18-Opal

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Mathcad Community Challenge Summer 2024: Game Gallery

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
July 1, 2024
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This season’s Mathcad Community Challenge is an open-ended creative challenge: design and implement a game within PTC Mathcad Prime! I’ll be hosting this challenge.

For our purpose, a game is defined as an interactive, structured experience with an achievable goal that has a beginning state, then allows for user input that can advance the state as the user tackles a challenge or solvable problem, followed by an advanced (intermediate or ending) state.
As a good example, see my first reply to this challenge below.

This challenge will be quite lenient on what a game is and the production values you put into it, though you should test it and make sure it works as intended before submitting it.

Games take a long time to concept and execute, and for that reason, this challenge’s submission period will last until the end of September (September 30, 2024)! Expect the blog write-up on Mathcad.com to come out sometime in October. Your regularly scheduled engineering problem challenges will resume with the November challenge.

You don’t need to use PTC Mathcad Prime 10’s Advanced Controls to do this challenge, but they would greatly help. (It is possible to creatively make non-control workarounds depending on what you’re trying to do.) PTC hosted a training webcast on August 20 to help you learn how to use the controls; replay is available now. You should also take the initiative for yourself and try to learn them independently if you want to incorporate them.

Unique for this challenge, in addition to the blog write-up, I will record my “playthroughs” of each submission and publish them on the PTC Mathcad YouTube channel.

In addition to the existing Mathcad Community Challenge Guidelines, I’d like to stress not to submit anything that would violate others’ copyrights, trademarks, or intellectual property rights per the PTC Community’s Terms of Service. If you don’t want to try to make your own game concept from scratch, it’s considered fair use to take inspiration from games that have existed throughout human history and/or the market (or submitted in this challenge), but not using commercial brands. You're also free (and encouraged) to directly collaborate with one another on a project.

Have fun!

Best answer by DJNewman

And now I can finally unfloat this post because the write-up blog is done: https://www.mathcad.com/en/blogs/community-challenge-game-gallery

...You can hopefully understand why it took so long. I go in-depth on all three games and the design decisions behind each, as well as life lessons...!

Spoiler

PTC also laid off my editor, which didn't help my turnaround time at all. And that probably is also why this is not only the longest article on mathcad.com by far, but probably the... uh... least hinged.

PTC also laid off my editor, which didn't help my turnaround time at all. And that probably is also why this is not only the longest article on mathcad.com by far, but probably the... uh... least hinged.

DJNewman

Author

18-Opal

MOO, also known as Bulls and Cows, is a code-breaking game where you use deductive reasoning to decipher a code based on the feedback you get from your guesses. It’s now available and recreated on PTC Mathcad Prime.

The goal is to guess the correct four-digit hidden number, and its Mathcad Prime depiction does that by comparing your guesses with the hidden number and delivering feedback. Using a variety of scripted Advanced Controls, Mathcad Prime both takes in your guess inputs and delivers the feedback outputs.

Have fun by downloading the attached PTC Mathcad Prime 10 file.

PTC Marketer Creo and Mathcad. I run their YouTube channels, some Creo campaigns, and all Mathcad campaigns and communications.

1_bulls-and-cows.zip

W

Werner_E

25-Diamond I

Nice!

In your sheet you write that opening the protected area is considered cheating. You should also add that evaluating variables First is cheating too 😉

The advanced controls sure need an option to get protected from viewing their inputs and editing.

At the time being the only solution I could think of is the usage of an evaluating function placed in the protected area. But unfortunately it would have to be called in a separate region (maybe a second collapsed area) after the user input was done as it could not be called from within a scripted control.

EDIT: But it may be possible to use the function call as input of a scripted control. That way we would not have to use an extra region. Haven't tried but I guess this should work.

I guess someone will get inspired and come up with a Mastermind or a Wordle variant. I am not sure but I think that quite some time back someone even posted a Wordle implementation here in the forum - can't remember if it was Mathcad or Prime. Given that at that time Prime had no scripted controls I suspect it was written in Mathcad.

EDIT: Found the thread. Was already Prime, but not the implementation of the game itself -> Wordle - PTC Community

DJNewman

Author

18-Opal

So you won't know the variables used unless you click on the controls and then look at their input variables, and by that point you should intuitively know you're a cheater.

Because Prime doesn't have area labels (hopefully it will one day), I thought that I'd put a note on what this protected area was so people don't think it's part of the game that they need to look into it.

I actually plan to develop another game before the submission deadline, and that will use very extensive use of protected areas, including putting controls in (sometimes expanded) protected areas. You can't globally define advanced controls, which would have been a big help for this use case and also Bulls and Cows and would help with the some of the cheating problems, which is why I came up with the workaround with pressing the confirmation buttons.

It's not a community challenge if you didn't have to come up with some fun workarounds. 😛

PTC Marketer Creo and Mathcad. I run their YouTube channels, some Creo campaigns, and all Mathcad campaigns and communications.

DJNewman

Author

18-Opal

We're now two months into the challenge with one month left!

_______________________________________________________________

Let me reveal what I've been doing during those two months: an escape room made in PTC Mathcad Prime 10: Escape the Gem Tunnels.

A mysterious organisation has trapped you in a cave system with three tunnels; at the end of each tunnel (which are their own themed Mathcad worksheets; Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald... I cannot stress this enough, you need to unzip the .zip to your computer and have all of the files in the same directory, since they link to one another with relative filepaths) is a password. You need to collect all three passwords to escape the cave system. Can you do it?
Escape the Gem Tunnels takes advantage of several intricacies of Mathcad Prime's document-centered approach and makes heavy use of Areas, especially password-protected areas, in conjunction with Advanced Controls.
The game will probably take you over half an hour to complete. Could take you far longer than that depending on how well your intuition or observational skills are working. There's an in-game timer.

Thanks to @pakhomova for helping beta-test it with me from the important perspective of someone who is less-versed in Mathcad. There are several bits of help text throughout, and an optional Hints checkbox to activate further assistance.
Edit: Ah, something really important to note. Unlike, say, Bulls & Cows where the answer is random and different every time you play, Escape the Gem Tunnels has a predetermined set of answers / passwords, so please don't spoil it for others.

PTC Community does let you insert a spoiler tag; it's the triangle with an exclamation point. You need to "Expand toolbar" to access it.

Spoiler

I've never used it before, but here's a good chance to!

Edit September 9: Attached a new .zip because I found out while recording the videos for the YouTube channel for this that I made some inconsistent typos. This fixes those.

PTC Marketer Creo and Mathcad. I run their YouTube channels, some Creo campaigns, and all Mathcad campaigns and communications.

2_escape-the-gem-tunnels.zip

DJNewman

Author

18-Opal

Escape the Gem Tunnels in three parts, played by Brandon of the PTC Education team. He's never used Mathcad before. Hopefully this'll inspire that team to do more with Mathcad in the future!
Note that each of these videos begins with a spoiler warning because they go through all of the puzzles and how to solve them, and once that's known, it's much less exciting to play the game for yourself afterward:

Sapphire Tunnel (and the game's beginning):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peqykLxdXv8

Ruby Tunnel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiSOqFtm5q8

Emerald Tunnel (and the game's ending):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DodPbGAgjG4

(Emerald Tunnel is currently Unlisted on the channel but will be published on October 24.)

PTC Marketer Creo and Mathcad. I run their YouTube channels, some Creo campaigns, and all Mathcad campaigns and communications.

S

StuartBruff

23-Emerald V

Oddly enough, I have an example of such a game, called Toads and Frogs. Unfortunately, it was written for Mathcad 11..15 and uses the Picture Component, which Mathcad Prime 10 (still) hasn't got. However, ISTR, it used other scripted components as well, which I am pleased to see have made it into Prime 10.

It might be possible to convert it to MP10 using a text representation of the toads and frogs. However, it was much more satisfying to use pictures of obscure anurids. Again unfortunately, I'd have to write it from scratch as I no longer have a version of M11..M15 and the MP10 xmcd converter fails when I try to convert the .mcd/.xmcd worksheets to MP10 format.

If somebody could convert the attached .mcd file to pdf and post it, I'd be most grateful.

OTOH, the method I vaguely recall using might not work. I suspect that I used the Picture Component as the body of a function and passed the updated image to it, also returning the position of the mouse to show which toad/frog to move. I used scripted components as the body of a function quite regularly, but it seems as if this is not possible with MP10? Or is it?

2024 09 10 C.png

Stuart

PS. The game was referenced in this thread re choosing an image to show in the Picture Operator:

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Mathcad/Showing-a-different-jpg-image-depending-on-a-result-MathCAD-15-0/m-p/790749

The F&T thread itself has been archived.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad/Toads-and-Frogs/m-p/193572#M75890

2_Dev---Toads-and-Frogs-02a.zip

1_dev---Scripted-Controls-001.zip

DJNewman

Author

18-Opal

Oh, sorry, I probably should've converted this earlier for you.

I don't have workarounds for the picture operator though.

PTC Marketer Creo and Mathcad. I run their YouTube channels, some Creo campaigns, and all Mathcad campaigns and communications.

1_toads-and-frogs-pdf.pdf

DJNewman

Author

18-Opal

As I've foreshadowed, I've developed Noughts & Crosses, just to prove that one can do that in Mathcad Prime 10 and still have it be fun (as fun as the base game can be). I think "tic-tac-toe" is really bad game design because it's very unbalanced.
It's two-player. (I think you could probably make a Versus CPU mode, but I didn't want to.)

In no way is my method of implementing it (95 advanced controls in a worksheet) supposed to be seen as a Mathcad best practice.

Mathcad's status circle may be "yellow" for several seconds after making a move, but fortunately, it processes the first turns at the top before the stuff at the bottom, and that's the part that matters.

PTC Marketer Creo and Mathcad. I run their YouTube channels, some Creo campaigns, and all Mathcad campaigns and communications.

1_noughts-and-crosses.zip

DJNewman

Author

18-Opal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ1M-vh_F9o

Noughts & Crosses video. Features myself and Preeya Dave of PTC playing three games together, one for each outcome.

(Currently unlisted, will be public to the Mathcad channel in early November.)

PTC Marketer Creo and Mathcad. I run their YouTube channels, some Creo campaigns, and all Mathcad campaigns and communications.

DJNewman

Author

18-Opal

The calendar has told me that summer is over and autumn has started, but the challenge is still open for canon submissions for another week (and a day).

PTC Marketer Creo and Mathcad. I run their YouTube channels, some Creo campaigns, and all Mathcad campaigns and communications.

DJNewman

Author

18-Opal

I'm writing the blog for the three games, and I've also installed the just-released Mathcad Prime 10.0.1.0. Of course, I'm replaying my own games so I can write about them in fascinating detail.
However, none of the games were made in Prime 10.0.1.0 in mind. They couldn't; I just got access to it today. No in-dev builds for marketing ~~this time.~~

I also don't know specifically what bugs were fixed yet because Update Advisor hasn't been updated yet because of problems across all PTC web properties that inconveniently happened today and will continue to tomorrow.

Noughts & Crosses works fine and maybe even faster. Alternatively, that's a placebo effect.

MOO is... different. Everything seems to be the same in terms of gameplay, except for the rules that restrict the SubmitYourAnswer Text Box. In 10.0.0.0, it would literally prevent any additional characters past the fourth character from appearing. In 10.0.1.0, you can put infinite characters, but when you click away, it'll only keep the first four. Same with putting, say, a letter in there. In 10.0.0.0 it would automatically revert the whole answer to 0000. In 10.0.1.0, you have to click away first. 10.0.0.0 will always put in four 0s to make sure that your answer is at least four characters if you try to delete one. 10.0.1.0, again, will insert them after clicking away.
The net gameplay outcome should still be the same.

Escape the Gem Tunnels is... a much bigger project to see how much it's impacted by the maintenance release, and for that I'll wait for Update Advisor's patch notes.

Update on October 9: Update Advisor is updated. One of the things fixed was "Unexpected immediate text box execution event in Mathcad Prime 10", which perfectly describes why the Text Box is different in MOO compared to the previous version. Apparently the behaviour that I thought was desirable and cool was an unexpected bug.

PTC Marketer Creo and Mathcad. I run their YouTube channels, some Creo campaigns, and all Mathcad campaigns and communications.

W

Werner_E

25-Diamond I

Is this 'Update Advisor' publicly accessible or only PTC internal?

EDIT: Forget it, I just found

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/update_advisor/update_advisor.jsp

which seems to be what you were talking about. Not really user friendly and the information sure is not clearly arranged, but at least some information is there

And a second question: VladimirN from time to times posted partial screenshots showing Primes roadmap and the features which are planned for the next and other future versions.

Is this information publicly available? I mean, not a movie, a webinar where we are supposed to jump through the loops registering and having to provide all sort of information even though we come logged in to PTC anyway.

W

Werner_E

25-Diamond I

Sorry, I sure would prefer printed/written information over a live or recorded oral one.

DJNewman

AuthorAnswer

18-Opal

And now I can finally unfloat this post because the write-up blog is done: https://www.mathcad.com/en/blogs/community-challenge-game-gallery

...You can hopefully understand why it took so long. I go in-depth on all three games and the design decisions behind each, as well as life lessons...!

Spoiler

PTC also laid off my editor, which didn't help my turnaround time at all. And that probably is also why this is not only the longest article on mathcad.com by far, but probably the... uh... least hinged.

PTC also laid off my editor, which didn't help my turnaround time at all. And that probably is also why this is not only the longest article on mathcad.com by far, but probably the... uh... least hinged.

PTC Marketer Creo and Mathcad. I run their YouTube channels, some Creo campaigns, and all Mathcad campaigns and communications.

DJNewman

Author

18-Opal

So this weekend I played the games I made again but in the new version that they weren't designed for. Fortunately, Mathcad Prime 11.0.0.0 doesn't break any of these three games. ...Just don't play in Manual Calculation Mode; they're not designed for that and I struggle to believe you could make or play a fun game with that turned on and have it benefit because of it. (Calculate Now is a nice feature for actual lengthy math worksheets, though.)

Actually, Noughts & Crosses ran WAY faster (with Auto Calculate) when I played it compared to when I played it in 2024. Maybe it's because Mathcad Prime is faster, or the laptop I'm on is faster than the older laptop from then. Very nice.

PTC Marketer Creo and Mathcad. I run their YouTube channels, some Creo campaigns, and all Mathcad campaigns and communications.

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