Explain ending of Tartarus Engine ?

[Lûte the Goblin]

Could someone explain the ending of Tartarus Engine to me? It leaves me puzzled.

[omisis046]

The machine tries to awake you, but it is st wrongly and awake you in loops.

[Zhnigo]

The way I see it:

The machine runs at a basic x1.2 time dilation rate. Their plan is to simulate the engine within the engine recursively, so that the second layer has 1.2*1.2 = 1.44 time dilation rate, the next layer is 1.44*1.2 = 1.728, etc, to an unspecified depth. The programmer says one second in the real world will give them years in the simulation, which suggests 50+ million layers of recursion. It is THANKFULLY not infinite since the machine is a finite physical object.

Now as things go south, the programmer says he forgot to disable something before getting cut off. I assume he forgot to set a limit on the endless recursion, which is why the machine freezes and crashes when they first run their custom preset. Without a limit to recursion, the machine runs out of processing power and/or memory.

Now what actually happens is that they DO manage to directly reach the deepest layer of recursion possible, as they planned. We don't know how deep it is, but again it has to be more than 50 million layers down, probably much more, since without recursion limit the engine was creating layers until it ran out of memory. This is why the layer appears empty and dark, as there's literally no processing power left to render anything.

Then, as a failsafe, the engine shuts down the simulation and pulls us back out. The problem, however, is that while starting the simulation we reached the deepest layer instantly - as we planned - but on stopping the simulation the machine brings us back layer by layer, which means we will now perceive being confined to the chair, going back through said millions of layers one by one before reaching the real world, which will take us years of perceived time, if not decades, since we don't know just how many layers deep we are. Thankfully, at least it's not infinite.

[_d4Mn_]

Publicado originalmente por DitchHeadBeluxe:

That was the impression I got, stuck for a few seconds in Mental Hell for what will feels to them like eternity. But then, like, what's the vibe in the room when everybody wakes back up after "31.53 billion years"?

They will eventually kill themselves due to the mental damage this whole thing caused.
Mike has another game, one of his first creation. It's called Infineural, the scenario is very similar there. Look it up on youtube or support him and buy it on Itch.

[Arachniddeus]

Publicado originalmente por Zhnigo:

The way I see it:

The machine runs at a basic x1.2 time dilation rate. Their plan is to simulate the engine within the engine recursively, so that the second layer has 1.2*1.2 = 1.44 time dilation rate, the next layer is 1.44*1.2 = 1.728, etc, to an unspecified depth. The programmer says one second in the real world will give them years in the simulation, which suggests 50+ million layers of recursion. It is THANKFULLY not infinite since the machine is a finite physical object.

Now as things go south, the programmer says he forgot to disable something before getting cut off. I assume he forgot to set a limit on the endless recursion, which is why the machine freezes and crashes when they first run their custom preset. Without a limit to recursion, the machine runs out of processing power and/or memory.

Now what actually happens is that they DO manage to directly reach the deepest layer of recursion possible, as they planned. We don't know how deep it is, but again it has to be more than 50 million layers down, probably much more, since without recursion limit the engine was creating layers until it ran out of memory. This is why the layer appears empty and dark, as there's literally no processing power left to render anything.

Then, as a failsafe, the engine shuts down the simulation and pulls us back out. The problem, however, is that while starting the simulation we reached the deepest layer instantly - as we planned - but on stopping the simulation the machine brings us back layer by layer, which means we will now perceive being confined to the chair, going back through said millions of layers one by one before reaching the real world, which will take us years of perceived time, if not decades, since we don't know just how many layers deep we are. Thankfully, at least it's not infinite.

In fact, it sounds much more logical and terrible than just "They miscalculated and are now in a regular virtual prison with everyone else." And the visuals are much more suitable for this theory. However, I think that the time dilation will work at least somehow, so they are there for at least a decade.

[Miankot]

What I want to know is, why would all three of them strap themselves to the machines at the same time? If something bad were to happen then one of them could troubleshoot and make sure no permanent mental damage happened. Seems like a complete idiotic plan: use random code from anonymous source, all three jump in to infinity for...what was the point of all this?

[rxmanwashere]

Publicado originalmente por Miankot:

What I want to know is, why would all three of them strap themselves to the machines at the same time? If something bad were to happen then one of them could troubleshoot and make sure no permanent mental damage happened. Seems like a complete idiotic plan: use random code from anonymous source, all three jump in to infinity for...what was the point of all this?

They talked about wanting to create the "perfect preset" and in the elevator say they're diverting all power away from inmates and only toward their simulation for maximum power output. I think they three wanted to use this "cascading preset" so they would have basically infinite time to create a personalized utopia simulation within the machine: their "perfect preset". The text at the beginning of the game more or less says: "There are safeguards to prevent people from using the machine for their personal gain... but there's no such thing as absolute security." When they test the machine by entering the potato peeler preset, one of the guys also says something like, "We [humans] made such a powerful technological innovation and all we're using it for is torment" as apposed to literally anything else. Clearly, they're fed up with whoever is calling shots with the machine and decided to take matters into their own hands.

Honestly I think they were just too excited and trusting of each other and their own abilities that they weren't thinking it could go so wrong, especially not in the literal worst way possible. Such an innocent mistake led to them being trapped in a hell of their own making for what might as well be forever...

But I absolutely agree that it was stupid af, as soon as dude said "Oh I just found the code" I knew his dumbass was gonna get them in so much trouble

[battlekruiser]

Publicado originalmente por Ortinsbane:

It's not that they got pulled "through multiple layers of the engine", is that they simulating the tartarus computer inside of itself, at least that's how I understand the "cascade effect". If you run a simulation of the computer at 120%, the next simulation of itself will run at 144%, and so forth. The problem is that the code they used did not have a way to stop the recursion, so it will be forever simulating itself again and again, each time faster.

*now* it hit me. The goosebumps.
How long does it take a city sized computer (freshly rebooted) to have a stack overflow? That's if they're lucky and it's not bounded by memory instead.