Representing Elements

I wasn't really sure where to post this, but here goes.

First of all, let me just say we can't simulate every known molecule in the game. Sure, we can represent elements, but molecules and their combinations are endless.

My solution/question is, what if we used our own molecules? I've been hearing talk of required compounds for different organisms (preset organisms, etc.), and I think this could be usefull.

For example,

Compound 0x00. It's great for building material.
Compound 0x01. Another type of building material.
Compound 0x10. It contains energy, and is basically like sugar.
Compound 0x11. It contains energy, and is pretty much a different kind of sugar.
Compound 0x20. It stimulates neural growth for brains based on 0x01.
Compound 0x30. It effectively destroys 0x01.

OrganismA has the ability to turn Compound 0x01 into 1/2 of a 0x10, thus fueling itself.

Biomes would have different amounts of each material, and would enable species to eat things purely based on their organic makeup. You may find that some organisms evolved the ability to eat rocks their whole lives, so we may need to limit the possible conversions.

Eh?

roadkillguy wrote:

I wasn't really sure where to post this, but here goes.

First of all, let me just say we can't simulate every known molecule in the game. Sure, we can represent elements, but molecules and their combinations are endless.

My solution/question is, what if we used our own molecules? I've been hearing talk of required compounds for different organisms (preset organisms, etc.), and I think this could be usefull.

For example,

Compound 0x00. It's great for building material.
Compound 0x01. Another type of building material.
Compound 0x10. It contains energy, and is basically like sugar.
Compound 0x11. It contains energy, and is pretty much a different kind of sugar.
Compound 0x20. It stimulates neural growth for brains based on 0x01.
Compound 0x30. It effectively destroys 0x01.

OrganismA has the ability to turn Compound 0x01 into 1/2 of a 0x10, thus fueling itself.

Biomes would have different amounts of each material, and would enable species to eat things purely based on their organic makeup. You may find that some organisms evolved the ability to eat rocks their whole lives, so we may need to limit the possible conversions.

Eh?

If i understood this right, i loved it. If i understood it right. Technical's never been my strong side. No, i'm pretty sure i get it. Yes, good ideas.

I think that including something like this, while interesting, is not needed. It adds a whole new level of complexity that would take a lot of code to implement and might not really be used much.

While this opens a whole new world of possibilities, it also opens a whole new world of problems to be solved, and while it sounds great on paper, I'm not sure it would add that much to the gameplay. Prove me wrong if you can, I would really love to be wrong here, but I fear I'm right.

I didn't think I was over complicating.. I thought I was simplifying. For some reason I thought certain biomes were requiring different kinds of elements, soil, and such..

Nevermind then!

Biomes require resources. (Elements would be a little complicated.)
However, the microbial stage probably doesn't need any resources beyond the most basic assignations for food, light, and other stimuli.

While obviously these would have actual names rather than numbers, it seems like a pretty good idea. Not to mention that some things can be simplified, like the thousands of different carbon chain molecules (though some of the simpler ones should be unique from the rest of the carbon strings).

TL;DR: Supported with refinement

i think this idea is of the following type: do it in your spare time and make it work and easy to increase or adapt but in general it is to time consuming to be used it might be the thing we will be working with but we don't even have much of framework let stand enough to undertake such programs

just like an hunter gatherer society can't build the pyramids


*edit* you might also need to understand the sheer size of this thing i'm talking about thousends of elements if not more then a million as we are also talking about universal proportions and this kind of software is a base brick so when we get the system running and we are going to implement this then we kinda need to fiddle everything in such way that it works

basic program with a team of 20-50 coders maybe a month's work if not more
then adapting everything around it also a month
and then the most annoying ironing the bug's out the biggest ones will be out after a month of testing and we will then need bug fixes every week
*note* i'm not yet experienced with coding but i do understand the sheer size we are talking with and we need people that has been working with gigantic projects that can do such task and do it fast enough to make it not the biggest thing we made

Yeah, we've axed actually having chemistry in the game. and there's only 100 sme elements, depending on how many you want to simulate, and only about 90 of them would really be worth implementing, even if we did do this.

~sciocont wrote:

Yeah, we've axed actually having chemistry in the game. and there's only 100 sme elements, depending on how many you want to simulate, and only about 90 of them would really be worth implementing, even if we did do this.

if people want to edit it and increase it then it will end up much more and what you are talking about are Earthly wealth so a small part of the total things

@Raven: Millions of elements? Sure you don't mean millions of compounds?


@roadkillguy: Love it.
Honestly we seriously need to begin stripping down complex scientific aspects into simple feasible game-play mechanics.

I mean

We should make these things more simple.

This kind of thing seems to be a good area of simplicity to plan about - rather than creating every crucial element/compound, giving them their real life names and sweating over whether every single property is right in case some angry mob of scientists are gonna chase us out of town for being unrealistic, we give them systematic compound names like you said with preset properties (perhaps based on real life elements or compounds) and let the player decide what they are, even name them.

Before we agree on this, I just want you to ask yourself: Is it an absolute nessesity? How many players will use it? What alternatives do we have?

Pezzalis wrote:

@Raven: Millions of elements? Sure you don't mean millions of compounds?


This kind of thing seems to be a good area of simplicity to plan about - rather than creating every crucial element/compound, giving them their real life names and sweating over whether every single property is right in case some angry mob of scientists are gonna chase us out of town for being unrealistic, we give them systematic compound names like you said with preset properties (perhaps based on real life elements or compounds) and let the player decide what they are, even name them.

chemistry ain't my field of knowledge so as you already seen and like i said before we wrote down what we have found and we are still stuck on this BELGIUMy rock that we just randomly destroy (just saying) we managed to get (what was it) 30 men on the moon or so and that 40 years ago or something and still we can't get further then our space station

oh and we don't even know our own planet to the max so who are we to say that there are only 100(??) natural elements!

Please study chemistry before you actually make any claims about it. There are 94 elements that occur naturally on earth, and 80 of these are stable. Why? because an element is determined by the number of protons that it has, and you do not have half of a proton. Ever. You go all the way from 1 proton to wherever the heck you want to stop. We know how many natural elements there are, because when we tried to simulate the next batch, they did not stick around, no matter what we did.
You are quite right in that chemistry is not your feild.

Also, there's no need to rant at Pez. Pez was wondering what you meant.

@ scio - your filter might be amended.

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

Please study chemistry before you actually make any claims about it. There are 94 elements that occur naturally on earth, and 80 of these are stable. Why? because an element is determined by the number of protons that it has, and you do not have half of a proton. Ever. You go all the way from 1 proton to wherever the heck you want to stop. We know how many natural elements there are, because when we tried to simulate the next batch, they did not stick around, no matter what we did.
You are quite right in that chemistry is not your feild.

Also, there's no need to rant at Pez. Pez was wondering what you meant.

@ scio - your filter might be amended.

i wasn't ranting maybe a little to energetic in clarifying

All right. I'm sure I can find a good place for you to learn a little chemistry, if you still have questions. It would probably be in english, though.

NO CHEMISTRY. ADMIN HAS SPOKEN.

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

All right. I'm sure I can find a good place for you to learn a little chemistry, if you still have questions. It would probably be in english, though.

english ain't a problem it is a problem when i need to translate data stored in dutch in my brain to english

All right then, you up for it Raven?

Admin: we hear you.

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

All right then, you up for it Raven?

Admin: we hear you.

always

PM when I find you something good. (It will not be now... I unfortunately have to go to lab.)
This way we can disembark the thread before ADMIN blows my eardrums out.

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

PM when I find you something good. (It will not be now... I unfortunately have to go to lab.)
This way we can disembark the thread before ADMIN blows my eardrums out.

ok what you want

@ADMIN:
No chemistry as in no to the OP?

Or no to My/Ravens/Calli's discussion?

I'm pretty sure he means "no more belgiumming editors!"

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

I'm pretty sure he means "no more belgiumming editors!"

No more editors? I though he meant no real-life chemistry, with real-life elements and compounds, in which case our OP's 'materials' would be fine; at the time we were discussing real-world chemistry.