Applying FoldIt to other video games.

Started by GeneralSigma

GeneralSigma Lv 1

How hard would it be to put the FoldIt game into another game?
I envision a massively multiplayer game where the proteins and the various parts are visually represented as something else, like aliens that have invaded the planet. The objective would be to fight and perhaps herd the various types of aliens, or enemies, into specific areas to connect, and move around, just like in FoldIt, until they have been conquered. It could be zombies too. It's all code anyway and can be visually represented as something else and the way things are connected and disconnected, can be programmed as things that move around and need to end up in a specific position and place to complete the level.

Personally, I would prefer a first player shooter kind of a scenario, with superb graphics where servers with two teams compete against each other to be the first to solve the problem on each map. In essence, the two teams are still solving the problem together, but with competition, they would be inclined to get it done faster to reap the reward of being the best at this.
The game should furthermore be free to play, but with donated rewards from companies, such as gaming mice, graphics cards etc. resulting in monthly rewards for the best players, best teams and best squads. In order to finance servers and things, we already have that in games like BF4, where crowdfunded servers are in operation thanks to small donations from a bunch of people.

Just imagine if such a game became as popular as Fortnite, COD, Battlefield etc.
With the Unreal Engine, Quixel Megascans, tons of assets from around the web, many of which are free, a large development community should be able to get this up and running in record time. EPIC, Quixel, The Blender Community, and other high end companies are sure to support this development. That's where my speciality comes in, to source things for free. I've done it with other projects, short films, theatre, music production and concerts.

A game made by gamers, for gamers, with the one goal of curing real life disease.
Imagine FoldIt being played by thousands of players simultaneously, on PC and consoles in an environment that looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blz8T0Ot3Rw

Before you start thinking about this being too hard and impossible, relax and believe in the impossible. There are enough many amazing creators for everything needed who have spare time, interest, ready made things such as models and music, that when it's all combined, shouldn't be such a terrific challenge.
My role would be that of a non-paid CEO.
Will it take a long time? Yes.

DoctorSockrates Lv 1

In case you didn't know already, Foldit runs on the Rosetta macromodeling engine which has license fees that I hear are in the thousands per year.

As far as I know the development team are trying to work out a solution to separate the front-end and the back-end so that the actual "game" portion can be open-source, but nothing's been reported yet.

If this hurdle can be overcome along with a few others that have been mentioned, feel free to spark the fire! It's just that once you mix the formalities of science in with gaming, things are considerably debuffed.

andrewxc Lv 1

EVE: Online has a citizen-scientist "game" as part of the game itself, called Project Discovery. You read dyed, fluoresced microscope slides, and try to identify the structures that exist within and around the cells.
It's a pretty one-to-one correspondence with actual science being done, so it's not super exciting, but you make some in-game cash out of it, if you're good.

They also released an exoplanet survey module into Discovery, which makes much more sense within the scope of a space game.

jawz101 Lv 1

I've kinda suggested something similar in previous posts. The more the science can be abstracted away from the game and still be fun, it could really generate results.

zo3xiaJonWeinberg Lv 1

I made a simple Starcraft-like RTS game a decade back; RTS games have lots of possibilities but they're easier to create than 3d games. I figure since Starcraft has the Protoss faction and protoss is the Greek word origin of Protein according to Siraj Raval, I think there would be some overlap with Foldit. There is also a 2d science game like Foldit online called EteRNA, and there used to be a 2d online game called Nanocrafters.

zo3xiaJonWeinberg Lv 1

I did the opposite and put a sort of chess game in a Foldit dialog box with a recipe. It could also be used to test out machine learning or exploration algorithms quickly in the Lua 2 environment and directly apply them to Foldit. Having trouble uploading screenshots but my recipe is here: https://fold.it/portal/recipe/103814
You win the game if you have more territory than the CPU. The game board can also be expanded infinitely to be as numerous as pixels, so this Asian chess game is more similar to video games than ordinary board games. If you think I could make a career out of this, please up-vote.