[DGD] time travel

[Noah Gibbs]

  Well, if you rolled back to the moment of the paradox and then went forward, it'd depend on how your "going forward" algorithm worked, how far it went and so on.  That's a good question in general, and depends a lot on other game mechanics.

  One fine fix for this would be to not allow time-travel in your "going forward" algorithm, so it would only roll forward until the first instance of time-travel, and then stop.  However, that would still be rolling forward from a state where your grandfather was dead -- there'd just be no you to kill him, and so no obvious cause of death.  So there would be no you, even though you had had an effect on the game state.  Killing your grandfather would still destroy your character, basically, assuming no time-travel (or other algorithm-interrupting events) were to occur between your killing him and whenever you rolled forward to.

--- On Sat, 2/21/09, Shentino <shentino at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Shentino <shentino at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [DGD] time travel
> To: "All about Dworkin's Game Driver" <dgd at dworkin.nl>
> Date: Saturday, February 21, 2009, 8:10 PM
> I just thought of something.
> 
> How do you resolve paradoxes, like going back and killing
> your own
> grandfather?
> 
> On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Shentino
> <shentino at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Personally, when dealing with a RNG I'd just
> settle for dropping a symlink
> > to /dev/urandom :P
> >
> > But I agree that history is very bad at making itself
> amenable to PCG,
> > owing to the unidirectionality of it.  The arrow of
> time, if you will.
> >
> > Otherwise, it would be like looking at a TV screen
> without a channel tuned
> > in...nothing but white noise.
> >
> > Also, considering that the future is derived from the
> past, and not vice
> > versa, the past would probably need to be generated
> first.  This factor also
> > makes it hard to preserve the present when someone
> messes with the past.  In
> > fact, *active* time travellers often count on this. 
> Passive tourists ala
> > Chrono Trigger, not so much.
> >
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