Hello all. I''d like to take this opportunity if I may, to let you know that Quantum Atomica has been released. Quantum Atomica plots the probability density functions for various states of the hydrogen orbital by solving Schrodinger''s Equation in a variety of cunning ways. Not much to do with games, admittedly, but a whole load of maths and physics. Anyway, in case any of you are interested check out http://www.quantumatomica.co.uk. We implemented a large amount of obscure optimisations to ensure this application runs very quickly on even old machines, a lot of which may be directly translated to games. Within 2 weeks of its release it''s being used in a number of universities across the world and has already even appeared on tv, so we''re on to something. By the way, in case any of you point out that people have already done what we have done, and in most cases better too - we know, but this is the first time it has been made accessible to people fresh out of secondary school/college. I''ll be happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you r. "The mere thought hadn''t even begun to speculate about the slightest possibility of traversing the eternal wasteland that is my mind..."

This is pretty cool. The only complaint I have about it at the moment would be about the website (I''m still testing out the software). It is kind of annoying how when the window opens up, even if you resize the window, the viewing area is the same size. I think it limits the experience. It was kind of hard sometimes to fit the images into the space, and sometimes they just didn''t fit. Anyway, just my 2 cents...

ewen

quote:Original post by grhodes_at_work
Actually, it could be perceived as a game.

Thank you - although I''m not exactly sure what you mean. I just hope some other physics peeps get themselves a copy; the images sure beat the outlines and 2D graphs found in introductory level textbooks.

r.

"The mere thought hadn''t even begun to speculate about the slightest possibility of traversing the eternal wasteland that is my mind..."

Fresh: I wanted to get back to you on this. First I want to say that I thought the application was excellent. I especially liked the volumetric rendering and the ability to take a cross-section. I also like how the reference is built right into the program.

My only criticism is that I originally switched it to full screen, but instead of going to full screen it just changed my desktop resolution! Then when I exited the program, it didn''t even bother to change it back! Switching it back wasn''t hard or anything, but I like it better when programs clean up after themselves . Is there a reason you didn''t just make it do true full screen?

ewen

VERY nice program. I only had one problem with it. One time after deleting an orbital it produced a run-time error. Sorry I didn''t write down the error code (stupid me) and I can''t reproduce the error. I guess since it only happened one time it''s not that big a problem, but I just thought that I would mention it.

First, thank you both for downloading it.

We've had more than a few hundred downloads from various
places, and things seem to be going well for a beta release.

echeslack:
One of the reasons why we change the resolution as opposed to actually increasing the size of the QA window is because the interface are static bitmaps, as you might have noticed, but the main reason is that it would significantly reduce the quality of the images it produces (by introducing stretching artifacts of some nature). If the images were not stretched, they look small on monitors with large resolutions, hence the reason for changing it. There is, as you say, no excuse for the resolution not being changed back however. Is this a persistent problem ? Also, when running in fullscreen mode, does clicking on the restore icon work correctly ?

Volumetric Rendering: Yeh this is pretty cool. One optimisation we used here which you may find interesting is what we have called the 'half-split' method. If you look on any volumetric image you will notice that the form of top half is mirrored in the bottom half in shape, but not the shading. By recombining the samples taken through the orbitals in the reverse order and reflecting and mirroring them, the bottom half of the image can be created almost instantly.

Reference: Thanks for mentioning this. I hope you found both the program and the physics reference useful, if not that interesting .

Anonymous Poster:
The orbital deletion code is a biatch . I have tried many permutations and combinations, and the code has been thorougly revised, but I haven't managed to replicate this error.

Another thing I would like to ask both of you is whether or not the transects disappeared when you displayed them in the main view. This bug seems to be temperamental.

r.


"The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the slightest possibility of traversing the eternal wasteland that is my mind..."

[edited by - Fresh on May 3, 2002 12:38:02 PM]