Quake II Mods for Engineering Students 52
gleeklet writes "Has anyone else seen that there is a need for inexpensive 3D visualization software for presentations and classroom lectures? There is a Chemical Engineering package available but compared to video game software, the graphics are a bit lacking. My goal was to create a chemical plant with the process control algorithms coded into the Quake II source. As a short demo I spent several hours creating a unit cell demo Quake II level to demonstrate the use of open source video game technology, which I found was well received by undergrads. Has anyone used video game technology as an education tool for science or engineering?"
How long until... (Score:1, Funny)
Re:How long until... (Score:1)
Make sure... (Score:4, Funny)
I can see the class... (Score:1)
A wonderful idea (Score:5, Interesting)
wasnt there a post here on
Re:A wonderful idea (Score:2)
Video Game engines (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Video Game engines (Score:1)
Don't believe me? check out the Halo Warthog Jump! [oz.net]
I'm not even kidding, they used massive amounts of grenades to play with ballistic trajectories.
The video is pretty funny tooo
Re:Video Game engines (Score:5, Informative)
Ofcourse, the game is not out yet. But when it'll be out, there will be modders out there to use this and as we know iD, they will release their source code in a couple of years.
Uh. (Score:1)
Neither of which is relatively new; the latter was demonstrated by test builds of the Unreal engine when they first started using Karma.
Heck, you already have a quite robust physics engine for people to play with in UT2k3--not only does it ship with physics-based vehicle support, somebody's already built a Stair-Dismount mod.
Re:Uh. (Score:1)
Where have you been? (Score:1)
Re:Video Game engines (Score:1)
Good Idea (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Good Idea (Score:1, Informative)
The Quake II engine is open sourced, thus making whatever modifications necessary much easier. Unreal Tournament 2003 isn't, and probably will never be.
Well.. (Score:5, Funny)
Grand Theft Auto taught me all about how to run people over and blow things up. I now have a PHD in urban terrorism.
The only way to go, IMHO (n.b. shameless self-pr) (Score:5, Interesting)
Video games often present optimization problems that would be rather dull if stated formally, but in the presentation of the game are quite engaging, even addictive.
My belief is that pretty much anything worth learning has this addictive element, and that, if we worked at it, we could start off sparking kids' interest, then provide more stuff to satisfy that interest, and encourage deeper exploration. Like drug pushing, basically.
Anyway, if you want to read stuff about it you can go to http://fulcrum.org/old_index.html [fulcrum.org] if you want to read more about it.
You can see (with a shockwave browser, sorry) a couple of things I've done to sort of get started at
http://fulcrum.org/test/stretcher.html [fulcrum.org]
http;//fulcrum.org/index.html [fulcrum.org]
http://fulcrum.org/test/oodometer [fulcrum.org]
i have little doubt that people will post all kinds of "Video games are exactly what kids today DON'T need! In my day a slide rule was what everyone wanted for Christmas!", etc in response to this story. But the truth is that people get into a field because something about it was intriguing to them. They learned it in spite of the way it was taught, not because of it. All I'm suggesting is that we try to make this happen less by the occasional accident and more often by design.
Everyone whines that, e.g., legislators don't know anything about technology, but then when you try to suggest a way, through making an introduction to technology fun and interesting, to fix that problem, it gets railed aganst as being nothing but glitz, etc, etc.
If you want "tough" subjects to remain an exclusive club, keep making the classes boring. If you want more people to understand the things you are interested in, you have to find a way to get them intrigued about it.
The "flippy triangle thing" on my home page is the beginning of something like that. It's an illustration of an abstract algebraic group. I'm trying to present it as an interactive art piece that will put the simple question "what is that?" in random passers-by's heads. Getting people to say "Hmmm, I wonder what that is?" about an abstract mathematical concept is a first step to a world I envision where we work as hard to entice people to "get into" science, mathematics, and history as hard as we try now to get them interested/addicted to the latest reality show stunt.
In other words, I think this guy is on the right track.
OT (rebutting spam accusation) (Score:2)
Re:The only way to go, IMHO (n.b. shameless self-p (Score:3, Funny)
Not dead ones!
Re:The only way to go, IMHO (n.b. shameless self-p (Score:3, Funny)
Well, that's a good point. However, if one wanted to split hairs, one might argue that such mammals, having shuffled off their mortal coils, pulled down the curtain and joined the choir invisible, etc, are more properly referred to as ex-mammals.
Re:The only way to go, IMHO (n.b. shameless self-p (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The only way to go, IMHO (n.b. shameless self-p (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The only way to go, IMHO (n.b. shameless self-p (Score:1)
Re:The only way to go, IMHO (n.b. shameless self-p (Score:1)
Re:The only way to go, IMHO (n.b. shameless self-p (Score:4, Interesting)
There is an emeritus professor at UCI working on educational physics. He was the guy who predicted and confirmed that a specific Mozart sonata stimulates different portions of your brain than most music (based on a brain communications model he was working on). Now he's making video games that train elementary school children to think visually and multidimensionally, and the puzzles are based on string theory mathmatics. It's pretty crazy [mindinst.org], and it seems to be similar in philosophy to your site.
Re:The only way to go, IMHO (n.b. shameless self-p (Score:2)
I have thought that too! (Score:1)
Learning a spell requires a proof (by the series of legal steps you have in your spellbook, transform this equation into this, show that this is true etc.), casting requires a simple (or not so simple) application.
In fact, I think of it sort of like that already (probably why I'm reasonably good at maths). An interesting theorem can be used to build more powerful spells
Seems like a marriage made in heaven to me!
Of course not all problems can be automatically generated and posed as a challenge this way, but enough to make it interesting. I have been thinking about it for a long time, but I haven't gotten around to getting code down.
(Indecision. Should I use java for the object orientation, or C for the ease of making a parser with bison?
(Apropos happy marriage, I'm getting married next saturday!
Re:I have thought that too! (Score:2)
Set it up so that a full set of cartridges is ten wide, so you have to do 10-n every time you kill one. But the subtraction is not explicitly written out, just something you "naturally" have to do as part of the game.
(Not that I want to discourage you in any way whatsoever from trying anything or going on with the implementation you are talking about. Whatever _you_ think would be fun to play would probably be the best thing for you to work on, etc.)
Dance Dance. (Score:2, Informative)
Only one side of the material (Score:3, Interesting)
But you still need the theory. If you learn the experiental part without the theory, you become a technician, rather than an engineer. The theory lets you calculate where that knob should be set, rather than trying all the settings. It lets you figure out of there's any setting that will work before you build the plant. And it lets you program simulators.
I don't see how any simulator can teach the theory. I usually find that if I have the simulator, I spend lots of time playing with it, and I can confirm my understanding of theory I know, but I can't learn new theory.
Seen it done - it works (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure Quake2 is the best engine, simply because it is very game oriented, but if your requirements allow you to do the coding in QuakeC rather than modifying the engine directly, it would be an excellent option - for one, you get automatic support for any platform that Quake II has been ported to.
If you need to work with the engine at a lower leve, I would suggest giving a free games engine such as Crystal Space a try. Although I think CS is a bit unwieldy to work with, others seem to like it.
Unreal engine used to showcase real estate (Score:1)
Probably too late for this to be modded up... (Score:3, Interesting)
A few years ago, working on Unrealty [unrealty.net] (an Unreal-engine based 3D walkthrough app), things like this came up. Adding solid modelling, so you could cut through character and other models and have an "inside" to work with (I think the suggestion was for dentistry simulation). Integrating a physics engine for basic engineering tests.
Now, the latest Unreal engine tech is extremely powerful, with great physics available via MathEngine's [mathengine.com] Karma [mathengine.com] engine. Modifications and custom code and maps is anecdotally easier than with Quake * thanks to better editing tools and the UnrealScript interpreted language (and the recent fact that subtractive geometry is no longer the dominant design tool).
I wonder, then, if an Unrealty-esque system, with better level and physics design docs, aimed at engineers and such, would garner interest? I wouldn't expect the engineers to have enough time and artistic skills both to create their own content from scratch; but they could modify physical properties of existing objects easily enough. What would have to be part of the package, both documentation- and content-wise, to make it usable? Assuming it's not much more than the stock game engine, made suitable for education use by the removal of the "game" portions.
Company use (Score:2)
Two aspects (Score:3, Insightful)
In general, using existing gaming engines as a starting point has 2 issues to consider particularly in ChE:
First is the modelling of the plant or whatever you want to see. This is rather easy since most of these engines can give you a realistic design without necessarily a lot of detail, making these engines ideally suited for the purpose (as opposed to starting from scratch with new 3d modelling program).
The other aspect is getting the "actions", specifically the chemical and physical phenomenia, correctly working. Sure, one can create a map file that has a scripted action such that it follows the physical world counterpart exactly, because you've scripted the path that way. Much more interesting, however, is to actually build in physical and chemical models into the map and let the user and other events cause objects to follow these models. For example, it's very easy to model simple chemical reactions via a finite difference forward partial differential equation method in real time, such that one can have the output of a reactor unit change in response to a change that the user makes in the flow concentration, say by using the game engine to interact with an upstream valve, or such. It would take some effort to build that into the BSP map as opposed to modifying the game engine, but it could be done and would give a much wider range of varied situations than having a number of preset input variables with a fixed number of output possibilities.
Now, do consider if a 3d medium is entirely appropriate for such things; in the case of the reactor example above, 3d is probably overkill to some extent, as that could also be handled by a simple Tk/scripted GUI interface or with something like LabView or Excel, even. But the poster's other example of a crstal cell is something that works right in 3d, so is entirely appropriate.
Another thing to consider is that the older engines (Q2, HL, and Unreal) will work much better on the typical computer equipment that universities will have compared to the newer engines of Q3A, UT2003, and Doom3. You should be able to do all the same physical/chemical modelling in these engines, but the amount of detail you can get from the latter ones is probably overkill for a teaching aide. And since most non-first-tier universities are probably working with machines in the 800MHz to 1.5GHz range without fast 3d cards, you'll get very poor performance out of them.
One final consideration is that some modelling might work better in the Quake-like engines, while others better in the Unreal one, mostly due to the difference in how maps are generated. A Q2 engine would NOT be good for a large outdoor area as you'd expect a chemical plant to be situated in, but Unreal should be great for that (though both will struggle if you pack the scene with polygols). On the other hand, Q2 is probably easier to use for enclosed spaces if you have such that you want to model, or if you're focused more on objects as opposed to trying to carve out a room as with Unreal.
Reasons for choosing Quake II (Score:2, Informative)
What I would LOVE to see... (Score:1)
what about alice? (Score:1)
Interactive 3D Graphics designed specifically for education.