me:  We just came from the doctors and he doesn’t need it here – only up in the mountains.
Patrolman:  (with a sudden big grin) I’m talking about the car seat.
Me:  Oh! Yeah, that’s hooked up!

I’m sure we made that patrolman’s day.

 

Wilderness Hikes

Aidan is a true innocent. He will be 17 years old this June, but mentally he is probably around 6 or so. He has been through many painful procedures throughout his life. He has to have blood draws every 6 weeks to make sure that he is not rejecting his liver. Sometimes during hospital stays it has taken one and half hours to start an iv with numerous “pokes”. That is because he has been stuck with needles so many times that his veins aren’t in great shape. His body is a battlefield covered everywhere with surgical scars. And yet throughout it all he has remained brave and cheerful. He has an indomitable spirit and courage. He finds joy in simple things. He loves and is loved. He is my hero.

At home I’d carry him on my back so he could go on mountain hikes and do everything that the rest of the family does. Hikes through the wilderness are wondrous. There is magic around every bend if you just look for it. As the years went past he just got too big for me to keep carrying. The older Aidan could walk for a while, but eventually he gets very tired so then I carry him. On the hike in the two bottom photos below, I carried him for a few miles and it was really tiring. He was getting bigger and I was getting older. By the end of the hike, my arms were tired, my legs were tired, my brain was tired, and Aidan was very happy. I wanted a Black Butte Porter.

 

 

 

Walking

He wasn’t able to walk at all in his first couple of years because his left side doesn’t work too well because of the stroke. He could stand, but to move around he’d scoot on his rear. Then one day when he was two he started using a toy as a walker to get around the house. He could really zip around with that thing – I mean run fast! One time he took a corner too fast and went down with the walker on top of himself. Didn’t faze him – he was up and off again right away. It was good he figured out how to get around his “can’t walk” problem because once he became more mobile then he could more easily play with his brothers and sister.

 

 

Pikachu

When he was an infant he became very attracted to Pikachu. I spent many, many, many, many hours and days and weeks and months and eternities watching Pokemon with him at the hospital. One day when he was two or three he was with me at a Goodwill store and there was a big stuffed Pika in the discount bin. He shouted, “Pika!!” My wife heard him from across the store. That Pika goes everywhere with him. It has gone into many surgeries with him. Even today he uses it as a pillow and it travels with us whenever we go anywhere.

 

 

Steve McQueen

We will occasionally stay at the Glen Tavern Inn which is in Santa Paula. It has quite of history of old Hollywood stars staying there – Houdini, John Wayne, Rin Tin Tin, etc. In 1979 Steve McQueen lived in a hanger at the Santa Paula airport just a couple of blocks from the Glen Tavern Inn. So of course, since Steve was a patron, one of the drinks that they have at the bar there now is “The Steve McQueen”. It consists of:

-Coke
-Jack Daniels
-Bacardi 151 Rum
-Jagermeister

Aidan has gotten into the habit of finding ways to help around the house. A few years ago he started taking the trash out to the street for the garbage truck. He does lots of small tasks like this. So a couple of years ago out of the blue he decided to help mix drinks for me. “Want me to make you a Steve McQueen?” So I said sure. Now Aidan likes coke and so I had been letting him have any of the left over coke. So apparently he figured out that if he puts in more alcohol there is more left over coke for himself.

One day I filmed him making me a drink. That drink started to look very dangerous, I wanted to say hold it, but I kept my mouth shut as I watched with an impending sense of doom. I think it is the Bacardi 151 Rum that is the killer. Anyway I tried to finish that drink, sipping slowly, while watching a movie with the kids, but couldn’t. It crept up on me and eventually hit me pretty hard and I had to go lie down on the bathroom floor. The last time I felt like that was my freshman year at the University of Oregon in the Bean East dorm.

Here is the video of Aidan the bartender:

 

My Name is Aidan

Back in 2007 we visited Ireland for a couple of weeks. One night we went to Knappogue Castle for a medieval feast which was lots of fun with food and singing. Aidan really enjoyed it. When we got back to the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis where we were staying my brother gave me a poem he had written.

 

Coolers

Aidan will get interested in many different strange things and for some reason he started to like coolers. I’m not sure exactly why or what triggered it in his head, but he slowly acquired a small group of different size coolers. One day after watching Toy Story 3, I found that he had set up the coolers around a “See ‘n Say” toy, mimicking that scene from the movie. To this day he will still set up the coolers different places around the house having them do different tasks.

 

 

Dynamix to Spotkin

In 1984, a year after graduating from the University of Oregon, I was living in an apartment just off campus when I got a phone call from Damon Slye. He and Jeff Tunnell had just started up Dynamix and they wanted me to do some work for them. Not long after that they asked me to come on board as one of the original four owners of the company. Our first product was with Electronic Arts (Arctic Fox) and over the years our company grew to around 200 people. We went through a lot of ups and downs over the next 16 years. Bought out by Sierra which was good. Merged with CUC International which was very bad. Here is a New York Times article about CUC and the biggest accounting fraud ever: Asleep at the Books: A Fraud That Went On and On and On

During the years when I was spending a large part of my time in the hospital with Aidan, Jeff started up Garage Games with some former Dynamix employees. I published a few games with them before it was bought out by Barry Diller’s company (IAC) in 2007. Then he started up Pushbutton Labs which was bought out by Disney in 2012. I actually worked with Disney for a year or so before I moved on to work with Jeff again on his new venture, Spotkin. That was when I started work on Contraption Maker which is in many ways an updated version of The Incredible Machine.

So over the course of development of Contraption Maker, I implemented a whole boatload of different parts. At one point in the development I was implementing some container type parts in the game like boxes, baskets, and such. Around this time I was on one of my Eugene visits and I tell the Spotkin guys (Jeff, Jon, Keith, Tim) about how Aidan likes coolers. A few days later I get the artwork from them so that I can add cooler part to the game. They even put Aidan’s name on the cooler. It is a good thing to have work colleagues who are also your friends. In Jeff’s case a friend for over 30 years now.

Cool! I implemented it in the game and then brought Aidan into my office to see. You should have seen his face light up with a huge smile the first time he saw it.

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A longer version of Aidan’s early years is here: Aidan Ryan – Liver Transplant Story

It may take me a while because I’ll need to find some free time, but as I wrote above, I’m going to write another blog post that gives a technical description of how I took the artwork above and turned it into a cooler that acts with correct physics.

For now I am going to end this post with a more recent photo of Aidan and a video from his Make-a-Wish trip where he figured out he could make his shoe squeak.

 

 

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