Comment by asgard1024 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asgard1024 | Hacker News Reader

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That was a disappointment. I think education in Minecraft (-like game) is a great idea, but what they presented lacks imagination what it could be. They mention mathematics and history and problem solving, and I think for that, it is exactly the wrong medium, and let me explain why.

I really like to play with mods, especially the tech ones, I enjoy building automated processing systems and factories and bootstrap myself in the style of "The Mysterious Island". Here's a game I really wish would exist (and I think it will, eventually):

Realistic sandbox game based around technology and history of technology. De-emphasize the kinematics, and emphasize other types of physics such as statics, thermodynamics and electromagnetism, and also chemistry, material engineering, biology and geology.

Imagine a game where you could learn about almost any industrial process (including historical ones), ranging from agriculture through chemical engineering to computer-controlled 3D printing.

I wouldn't mind complexity too much. There are people who enjoy flight simulators which are quite complex. It should capture the spirit of common industrial processes, within the first order of approximation.

I think this would be a great game to understand how the modern world is built, on what basis, what it takes for economy to operate. So it would also be very educational in the economics aspect (actually changing focus from money to production would help people to understand economics a lot better).

Current Minecraft is not there though, even with mods. The basic physical laws are not preserved, and often realism is eschewed. It's quite hard to make such a game, because people who know the industrial processes well enough are rare, but I really wish it would exist. And I think it would be highly educational, but mostly in fields of natural sciences and technology.

A huge problem are the game engines. Traditional state of the art game engines have mainly static worlds for performance reasons (Unreal, ID Tech, RAGE, Valve Source, etc).

Voxel game engines like Ken Silverman's Voxlap (http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap/voxlap05.htm ), Infiniminer, Minecraft and Lego Worlds have a dynamic game world where everything can be changed. It's resource intensive and choosing the optimial world data structure is very important (avoid rendering invisible parts, infinite worlds, LOD). And integrating realistic infinite physics is too resource intensive. That's why you see little and only local physics.

From the graphical point of view the new Lego Worlds engine is really fascination! It seems it uses advanced geometric shaders to render all the tiny Lego parts on the fly. Does anyone know how it really works and which data structure it uses?

Actually, I think the blocky world is good enough for the application I described. Getting geometry and kinematics right is not so important for the game. I think something like Minecraft with a rudimentary thermodynamics system, statics/continuum mechanics for blocks, and mixture system for fluids (including air) would be doable. I think what would be more important is to change the crafting system from specific items to be more based on what materials you use (kinda like Tinker's construct does it).

I even think the game doesn't have to be 3D - Terraria like world would be good fit too, if done right (probably allow several different layers at each tile - like background wall, plumbing and ambient layer for fluids).

Local physics around the player is doable, like Minecraft's water/lava/red stone. Some mods already add thermodynamics, magnetism, other fluids similar to the water simulation.

Real infinite physics like draing a water dam and flooding mines is CPU intensive (there are such mods too) and changes the gameplay (reversing a flood means pumping out the water). In 2D it's a lot easier and several such physics playgrounds exists (even with basic fluid physics). E.g. Phun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phun ) and some games based on 2D physics engines like Box2D.

Can't neglect to mention Dwarf Fortress and its 3D water physics. Of course the price is that DF will happily drop to many seconds per frame during big 'physics moments'.

Simulators are not games in the same sense though. The aim isn't quite entertainment, and results in a much different set of assumptions about what the player's expectations are. It's more than just complexity, there are issues about gameplay vs realism too. There is no expectation in a game you'll be willing to fly for 2 hours in a straight line, because it's bad gameplay, but people in sims do this, because that's what the realism requires.

I wasn't making a comparison, I was just suggesting that people play flight simulators for fun which have enormous amount of complexity and detail. And I think the tedium can be alleviated (for example, the game could just track "effort" and require you to pay for it in food or medicines etc.) without compromising realism. It's not a problem because interesting part of realism comes from interaction, and complexity, and learning about it, not from the tedium.

I really like to play with mods, especially the tech ones, I enjoy building automated processing systems and factories and bootstrap myself in the style of "The Mysterious Island". Here's a game I really wish would exist (and I think it will, eventually):

Actually, there's a game about building factories and automating the hell out of it.

It's called factorio.

But admittedly, it's not realistic, not even close. But I do spend the vast amount of my time thinking about logistics.

I know Factorio, although I haven't played it very much. My thoughts exactly - it teaches kind of engineering, but the realism is lacking.

What I would like to see from the game is less focus on how are things laid out in space (that's a different puzzle) and more focus on what crafting materials to use and what their different tradeoffs are (physical and chemical properties, cost, processing complexity).

There were game using similar learning mechanism before like robot odyssey.

I also had an idea similar of yours, maybe by stringing together some open source simulation package into a sandbox environment it could be achieved.

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