27th April 2012, 4:49 PM
I've done some more research on Tetrisphere. While it is indistinguishable mathematically from a torus, most likely in terms of programming they just put a distorted fisheye lens effect over a section of a large grid with wrap-around turned on. One thing you may notice is that "spinning" the sphere doesn't really "rotate" it in the way an actual ball would. Like, if you sit a piece on a real world ball and spin it from one side to the other, it should take the same amount of time to rotate into view as it does to rotate out of view, but that isn't the case on most tetrisphere maps. You can rotate a piece out of sight and it'll take a surprisingly long or sometimes near instant amount of time to rotate back into view. A better name would have been "Tetrigrid" perhaps.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)