TestTubeGames Forums

Posted: **Sat Dec 21, 2013 1:02 am**

So, I think just the free version should require some extra ten or so digits of code. That sounds like a good idea.

Also, I could check it to keep me logged in, but I use a shared computer. I do this for my phone, though. And for the smilies, pls make them a more 'condensed'/'intuitive' version (i.e.

being (:< and not the word twisted with a colon on either side). Also, you should add an invisible smily, a stick-figure smily, a gravity simulator smily, a TTG smily, and a quantum smily (sometimes it loads sometimes it doesn't). Moving on, the structure doesn't bother me too much, but at least include a link back to the main TTG website and create a guide/thread of how to do various (non-trivial) things on the forums. (i.e. How to view all posts in chronological order, how to mark a thread as 'unread' to flag it for later, etc.

Posted: **Mon Jan 27, 2014 11:48 pm**

Hello TestTubeGames!
I just so happened to stumble upon Gravity Simulator 2.0 (and the website too ), and there was a few things I felt were missing.
Nothing too big though.

My first suggestion is, to add more colors for the planets.

8 different colors for planets is a lot, indeed, but what if I wanted to make a system with more than 8 entities, and I wanted those entities to stand out individually?

I suggest you do either of these:

- Make the list of colors larger. Add some colors like brown, tan, purple, cyan, and whatnot.

- Even better: Add a color picker of some sort. The ability to select any RGB color would be awesome!

Of course, you should make this a pop-up (The button should also be where the color list used to be, if you implement this.)

My second suggestion is, please let us type the mass of planets in the mass selector.

By that, I mean, instead of having to try as much as possible to get as close to the desired value as possible (or having to edit the save code), why not let us input the mass of our object by typing?

Put the value of mass in a text box and let us edit it.

I would've mentioned the lack of the ability to move the view around or zoom in/out as a suggestion, but it could be a bit hard to implement.
I don't doubt you could do it, considering you were able to in the older version of gravity simulator.

Anyhow, thanks for reading!

If I do find anything else I feel is missing, I'll be sure to let you know.

Posted: **Tue Jan 28, 2014 7:52 pm**

exfret wrote:Welcome wtg62 to the fora! I hope you enjoy TTG (testtubegames)! Be sure to check out the other stuff too. Like Velocity Raptor. Possibly other user levels. Like my user levels. Especially my Velocity Raptor Series of Levels. You MUST to try out my Velocity Raptor Series of Levels. OR ELSE. Not really. I'm just making fun of myself for how much I wanted people to post something in that thread even though I was getting a reasonable amount of attention already back in the day when I was making my Series of Levels. I don't really care about them much now (though I did recently make a video of me completing part of it). I hope you find TTG as great as I do.

wtg62 wrote:Hello TestTubeGames!
I just so happened to stumble upon Gravity Simulator 2.0 (and the website too ), and there was a few things I felt were missing.
Nothing too big though.
Wait, you didn't actually just type in the url and happen to have it work, right? Also, I like all that text formatting you do. It makes everything much less dull.

wtg62 wrote:My first suggestion is, to add more colors for the planets.

8 different colors for planets is a lot, indeed, but what if I wanted to make a system with more than 8 entities, and I wanted those entities to stand out individually?

I suggest you do either of these:

- Make the list of colors larger. Add some colors like brown, tan, purple, cyan, and whatnot.

- Even better: Add a color picker of some sort. The ability to select any RGB color would be awesome!

Of course, you should make this a pop-up (The button should also be where the color list used to be, if you implement this.)
I totally agree with you. In fact, when I first saw GSimV2, I was surprised that Andy hadn't implemented a color using a color picker in the first place. Default colors, though, are always a good thing to have by default for three reasons:
-It's more intuitive and easier to understand for first-time users.
-It's easier just to pick a default than to colorselect it from a colorwheel.
-It's easier and more precise to go back to the same color you on a previous planet than it is with custom colors.
Which gives me the idea: How about you enable the paint option, too? (When I say 'you' and am asking for a feature, etc., I'm speaking to Andy (the creator of TTG)) Talking about features you should have implemented into the simulator when you first made it (though I don't blame you at all for not including them, for I know how little time you had to put it together), when are you going to add in zooming and panning? I mean, I just instinctively hold and drag whenever I want to pan, and I try zooming in and out with 'q' and 'z', but the fact that it doesn't work just doesn't make sense. Why can't you just copy-and-paste from the old sim.? I mean, you'll have to change a... Oh wait, I forgot this one was coded in e^(i*tau).

wtg62 wrote:My second suggestion is, please let us type the mass of planets in the mass selector.

By that, I mean, instead of having to try as much as possible to get as close to the desired value as possible (or having to edit the save code), why not let us input the mass of our object by typing?

Put the value of mass in a text box and let us edit it.
Actually, this is something that has been discussed before in the Suggestions thread (the url ARP is giving you). Hopefully, Andy will implement that feature soon, but for now, there are p'robly 19,683 Randomly scattered dAndy piles for Andy have fretted about before now. (BTW: That was an 'extended' pun on all our names). Point is: First, Andy is working on ~TES~ (The Electric Shocktopus, his soon-to-be new game) as his priority, and second, there are plenty of features that Andy hasn't added in that have already been requested, and this is one of them. Re-requesting them, though, is actually a good thing, as it resurfaces the issues that we all care about most so Andy can work on them sooner (like hyperbola-land, hint-hint wink-wink).

wtg62 wrote:I would've mentioned the lack of the ability to move the view around or zoom in/out as a suggestion, but it could be a bit hard to implement.
I don't doubt you could do it, considering you were able to in the older version of gravity simulator.
I don't understand why something like that would be so hard. Just make it so the drawing take into account the 'center position', and then allow a mouse drag to change this 'center position'. As with zooming, just make the press of some button increase/decrease the 'zoom factor', and you can just dilate the the circles depending on the zoom factor. Easy, right?

A Random Player wrote:viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14?
I actually think it would be better to place posts about the beta simulator here. I think it would be good to do this due to the size of the suggestions thread. I mean, it kind of makes sense to split it up once it gets to over a hundred posts.

Andy, you should probably place their thread back and just leave a message directing them to here. I mean, how are they supposed to find any responses to their post if they can't find their post, and how are they supposed to know their post is here. Also, I have it on "keep me logged in" now, but I decided to copy my message just in case. Good thing, too, or else my whole post would have been lost due to your deletion of that topic.

Posted: **Tue Jan 28, 2014 9:01 pm**

When are you going to update the Flash version? It really needs the custom law-changing feature that the Unity version has. I haven't been able to get the Unity version to work, even with the stuff you PMd me.

Posted: **Tue Jan 28, 2014 9:05 pm**

Thank you for welcoming me here!
Silly me, to not notice a suggestions thread

exfret wrote: Wait, you didn't actually just type in the url and happen to have it work, right? Also, I like all that text formatting you do. It makes everything much less dull.

Nope, I was looking around for some good gravity simulators, and so far this site has the best one I've seen yet.

exfret wrote: Actually, this is something that has been discussed before in the Suggestions thread (the url ARP is giving you). Hopefully, Andy will implement that feature soon, but for now, there are p'robly 19,683 Randomly scattered dAndy piles for Andy have fretted about before now. (BTW: That was an 'extended' pun on all our names). Point is: First, Andy is working on ~TES~ (The Electric Shocktopus, his soon-to-be new game) as his priority, and second, there are plenty of features that Andy hasn't added in that have already been requested, and this is one of them. Re-requesting them, though, is actually a good thing, as it resurfaces the issues that we all care about most so Andy can work on them sooner (like hyperbola-land, hint-hint wink-wink).

Didn't know it was requested before! I can only hope to see it sometime though.

exfret wrote: I don't understand why something like that would be so hard. Just make it so the drawing take into account the 'center position', and then allow a mouse drag to change this 'center position'. As with zooming, just make the press of some button increase/decrease the 'zoom factor', and you can just dilate the the circles depending on the zoom factor. Easy, right?

He's done it before, so like I said: I don't doubt he could do it.
Simple actions like moving the view around, or zooming sound easy to make.
I'm a programmer myself, and it's sort of a complex thing to code. (Or at least to me it is )

Posted: **Tue Jan 28, 2014 10:28 pm**

Stargate38 wrote:When are you going to update the Flash version? It really needs the custom law-changing feature that the Unity version has. I haven't been able to get the Unity version to work, even with the stuff you PMd me.

Well considering...
1) Andy is currently working on ~TES~ as his priority, and the unity version is even needier (for example, he hasn't even added panning or zooming to that version) and higher up on his list, and
2) The Unity version is the beta version where he's adding these features (he's not going to add something to, and potentially break his already awesome and finished alpha GSim), so if he adds anything to GSim it'll be a change to GSimV2.
I don't think he's going to update the flash version at all. Eventually, it might get replaced with the Unity version, but you're probably not getting custom laws anytime soon.

Posted: **Tue Jan 28, 2014 11:09 pm**

wtg62 wrote:Thank you for welcoming me here!

You're welcome! I hope you enjoy tes(*cough*SeriesofLeves*cough*)tubegames.com. I find it interesting how many people wander into TTG through GSim. This is actually how I got here myself. I found that it was the best GSim, too. It just seemed the most intuitive, practical, and user-friendly. Of course, other websites could have accretion disks, timers, rulers, prettier planets, etc., but this one just felt like someone built it for you to discover things, not just to watch circles flying around your screen. (It's obviously built for that, too, though)! It was just the only one without too much lag, an easy way to start over and pan and zoom and add all sorts of stuff, and its addition of tracks, and, importantly, the code you could use to share something. That just made it feel worthwhile to explore, especially with the ability to choose different exponents on r.

wtg62 wrote:Nope, I was looking around for some good gravity simulators, and so far this site has the best one I've seen yet.

Wait, so did you just find the link to it in Google, or did you click on the link from testtubegames.com/gravity.html? Talking about URL's reminds me of something: do you want to know how to access past versions of GSim? Well, there are actually a bunch of hidden gamefiles at a specific url at TTG.com which have lots of cool stuff. I have a thread about it here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=126

wtg62 wrote:Didn't know it was requested before! I can only hope to see it sometime though.

I don't expect you to know that. I was just saying that not knowing that wasn't a bad thing.

wtg62 wrote:He's done it before, so like I said: I don't doubt he could do it.
Simple actions like moving the view around, or zooming sound easy to make.
I'm a programmer myself, and it's sort of a complex thing to code. (Or at least to me it is )

Hmmm... Here's what I would do:

//This isn't in any programming language, by the way, but hopefully it's easier to see how it might placed in one. It's kind-of java-y

Array planetx[x1,x2,x3...]
//So that array would hold each planet's x position
Array planety[y1,y2,y3...]
//That one holds y

Method paintStuff[] {
    for(each planet) {
    //Of course, the for loop wouldn't actual say each planet in the parantheses, but I didn't want to do extra work to include array length etc.
        draw.circle(planetx[iteration]*pow(10,zoom)-centerx,planety[iteration]*pow(10,zoom)-centery,size*pow(10,size))
        //This command would draw a circle and the current-iteration-of-the-for-loop-th planet's x and y, taking zooming and panning into account
    }
}

Method senseMovement[] {
    if(ZoomInKeyPressed) {
        zoom+=0.1
    }
    if(ZoomOutKeyPressed) {
        zoom-=0.1
    }
    if(PanMouseEvent) {
        centerx=chginMouseX
        centery=chginMouseY
    }
}
//This might seem like a big bit of code, but it's really not. It took me 20 minutes to do when I haven't programmed in 6 months, so Andy should be able to add it in ~10 minutes, allowing you to finally see things going offscreen.
//Edit: I added in changing the size of planets depending on the zoom. I had accidentally overlooked that before.

Posted: **Wed Jan 29, 2014 9:48 am**

The problem with your approach, I've found from personal experience, is that you also need to do it with trails. And trust me, with as many trails as this game has, it's hard to do it without lag.
A better approach would be to store an offset value, and when rendering the stuff, increment the value by the offset. So, instead of adding 1 to every object x, add 1 to xoffset and when rendering, place it on x + xoffset

Posted: **Wed Jan 29, 2014 10:34 am**

robly18 wrote:The problem with your approach, I've found from personal experience, is that you also need to do it with trails. And trust me, with as many trails as this game has, it's hard to do it without lag.
A better approach would be to store an offset value, and when rendering the stuff, increment the value by the offset. So, instead of adding 1 to every object x, add 1 to xoffset and when rendering, place it on x + xoffset

Umm... Isn't that exactly what I did? I had the offset's x (that was the centerx, by the way) and y (centery), which probably should have been called offset each time. Then, in the rendering/paint method, I placed each thing at a certain location depending on the offset. You'd just do the same thing with lines, to. Also, I would store the current state of the GSim as a canvas (I didn't do that because I didn't want to spend more time making that post, plus I don't know how to code canvases) while panning/zooming so that the lag could occur once you decide where to pan/zoom.

Posted: **Thu Jan 30, 2014 4:28 pm**

Whoa, I have my head buried in TES for a couple days, and I emerge to some awesome posts over here! Okay, let's see...

wtg62 wrote:Hello TestTubeGames!

Hello wtg62! Welcome to the forums, and thanks for taking the time to stop by with some suggestions!

Color picker: yes, love the idea. I'll have to play around with combining the 'easy' way of doing it (picking one of a handful of color swatches), and the 'hard' way (rgb picker). But yeah, these 8 colors are more of a proof-of-concept.

With the mass, same thing, the slider is kinda a placeholder. I'll make it so you can type in the mass in the next version.

Then, of course, we get to the interesting discussion of zooming and panning! First up, it's definitely coming to the Unity version, I just need a day or two where I can sit down and hammer it out. It's straightforward, but really easy to get the math mixed up... so I've been holding off doing it until I can actually focus.

robly is spot on that the lag really becomes an issue when you have orbits. The coding example you gave, exfret, works perfectly if you just have planets. Move the screen? Fine and dandy. The planets just get offset. Done and done. With orbits, though, I've had to make things a bit more complex to avoid lag. The orbits are drawn onto a background layer, pixel by pixel. Which means sliding side-to-side still isn't hard. But add in zooming, and I'll need to redraw all the orbits (with some cutoff). Anyway, surprisingly harder than you might expect to get it done right, but also not extremely hard. So I'll say: we're all right!

Stargate38 wrote:When are you going to update the Flash version? It really needs the custom law-changing feature that the Unity version has. I haven't been able to get the Unity version to work, even with the stuff you PMd me.

Really? Dang. I'll take this chat back to the PM'ing to see if we can't figure this out. Unity is way more powerful than flash, so I'd certainly want a power user like you to be using it if possible.

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Calling all Suggestions

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A few small suggestions

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Flash Version is way out of date

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Re: Flash Version is way out of date

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Re: Calling all Suggestions

Re: A few small suggestions