Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Blargityblarg]

Australian Chem Student here, doing Unit 2, which is the second six months of my first year of Chem. We're either doing or just finished Redox, and we did Stoich, Lowry-Bronsted stuff and a pile of stuff about water before that.

[Supermikhail]

Oh, I didn't reply! Also, a quick update.

I think a simple game like tetris may be an idea approach as it's going to make it pretty easy to switch the level of chemistry without changing the level of difficulty very much. Well, level of chemistry is somewhat level of difficulty, but it doesn't necessarily have to be.

During past few days I've stumbled on some more ideas of "a well known game into a chemistry game" conversion. One of the more extreme is Rubik's cube. Extreme because I used to have a computer version and the controls were quite fiddly. Others - I don't really know how they are called. Basically, the hacking minigame from System Shock and Bioshock. And the puzzle where you have to move square pieces around replacing the empty square. In the first one you uncover pieces of a molecule and try to connect the two ends of it, constructing hopefully something explosive. In the second one you reconstruct a piece of the Periodic Table. Well, it may not be so interesting to play, but it'll probably make an interesting programming challenge.

[Talanic]

That hacking minigame bears the original name (or at least, as far as I'm aware it's the original name) of "Pipe Dream". 

The second has no special name that I know of; I think it's just a sliding tile puzzle. 

[eerr]

What good is a hacking game if nothing is at stake?

[Supermikhail]

Thanks, Talanic. It appears that the hacking minigame's original name is Pipe Mania

@eerr: Yeah, what good was Pipe Mania originally? Although it appears to be so mildly popular as to become a recurring element of other games, to be regularly included into cellphone games and cloned a number of times. To answer the question more directly - what do you mean? Explosions in the end, of course! Well, and any other available interesting visual effects.

On that note, today at a lecture I've been reminded that figuring out a compounds colour procedurally might not be an impossible task. Well, I'll have to dig some more into this, it seems. Dislaimer: the link doesn't explain everything!

[Virex]

CFT only applies properly for metal complexes (and maybe also some ceramics), which though common aren't seen that often outside of the chemical industry and it has also been surpassed by Ligand field theory, though CFT is often easier to explain. For metals you would probably be looking at their band gap and for organics and non-metalics the defining property is probably conjugation.

[Supermikhail]

I assume the band gap and conjugation would need to be entered by hand. I just wonder how efficient it would be as opposed to entering just colour information for every material that the game has. And for groups of materials. Like, for example a lot of liquid organics just don't have any colour, and a lot of metals just have a metal colour, right? And as you've said, there aren't many metal complexes outside of chemistry industry, and the game isn't for chemists, really.

By the way, I believe I haven't said anything about that game Chemicus on which I managed to form some opinion. Namely -

One reviewer said that the game was fun overall, had nonsense puzzles quite common in adventure games, required her to constantly turn to a chemistry encyclopedia that came with the game, and also she had to seek help of her chemist friend. That's pretty amazing, I think, and is quite opposite to what I want to achieve, namely, that school students should be able to play the game.

[Virex]

I assume the band gap and conjugation would need to be entered by hand. I just wonder how efficient it would be as opposed to entering just colour information for every material that the game has. And for groups of materials. Like, for example a lot of liquid organics just don't have any colour, and a lot of metals just have a metal colour, right?

Well, there technically isn't just one metal color. Steel, Chrome, Zinc, Silver, polished aluminum, magnesium, they all differ in color slightly. Similarly, gold, brass and copper also differ quite a bit. You could hand-wave most of this if you're going for low-end graphics though. You'll still need to account for the organic and inorganic pigments though (everybody loves azo's )
Also, entering the information by hand is going to be faster, because you need to punch in just as much information but the program itself will be more efficient. Especialy because quantum mechanical calculations are a DRAIN on resources.[/quote]

[Supermikhail]

I'm retarded. Or not. I mean, coding procedural stuff is much more fun than writing data-bases, right? Although, as it turns out, I don't have enough "levels" in some chemistry and not-very-chemistry stuff to work on procedural, anyway. For example, quantum mechanical calculations? What? I wouldn't even know what to Google.

[Virex]

If you know nothing about quantum mechanics, I would suggest starting with the Schrödinger equation, but don't keep lagging on it till you understand everything because you usualy only need to know about the time-invariant version. The Pauli exclusion principle is also important. Next thing would be the Hartree-Fock method and the Slater determinant, which can be used to calculate the required properties. While the original Hartree-Fock method isn't the most accurate, it's the easiest to implement and cheap to calculate compared to other methods (and I know roughly how to work with it, which can't be said of other methods)

[Supermikhail]

Well, I know something about quantum mechanics, I'm just very bad with the related math. For example, you can use the Shrödinger equation to calculate something useful? Especially at runtime? Our professor told us... although he didn't tell us anything about the Hartree-Fock method. Hm. That's fascinating. Although I don't see myself wrapping my head around it in near future. Also, almost all quantum chemistry software is programmed in Fortran? Well, that's depressing.

[Virex]

For example, you can use the Shrödinger equation to calculate something useful

Erm, no. But it is necessary background information.

[eerr]

Honestly? the biggest problem I can think of is having a large variety of materials.

If they all react with each other, that could be alot of reactions.

So for 10 materials, is what, 81 pairs?
You can't really afford that many with a great amount of detail.

Conclusions: you must either have a large number of materials as the only source,
otherwise materials must be divided into sets, with possible combinations only in that set.

If you want multiple materials combine, it just gets even more complicated.

[Supermikhail]

I thought this problem would be sort of circumvented in the Chetris version, because all the substances and compounds would be discrete blocks, and can react only in horizontal rows, with two other blocks at the most.

Or you're talking about a different thing entirely...

And you know, I don't think I'm ever going to be able to program it. I just keep promising myself that once I get some time, I'll dive into programming again... It's just sad... And I can't figure out how you get 81 pairs out of 10 materials. I'm just losing hope. And don't have any inspiration. Also, it appears that nobody likes C++ anymore and I thought it was such a rad language.

[Supermikhail]

Oh. I thought that's enough whining.

How about a game where you're given atoms to make compounds from. Each atom has got predefined valency in the form of several lines sticking out of a sphere. The shape and hybridisation can be changed, but not the number of bonds. When you piece the atoms together in a correct way, they turn into a piece of the compound they represent.

At that point I'm thinking of handing the reins to some external physics engine, which makes solids, liquids and gases behave like they have to. I also had an idea to make players collect compounds into appropriate vessels, but I can't figure out the purpose of that now.

I believe there's little possibility of simplifying this idea further, so now I'd like to get to some mental prototyping (at least). Hey, I think I've got a design document template around here somewhere.

A note: I decided that making the compound change optical properties during construction would be unnecessarily confusing to players.