Suggestions! (new)

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testtubegames
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Re: Suggestions! (new)

Post by testtubegames »

wtg62 wrote:If you decide to save the lines, add a way to delete them at anytime, as I usually toggle orbits on/off for the purpose of removing the lines (other people probably do too).
Yeah, I agree. Maybe some tweaks to the 'clear all' button... so there's a way to clear *just planets*, *just orbits*, and both.

I'd also like to add back in the 'medium lines', where the orbit only tracks for a second or so. Those can be pretty instructive (you can easily see how fast objects are moving)
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Re: Suggestions! (new)

Post by A Random Player »

testtubegames wrote:
wtg62 wrote:If you decide to save the lines, add a way to delete them at anytime, as I usually toggle orbits on/off for the purpose of removing the lines (other people probably do too).
Yeah, I agree. Maybe some tweaks to the 'clear all' button... so there's a way to clear *just planets*, *just orbits*, and both.

I'd also like to add back in the 'medium lines', where the orbit only tracks for a second or so. Those can be pretty instructive (you can easily see how fast objects are moving)
Or just add vectors for things like forces/velocities :P
(Though if you're adding that, why not some textboxes that display things like distance between objects or velocity relative to an objects (selectable)?)
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Re: Suggestions! (new)

Post by exfret »

What about the undead gravitons when I delete a fixed star? Or, how do I delete a planet and its orbit? Or, what if I want to delete the orbits of just some planets? Or maybe I just want to crop those orbits.
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testtubegames
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Re: Suggestions! (new)

Post by testtubegames »

exfret wrote:What about the undead gravitons when I delete a fixed star?

Haven't had a chance to fix this yet, but don't worry, I haven't forgotten about the ghost gravitons (aaah! Was that a ghost graviton creeping around the other room? Liiiiiiiigo -- can you come check in the closet? I'm scared)
exfret wrote:Or, how do I delete a planet and its orbit? Or, what if I want to delete the orbits of just some planets?Or maybe I just want to crop those orbits.
Maybe I could add those into the options when you select a planet ("track", "trash", "clear my orbit"). The way the orbits work, though, it would be treated like zooming... everything would need to redraw, and there'd be some upper limit to how far back in time it redraws.

The reason it would need to redraw is the pixels don't remember who put them there.

Oooo! Another, easier way to do this would be an 'eraser.' So instead of trying to delete a particular orbit... you can just move the mouse around and erase whatever. This might even be close to what you're interested in (no redraw/upper limits or anything, either).
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Re: Suggestions! (new)

Post by exfret »

Full screen isn't on the list. And, a 'gravity guide' would be a nice educational addition. (I guess I'll need to go in more depth about what I mean. Here, but I'll do that later). Also, having different screens running at the same time w/ the ability to switch using tabs would be good (all within the same browser tab). It would also be cool to be able to see the difference of where a planet goes with changes in the starting conditions on the same screen. Oh, and don't forget to include energy (total, kinetic, potential, maybe thermal if there's any energy loss for the collisions), position, velocity, acceleration, change in acceleration, change in the change of acceleration, change in the change in the change of my pockets of acceleration, etc (actually, just up through acceleration. These could be shown w/ arrows and numbers, and could be measured by your current reference frame or the 'absolute' reference frame. More planet variables could be distance traveled, age, [a slew of other useless numbers that I just thought of], name (optional), description (optional), and the planet's Facebook page link (not optional). Oh, and have you added in taking a picture yet? Oh, and allow the user to take the Fourier transform of any closed orbits (just thought of this and at first didn't mean it, but now I'm contemplating it). There should also be a few save slots built in (so you don't have to save to a text pad). Also, leaderboards (total time playing, clicks, cps, golden cookie clicks, number of antimatter condensers, wait wrong game. Scratch that all out). Oh, a 'boost' feature would be cool (and maybe a [opposite-of-boost] feature, too). Oh and you could have a shared gallery and when the paid split comes around, you could give non-paying users a limited amount of save slots and have no limit for paid users. Well, my thundercloud of ideas is dissipating now, but yeah, add in that full screen. That's all I was planning on posting about anyways.

Edit: Center of mass of objects selected, distance between two objects...
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Re: Suggestions! (new)

Post by testtubegames »

exfret wrote:IDEASTORM
High density feedback! I love it! Let me break it down bit by bit...

*Full screen: yes! In fact, the downloadable version will have full-screen mode with no more work on my part. I think I might leave that off the free online mode - partially for the speed -- the less you need to draw the faster the sim should go in the browser.

*I love the idea of a gravity guide, so much right now has been focused on making tools for people, assuming they can figure out what's going on. But 'what is the equation for the force of gravity', 'what is a closed/open orbit', 'Kepler's laws in action', 'what are lagrange points', those could all be awesomely shown off with the sim. Maybe in connection with a nice set of illustrative presets that I'd like to have. Good starting-point setups that people can load in.

*Different screens you can tab back-and-forth from -- could be neat. You could even copy and paste the 'seeds' as an easy way to change one thing about the sim. Would just have to figure out how to make it user-friendly (and still keep the sim elegant, without people getting overwhelmed with multiple screens). Your idea with overlaying two setups would just require having the planets on separate 'layers' - neat idea, though I wonder how much use that feature would get.

*Displaying numbers: yes -- I'd like to build upon the basic planet window I have now (which shows just the mass and speed) -- and of course let you change all those values on the fly, too. Age and distance traveled would be really fun, names of course are neat, can't think of a great reason for description yet, but I'm sure you could make a convincing argument ("this is at lagrange point 3, check to see whether it's stable or not" perhaps?). Would be wary of building up the planets with too much info, though, since part of the fun is just spamming the screen with 100 planets -- at which point finding a certain description/planet/name would be like a needle in a haystack. *Camera isn't in yet, but I do need to add that, thanks for reminding me.

*Save slots = yes, probably could combine nicely with the 'tabs' you were talking about earlier -- ways to quickly go to old setups.

*Leaderboards -- not sure if that fits with the style of the simulation, wanna keep some 'elegance' about it, but do want easy ways to share setups with other people.

*And by boost you mean speed up time, right? It's in the current version, you can go from x10 all the way down to x.1.

But yeah, full screen will be in the full version most definitely.

Not-really-an-edit: Center of mass for selected objects = yes! Love the distance idea, too, such a useful number.
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Re: Suggestions! (new)

Post by exfret »

Full screen- Just saying because it wasn't even on the list. Maybe you should have a separate list for just full version features.

Gravity Guide- Yeah, But I was thinking about more advanced stuff, like experiments you can try, why r^1 has ellipses and all, and how the gravity simulator works. That stuff would probably be better as an add-on to yours, though.

Different screens- I got this idea from the different layers in Golly (it's a Game of Life simulator if you didn't know that already). Also, I was thinking this could be a good thing to default to 'off' (so as to not confuse new users), but which you could later toggle on in the options. I'm also thinking that toggling other info on/off might be useful for planet displays and the regular display. That way, the information can be available, but it doesn't spam your screen because you won't toggle everything on at the same time, but rather the stuff that matters to you. You could also have a feature to jump to planets with names if finding a named planet ever becomes a problem.

Save slots- I thought this would be such a time and hassle-saver to not have to save the code elsewhere. I think this is a really good thing for you to implement.

Leaderboards- That was just a joke (I meant ignore the whole sentence when I said scratch that, not just the part in parentheses). I'm not sure if you got the cookie clicker reference...

No, boost would be speed boost (in the direction the planet is traveling). Like if you wanted to move a planet into a higher energy orbit. This is kind of a FSP inspired idea. I'm also thinking about how orbits might look if you had the planet constantly accelerating like there was an engine strapped on. Not sure if this would be currently implementable, though, because it depends heavily on a planet's rotation, and rotation has not been implemented. You could have a constant boost in the planet's direction of travel, though, and that wouldn't require rotation. It would be like inertia, except it creates more acceleration.

Definitely-an-edit: Yeah, there's other useful information that could be displayed, too. You can have this information not shown by default to make it less spammy, but other numbers could be:
# of planets selected
Total mass
Velocity vector of overall selection
Density
Pointing out any named or described planets
Heaviest planet, lightest planet, fastest, slowest, etc.
Average and mean mass, velocity (mean velocity would obviously be the velocity vector for the whole group, but average velocity might be interesting), age, distance traveled, etc.
Area of selection
Time your selection has existed
A zoom to your selection option
Etc.
Anyways, much of that information is probably useless anyways, so you decide which you're actually going to add in to the game. That's your job. My job is to fantasize the perfect Gravity Simulator where everything you could and couldn't possibly imagine exists and then idea storm it's features, hoping your Gravity Simulator gets somewhere close to that fantasy.

I also thought of this sort of general relativity stuff: slowing down time in a certain region of space. Adding space to a certain region. Ooh maybe you could add space in a way that makes it like HYPERBOLA LAND!!!!! Sorry, non-Euclidean geometry just excites me. :)
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Re: Suggestions! (new)

Post by A Random Player »

What if...
We could write scripts for the gravity sim? Not just my python code generation, a full(-ish) scripting language implemented/used in the sim. I'm not sure what the syntax would be, though. (my examples take some from VB) I imagine it to have variable assignment, math functions (esp sin/cos/tan), and ability to get/set planetary values (like [OnPress "D" | object(3).XV = object(3).XV + .1]).
This would basically do everything on the thread, except some things about trails/unimplemented things. Examples:

Tooltips: [OnPress "T" | Write(-5,4,"Example Tooltip")] (Assumes we can draw)

Nonacceleratable stars: [object(4).XV = 5.1 | object(4).YV = -2.4]

Vectors: [For indexvar = 0 to objects.count | DrawLine(object(indexvar).ScreenX,object(indexvar).ScreenY,object(indexvar).ScreenX+object(indexvar).XV,object(indexvar).ScreenY+object(indexvar).YV) | Loop] (assumes drawing lines)

Spaceship/Nudging: [OnPress "W" | object(selected).YV = object(selected).YV + .1] [OnPress "A" | object(selected).XV = object(selected).XV - .1] [OnPress "S" | object(selected).YV = object(selected).YV - .1] [OnPress "D" | object(selected).XV = object(selected).XV + .1] (assumes "selected" as variable holding current planet's index)
|||||Note: This assumes no rotating screen. But that's what's so good about using scripts: Someone can edit them to fix them.

Planet labels: [Write(object(2).ScreenX,object(2).ScreenY,"Kerbin - Our Home")] (Assumes we can draw)

Other possible stuff: Distance between objects, distance travelled, facebook link, Center of Mass of group and values, Cookie=Planet clicks, etc)

Some global variables would be needed to store things like angle of spaceship. Other things I haven't mentioned might be adding planets, changing force law (Reset to r^-2), time delay ([OnPress "Q" | Trigger("Explode",5)] [OnTrigger "Explode"] etc?), and almost everything. Maybe even a full guide could be written.
The scripts without "OnPress" or something would be triggered every frame.

And here's a gigantic understatement: Might be a bit hard to implement.

(Though this may make exfret "overdrive" again :D)
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Re: Suggestions! (new)

Post by exfret »

This just have me an idea: what if you programmed a game... Wait for it... About programming! I'm just imagining how awesomely meta that would be. You could, inside the program for programming, write a program about programming that let you write another program, this one also with its own program in it that you code a program within that you code a program again that you code a program within that you program a program within that you... It would be a FRACTAL computer program. Oh, and you could program within the 'last' program, so it would be, like, infinite programming, and then you could program about graphs that are fractals in non-Euclidean Geometry that give you diamonds when you mine them with an iron pickaxe or higher, and then you could give the diamonds to Andy for being so awesome! Oh man, that would be so awesome...

Though, yeah, programming within the game would be cool, and I've seen it before, so it's definitely possible. I don't know if it's worth the effort, though, but that's up to Andy.

Programming in GSim would be nice but what about in Velocity Raptor?! I could give Velocity Raptor a pickaxe and program in diamonds and creepers and four-way cannons and Velocity Raptor would get her own GSim and there would be cookies that you CLICK ON and you would be able to make a script for a Velocity Raptor game so you could play Velocity Raptor within Velocity Raptor and Prof. Rex would be so jealous and you could change the relativity laws and make it first person and switch it up so that Velocity Raptor has a bazooka-machine gun and the cannons are dodging her and you could even make the cannons pea shooters and play plants versus the Higgs Boson and you could predict whether the plants should walk or run in the rain using your pocket sundial to know that it's raining but then it's actually snowing and they cancel school and you get to finish your English project and have a good Happy Tuesday handing out lots of stickers and at the end of the day write replies to people on your favorite forum. So yeah, programming in Velocity Raptor would be Awesome-[insert word here].
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exfret
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Re: Suggestions! (new)

Post by exfret »

I think Andy just implemented the first command of the GSim programming language. It's called
Overdrive args
In the absence of arguments, the parameter defaults to "exfret."

GSim Command Console
Warning: System.Planets > 10000
Presenting Alert...
Closing Alert...
Fatal Error: Quitting GSim
GSim Unsuccessfully Closed: Presenting BSOD
Loading GSim V2...
GSim V2 successfully loaded
Toggling Console Visibility...
No User Command Found>?
Running User Command>Overdrive
No User Command Found>help Overdrive
No User Command Found>help
Running User Command>Overdrive
Running User Command>Python
Retrieving Python...
No User Command Found>Stop
Sending Python...
No User Command Found>Quit
Running User Command>Overdrive Python
Flipping Overdrive Bit on Python...
LD50 of Python Successfully Lowered to One
Running User Command>Overdrive Python
Error: You do not have permission to use that command
No User Command Found>Overdrive Permissions
Python delivered
Running User Command>Overdrive
No User Command Found> Overdr
External Error: Lingering Network Connections
Last edited by exfret on Wed Mar 19, 2014 5:00 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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