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Science Entertainment Games

Quake II Mods for Engineering Students 52

Posted by chrisd from the aim-the-bfg-at-the-hydrogen-atom dept.
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?"
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Quake II Mods for Engineering Students More

Quake II Mods for Engineering Students

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  • ...Someone makes a Quake 2 mod & map re-enacting Helm's Deep?

  • Make sure... (Score:4, Funny)

    by *xpenguin* ( 306001 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @11:15PM (#5438103)
    Make sure you have big guns to blow everything up.
  • ...okay, now to the right of the BFG, you'll notice a water molecule...

  • A wonderful idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cybergeak ( 318482 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @11:39PM (#5438202)
    making a map of something for a quake engine is a much better idea for a walk through than say QuickTime VR, and the guns and HUD are easily removed, so having a BFG while touring a possible building design isn't that big of a worry.

    wasnt there a post here on /. about architects using off the shelf stuff and quake 3 for virtural walk throughs of buildings they've yet to build?
    • It's not you having a BFG whilst touring the proposed design that's the problem, it's the other people having them and camping in the spacious reception with natural light and stripped pine floors.

  • Video Game engines (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Thalias ( 603695 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @11:45PM (#5438229) Homepage
    I like this idea. Using video game engines has potenial. I mean things like sim city could definately be used. Other things such as quake or Counter-strike could be used for classes such as physics. It could be used to show how motions and forces work, when variables are set at different levels. I thought movies would also make great teaching aids too, something that will get students interested in what is being taught. Lastly all the flashy graphics games could be used for animation. Oh yeah playing games themselves help sometimes. Like for political type class games that involve diplomacy such as Solar Empire are good. FOML [solarmatrix.net]
    • Well, the physics in counter-strike suck, but the physics engine in Halo, love it or leave it, is pretty good.

      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 ..hrm, seems to be a bit slow today.

    • Re:Video Game engines (Score:5, Informative)

      by Soul-Burn666 ( 574119 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @01:13AM (#5438617) Journal
      Look on the specs of the upcoming Doom3 engine. The physics there have reverse kinematics and many nice stuff. Their collision detection is so good that when you fire a weapon, the bolt is simply a triangular object, moving at a very high velocity. Because the system is so accurate, when it hits objects, they move as expected.

      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.
      • I'm not sure if you're referring to inverse-kinematic skeletons, or a physics engine automatically applying forces to objects based on hit velocities.
        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.
        • But is the UT2k3 physics engine accurate enough so that the projectiles can be simply a very fast moving object? I'm not sure.
          • Even in the original UT, you can grab the LazyMatrix mutator, and observe that the instahit bullet weapons(Enforcer, Minigun) now fire very fast moving bullets, that work just like the original. It's network issues that generally force lax collision detection, not technology.
    • Yup, playing games sure teaches students how to do things. "What did you learn today?" "ZERGLING RUSH!!!!"

  • Good Idea (Score:3, Funny)

    by alpha_1100001 ( 653929 ) <alpha_1100001@hotmail.com> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @11:48PM (#5438236)
    Science stuff can get very complicated and confusing very quickly. Using something like a video game to interface with complex things sounds like it would make things easier for most students to interface with. Besides, it gives you a really good excuse to have a game installed on every computer in the lab. ..Why not try this project with Unreal Tournament 2003?

    • Re:Good Idea (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Why not try this project with Unreal Tournament 2003?

      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)

    by RaboKrabekian ( 461040 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @11:49PM (#5438237) Journal
    Has anyone used video game technology as an education tool

    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)

    by msouth ( 10321 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @11:54PM (#5438258) Homepage Journal
    As someone's sig on slashdot says, "all mammals learn by playing". I have a site [fulcrum.org] where I talk about ideas like this. Science/engineering/math/philosophy/history are (according to my wild theories) actually very naturally interesting to average humans, but the presentation of them is so pathetically boring that it's no wonder that they look for something else to do when the subject gets brought up.

    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.
    • "all mammals learn by playing"

      Not dead ones!
    • It always puts a smile on my face when someone talks about pushing drugs for kids. That's when I know the face behind the nickname has thick glasses and/or acne, not unlike myself...

    • Re:The only way to go, IMHO (n.b. shameless self-p (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Goldsmith ( 561202 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @02:34AM (#5438874)
      I agree with you completely! As a physics student, it would make my life so much nicer if I didn't have to explain to everyone why it is I want to study physics.

      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.
    • I was wondering: what if you had a game like the Final Fantasys or nethack for that matter, but for combat, you had to solve mathematical problems? Like, the grid bugs have a simple addition attack (add two numbers in the range 1-20), but you have answer reasonably quickly to not get zapped. Green slime requires you to integrate a fairly complex function, but you get rather much time.
      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 ;-) Of course it may have little application in the real world, but then again, do computer games?

      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! :-) :-) )
      • My thinking on this is that it would be best to integrate the math a little more tightly into the game play, so that it doesn't become "game plus math", but "game. oh, is that math that I'm doing?". For example, an enemy ship comes toward you, and it has some certain number of fuel cartridges, and you have to select a bomb that fits into the space where the empty fuel cartridges go.

        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)

    by actor_au ( 562694 )
    Whilst not a science or even in the opinions of some people a real educational subject, there was some discusion a while back about Dance-Dance Revolution being used in Gym classes [slashdot.org] to encourage Co-Ordination and exercise.

  • Only one side of the material (Score:3, Interesting)

    by upper ( 373 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:34AM (#5439257)
    There are (at least) two parts to understanding most science or engineering subjects -- theoretical and experiental, for lack of better words. I don't think you really understand something until you have both and you've tied them together. Traditional classroom teaching doesn't pay much attention to the experiental part -- in demos and labs, but only a little. For some subjects (e.g. mechanics) you can develop the experience in your daily life, and that's pretty clearly the way to go. For subjects where that doesn't work, simulations has a lot of potential. And this sounds like a good way to do the simulation. If the fidelity is adequate, great!

    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)

    by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @05:45AM (#5439278)
    I'm doing some undergraduate research in computer vision. I looked at using the Quake II and Crystal Space engine, but turned them down in favor of making my own engine (they didn't fit my needs as well as I had hoped). However, I have talked to other people doing research in the same field using game engines, and they have been quite successful.

    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.
  • Unrealty [unrealty.net] uses the Unreal engine to mainly display commercial real estate. This application could easliy be used for other 3D modeling purposes as well. I believe it uses the Unreal Tournament 1 generation of the engine.

  • Probably too late for this to be modded up... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Vito ( 117562 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @10:01AM (#5440059) Homepage
    ...but I'll try anyway.

    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.

  • I used the Quake 3 Engine to mock up the floor plan of our new office building we were moving into so that others could see what we were moving into. It was crude and small but it was well received.

  • Two aspects (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @11:42AM (#5440692)
    The project that the original post refered to as a lacking attempt, I was at UMich as it was being developed (has since moved on to UIC), and their goal there at that time was to try to put ChE into Virtual Reality, to explode a chemical reactor at several difference scales (unit, particle flow, and reaction within the catalyst). They got the layout down well and the various movements well, but as the poster indicated, it was awkward and was meant to be used with the full VR helmet (though you could run it on a standard monitor too). It was interesting but it didn't seem practical as a teaching aid to a large number of students.

    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.

  • The main reason for choosing Quake 2 was the GPL'd source code. I would like to add code to model reaction rate kinetics, flow rates, phase equilibria, etc. With a proprietary game like Unreal or even the Quake III engine, this is not possible without licensing the software, which is big bucks. Chemical Engineering teaching labs are expensive to build and maintain, and as students, a trip to the plant is strictly look and don't touch for obvious reasons. Adding the danger of getting killed by falling on a turning motor shaft, or by opening the wrong valve and causing an explosion could provide valuable and cheap safety lessons as well. The real benefit from a plantwide process control perspective is to allow a disruption in a control variable like a feed rate, pressure or temperature to propagate through the system and then let the students "tune the controller" to help fix the problem. This is currently learned using Matlab, Simulink, or MS Excel. I had envisioned entering process control adjustments in the console in Quake 2, trading the weapons for tools such as a wrench, pressure tester, thermometer, flow meter and even a laser pointer for multi-player presentations and making the act of learning real world troubleshooting more realistic.

  • is a Quake level in the Valles Marinaris on Mars. Lots of gullys and rocks to hide behind. I would be constantly getting fragged though. I would be spending too much time looking at the scenery.
  • www.alice.org

    Interactive 3D Graphics designed specifically for education.

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