EricDB

Eric, if time was the dimension being traveled and the player was being surrounded by enemies, he would move backward in time to BEFORE the enemies were there, not to a different PLACE where there are no enemies.
That is an idea to use a forth spacial dimension to travel through 'options' or variations in the current 3D reality, and a good one. Basically, alternate realities.
I love how this game would work.
Now, there will be people who come on here and say things along the lines of, "it wouldn't work because we couldn't see the other options all at once. We only see 3D etc.'
I would like to remind them right now that we don't have to. A normal 3D view of the world with the ability to move through the 4th is enough.
Now how exactly would we create the 'random variation' in a way that could be used in actual gameplay?
It must have limits and be very predictable variation so that level design does not boil down to random 'sandbox' style generation.

I agree with you, rwilson, and the word for what you're describing in the last sentence is "continuity".  We're only adding one additional linear dimension, and we're requiring change along this dimension to be continuous, which is precisely how the concept of "time as the fourth dimension" operates.  

I guess the person who originally suggested this probably had in mind that "regular time" would be operating as normal, and this other extra dimension would be in addition.  That would be kind of like two-dimensional time, with the player free to move back and forth in one of the two time dimensions.  It is certainly an interesting idea.

I was reading this and someone mentioned how impossible it would be to make a game like GTA in four dimensions (not to be specific, that was their example.) Well my idea would be to take any good 3d game and stack tons of copies of the game world on top of each other in the fourth dimension. Immagine it like stacking tons of copies of a 2d game on top of each other through the third dimension. The player can then turn through the 4th dimension (I'm having a hard time visualizing what that would be like, but in the 2d analogy, the player would turn through the third dimension and see a skewed or more distant version of the existing world.) Then you can walk through the alternate versions of the game world and then turn back again and be in a completely different one. Normally this would be completely useless except as an interesting visual effect, but each alternate world will have slight random variations, which build up the farther you travel. So if you are stuck in a room with hundreds of enemies coming towards you, all you have to do is turn into the fourth dimension and run until you find a world where the enemies are gone, the layout of the map has changed in your favor, there are better weapons lying around you can use, etc.

That's precisely the sense in which time is referred to as the fourth dimension.

Wow.  If you study math long enough, you forget how mysterious things like "infinity", "four-dimensional" (let alone nineteen- or infinite-dimensional) or "square root of minus one" can seem to those who haven't.  

Seriously guys, take Yourself's word for it--there's nothing controversial or mysterious about 4D geometry.

I just found out that VirtualBox 3.04 is out by now. If you get that, you don't need to mess with WineD3D. Just make sure in install Guest Additions and check the box to enable 3D. You still have to do this in Safe Mode, I think.

Unfortunately, the same problem exists with running games in windowed mode.

I almost have this working. For reference, my system is a three-year-old Dell XPS m1210 laptop with 2G RAM and an nvidia 7400go GPU with 64M dedicated memory, running Ubuntu Jaunty. Here's what I did:

• Set up a Virtual Box machine running XP.
• Booted into Safe Mode, then chose Devices -> Install Guest Additions.
• Rebooted, installed DX9 from microsoft.com.
• Installed WineD3D (installer version) from http://www.nongnu.org/wined3d/.
• In the settings for the virtual machine, I enabled 3D acceleration, allocated 64M of graphics memory, and enabled audio (ALSA/AC97).
• Ran dxdiag to verify that things are working. DX7 failed; DX8 and DX9 worked.

After that, I can run GM7 just fine. The only remaining problem is that when I run a game in windowed mode, everything is shifted up by a few hundred pixels, leaving the bottom ~half of the screen black. I can almost completely get around this by having the game reset the screen resolution, and moving my taskbar to the left of the screen. Still, there's about 10-20 pixels of offset left. I haven't figured out how to fix this yet.

I suspect the problem is with WineD3D, because I've seen the exact same problem (vertical offset of graphics) while running Plants vs. Zombies under Wine.

If anyone has any luck with the offset problem, I'd love to hear about it.

Edit: Running in "full screen" mode works perfectly. It's not actually full screen; my real resolution doesn't change, but the game looks good otherwise. I guess if you didn't want full screen, you could change the setting right before you distribute it (preferably after testing on someone else's real Windows box). But 99% of your development can be done under Linux or the host OS of your choice, which is pretty cool.