Atom games

[sinkoman]

I'd like to see a physics toy that involves objects that are modeled down to the atom, with physics for each individual atom.

That way everything in the world is entirely destructible, and breaks realistically.

Then if you got more advanced, you could make an entire gamut of different types of atoms, perhaps the entire periodic table.

I'd be content with a little physics toy that had nothing more than maybe a box, some different type metal bricks, and a box of sand, with a few basic tools like a hand, a shovel, a simple pistol, and a tool to light things on fire/spray water and ice.

I'd imagine that if you did the former (a small little phys toy), then the system requirements wouldn't be too high.

Anybody know of anything similar in the works?

 

[Murray_H]

I'd imagine that if you did the former (a small little phys toy), then the system requirements wouldn't be too high.

You'd need a mental amount of processing power to see that in real time. You'd need to monitor the individual action of millions upon millions of entities and they get them to act accordingly when they interact. Doing it with solid stuff would be hard enough, but individual water molecules would be insane.

 

[sinkoman]

You'd need a mental amount of processing power to see that in real time. You'd need to monitor the individual action of millions upon millions of entities and they get them to act accordingly when they interact. Doing it with solid stuff would be hard enough, but individual water molecules would be insane.

Well, considering that there'd be no texturing or complex lighting engine, then i'd imagine that there'd be a ton of spare processing power to direct.

And I realize that water would be infinitively difficult. Dunno, maybe a shallow pit of sand would be equally difficult : /

 

[Naudian]

Down to the atom is just stupid.

However, sand down to the grain seems doable, but still silly.

Similar for water, except down to a small droplet instead.

It'd be a fun physics toy / tech demo for sure

 

[theotherguy]

I think you are severely underestimating the number of atoms in...anything. The best you could do with a true atomic simulation is maybe a few hundred atoms, and thats barely even the size of a microscopic transistor. For something to even be visible you would need thousands and thousands of atoms, and then it would just be a speck.

Now I could imagine a small physics toy with increibly simplified atoms that are scaled up to maybe 5-10 cm per atom, but then it wouldn't even be an atomic simulation, but just soft body physics with springs.

Another thing that would work would be a full fledged chemistry simulator, with extremely tiny amounts of atoms that you could play around with, with gameplay similar to the Falling Sand Game. Even that would require so much processing power its inadvisable for anything over maybe 50 atoms.

 

[Bad^Hat]

I've been considering a game engine made up of matter/atoms for awhile. Sure, it's awhile off, but it's something to aim for. Just thinking about it, you can see how far gaming has to go. Photorealistic graphics definitely won't be the end.

 

[Solaris]

I'd like to see a physics toy that involves objects that are modeled down to the atom, with physics for each individual atom.

That way everything in the world is entirely destructible, and breaks realistically.

Then if you got more advanced, you could make an entire gamut of different types of atoms, perhaps the entire periodic table.

I'd be content with a little physics toy that had nothing more than maybe a box, some different type metal bricks, and a box of sand, with a few basic tools like a hand, a shovel, a simple pistol, and a tool to light things on fire/spray water and ice.

I'd imagine that if you did the former (a small little phys toy), then the system requirements wouldn't be too high.

Anybody know of anything similar in the works?

We don't even know enough about how atoms work to do that.
Just think about what you said, maybe take a physics class and you'll realise if we did know enough, it would require CPU power the likes we've never seen before.

 

[Ren.182]

As stated what you are thinking about would take massive amount of processing power. The processor would have to track the x,y,z co-ordinates of each atom in 3D space. Simply dropping a drop of water into the sand would cause the computer to crash out.

We're a long way off real-time atoms yet

 

[sinkoman]

We don't even know enough about how atoms work to do that.
Just think about what you said, maybe take a physics class and you'll realise if we did know enough, it would require CPU power the likes we've never seen before.

Jesus cripes, did you even read what I wrote?

I didn't mention anything about chemical or physical interaction of atoms. I just made a passing mention of having atoms with different trains.

 

[co05]

For this game, we need Deep Thought:

 

[Dekstar]

I'd like to see proper modelling of the human body, where it's actually rendered correctly, and soft-bodied cloth physics are applied. That way, in a sword fight, the clothes could be cut and the body underneath would be shown and bleeding.

 

[Ravioli]

I have imagined a game engine like that before. Everything modeled down to either molicules or atoms (altho atoms might be to much) or just a computer scaled particle which builds up everything. Everything has density and friction etc, all sorts of properties. Like a rock would have X density of Y particle and weight K amount becuase of its L mass. And for example when you shot a gun the bullet reacts to physics, its a real bullet flying out of the gun, it reacts to wind and everything. When it hits the rock its actually THE bullet hitting it, so the bulled is made of iron/metal whatever which is X density with Y particle etc etc, the computer calculates and generates how the rock and the bullet will react to each other and process it. So you see the bullet cracking the rock up, and creating partly dust flying which could be X density and X particle and reacts to the wind by P blalbalbla you get it, so basicly create this vast libary of particles and just mold them together and the computer generates its properties.


This could be done right? In the future i mean.

 

[jondy]

Modelling down to the atomic level is plain dumb - you just don't need to do it to get realistic physics. It'd be wasting resources on an unnecessarily complex simulation when an approximation would be just as good. Pixar movies aren't rendered at an atomic level, and they've done snow, water, you name it. (relatively) Coarse particle systems serve us just fine - atomic resolution simply isn't needed

 

[The Brick]

Even if you have like 500 atoms in a blob, all connected to each other, you'd still get like 0fps on a superbly up to date computer.

And averagely there are about 10^23 atoms in a spoon of water. My numbers probably will be a bit off, but just to give you an idea.

 

[Cole]

Going with brick here.
Lets say you just wanted a spoon of water in your game.

that means you have: 100000000000000000000000 (10^23) molecules.

Now lets take a look at water in chemical form: It is a polar molecule taking 2 hydrogen and 1 oxygen.
This means 300000000000000000000000 atoms.
4294967296 = Bytes in 4gigs of ram.

Can you make 300000000000000000000000 objects each having a single property and that property would be a byte big and would designate what atom it is.

Since were being nice, lets say each atom takes up 1byte of ram. This means you need 300000000000000000000000 bytes of ram.
or 585937500000000000000 gigs of ram...

Guess how much ram we can have with a 64bit computer?
36028797018963968 gigs (2^64 or 18446744073709551616 bytes).

So lets compare.
585937500000000000000 gigs
36028797018963968 gigs

So even with maxed out ram on a 64bit computer we do not have enough ram just to store each individual atom in memory. Not only that but we arn't storing where they are located in the world(3 64bit integers(giving you 18446744073709551616^3 amount of theoretical atoms in the world)) or electrons/neutrons.


Simply it is impractical even in terms of memory and processing power.

 

[theotherguy]

Right. But I think what might be possible is assigning each object atomic qualitites. Something like a scaled up version of Source's materials, only you have a material for every single kind of object. If you don't allow compounds and chemical interactions such a system might yield very realistic results with little performance cost. All you need is an object to have a number of fields that are associated with an elemental property, and it would be simple math to determine how it would effect their specific physical properties (simply calculate the size and density of the object and use avagadros constant to determine the number of atoms in it, and not even that would be necessary to fake it)

What I'm saying is you dont have to simulate each individual atom on an atomic scale, you simply have to apply the large scale properties to an object that arise from the atomic properties of it.