I would like to make a movie of how each track evolves over time. If each time a higher score is obtained, that position is recorded, then one would be able to see how the protein has evolved from low to high scoring. My intuition tells me that this would be relatively simple to do and would provide a great self teaching tool and may even be able to make demos for other people to see as well.
You mean like a track recorder? This is not such a bad idea, but unless interest in it sky-rockets, it may be put on the back-burner for quite some time.
It should allow for camera movement interaction, so users can see a particular protein folding at various camera angles.
Currently we can save a position. If the position was saved each time the score increases and we could play through it like we play through the current undo history, we could see how the progress was actually made.
These movies used to be made in the early days of FoldIt: successively better evolver solutions were made into movies. A search on youtube for CASP8 will show them: unfortunately they're not playing on my machine for some reason.
Thanks SPVincent for pointing those old movies out. That is the idea - except to do it within the game in a similar manner to undo.
you could obtain capture software which will provide you with the result you need, I'm sure others would enjoy seeing it as well.
No, I'm pretty sure I know what Tony's on about. If you have played any of the recent Halo games on Xbox, the theatre mode in those games is very similar.
I like this suggestion. It seems like it would help us visualize what types of changes are improvements.
An example of 2D movie:
There is a way to share important steps and explaining what was the intention of manual moves using the results Wiki like here (zee bottom, 5 steps of a gaining solution):
http://foldit.wikia.com/wiki/Puzzle_827
To do this, I had to load each intermediate pose then to make a picture of them.
Suggestion 1:
What about sharing the full pose in the archives ?? A new button "share to the archives" in the Open/share interface. And if done, after the puzzle expiration, any other player can load the full top result ! In addition to the tradition of taking a picture of best results for the Wiki, we could have a modern tradition of sharing the best pose to this "archive" of expired puzzles.
Suggestion 2 (=the opening suggestion by Tony)
I agree the idea of animated client like we have with undo's would be great !
We get the puzzle on our standard Foldit client and we can "play" the movie of the best result (or even of our current result!) and in the same time turn and zoom it in order to see everything. That would be instructing ! Same, this would be available in the expired puzzle list (load expired top puzzle result). May be not for all types puzzles (some puzzle results should remind "blind" to start again from scratch with new tools later on), and only on a voluntary base to share.
Suggestion 2a: A "text box" tool to allow us to whrite something on screen for explanations would be nice.
Suggestion 3:
May be less demanding and for all players only internal to their groups: a tool in the Open/Share interface that gives a kind of slide show of all shared results (and/or all quicksaves) starting from the less scoring one.
Suggestion for script authors:
For long scripts, we could easily add quicksaves, then to run recipes like 100 undos in order to make the movie of all significant changes of the recipe. The only limitation is that this would be good only on one client for one player and 1 recipe, and short time live (no archive).
The Feedback http://fold.it/portal/node/986177 is similar.