Slashdot Mirror
Quake II Mods for Engineering Students
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?"
Quake II Mods for Engineering Students? More like celda
...Someone makes a Quake 2 mod & map re-enacting Helm's Deep?
Repeal the DMCA!
Make sure you have big guns to blow everything up.
...okay, now to the right of the BFG, you'll notice a water molecule...
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
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.
/. about architects using off the shelf stuff and quake 3 for virtural walk throughs of buildings they've yet to build?
wasnt there a post here on
Well, as we all know, that's the easiet way to get karma because you don't actually have to know what the article is about. And if one thing's certain, history is DOOMed to repeat itself.
Oh wait, the summary said Quake.
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
FOML: Rise to Power
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?
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.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
SuperHotXXXAnimalSex.com has an excellent Quake II modelling package and some data sets for biology.
They have excellent models of exotic and farm animals, and of human bodies. Also some interesting animations of copulation between said models.
As someone's sig on slashdot says, "all mammals learn by playing". I have a site 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 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
http;//fulcrum.org/index.html
http://fulcrum.org/test/oodometer
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.
Liberty uber alles.
This is spam. MOD DOWN
I'm quakin' in my boots because of your admonishment...
"all mammals learn by playing"
Not dead ones!
I've had this sig for three days.
There's nothing commercial on the site. The home page has a use of 3-d game technology for an instructional purpose. I noted in the subject that I was going to refer to my own work. Are you sure that it's not just that your spam detector is set to "grassy knoll"? :)
Liberty uber alles.
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.
Liberty uber alles.
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 to encourage Co-Ordination and exercise.
Read Errant Story.
Hmm... they still have hair, but they're no longer warm blooded. What if we put them in the toaster?
I've had this sig for three days.
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...
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
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, 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.
;-) Of course it may have little application in the real world, but then again, do computer games?
:-) :-) )
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!
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
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.
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.
Ah, yes, an excellent idea. However, I shant be the one to investigate whether they still lactate.
Liberty uber alles.
Once I used Starcraft to present a simulation of the Civil War battle of Chancellorville. Was pretty cool, actually :)
Thanks for the link! The quotes from users/participants were great--stuff to the effect of "this isn't math, this is _fun_". Looks like a great leap in the right direction.
Liberty uber alles.
How about using blender?
http://www.blender.org
It has a phyton api so you could do a lot of
actual simulation with it.
Unrealty 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.
Journal
>> 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?
Yes. Also seen on TV.
A few years ago, working on Unrealty (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 Karma 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.
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.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
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.
mmmmm... warm milk... toasty mammals... exactly what my mom used to feed us before we went to bed
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.
--
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.
--
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.