In the previous ED puzzles I was able to use the ED chart as a guideline.
With 647 I find this impossible to do.
Maybe some extra tooling would help.
First of all adding the 3 translation vectors in the picture might help a little to find the main orientation.
And second adding tooling to make it possible to manipulate the visual representation.
Blanking out parts or colouring parts by moving a box around the part you want to blank out or colour. That way you can try to make the picture more usable as a guideline.
It is difficult to tell where to "wrap" the protein into the adjacent cell, since we can't see the ED cloud extending past the viewing prism on that side. Would it be possible to scroll through the cloud, or drag a prism frame across the cloud, so we can see the extension of the protein into the adjacent cell? The amount of cloud showing at any one instant could be the same, but the cloud could disappear on the left and more cloud appear from the right as we slide the frame in that direction. Since the game knows where the continuation of the cloud is, let us see different subsets of it depending which piece of the protein we are working on.
Agree, this, together with a blank out tool would make it possible to create a more or less coherent view. Or give us a cell of size 222 with a blank out tool.
I definitely agree there need to be more options for adjusting the view of the density. I'm looking into implementing some of these.
The native pdb (4GZV) for puzzle 647 shows a dimer of tetramers. Which begs the question, does the ED we were given show a single protein tiled in space, or a tetramer tiled in space? Will we know, in general, whether we are looking at repeats of a single protein?
Now I understand how the cloud is much bigger as the protein. The cload shows a dimer…. Making it really impossible for us to get near.
For a puzzle like 663 it becomes really important to have a blank out tool so we can narrow down the portion of the ED we are trying to match. Timo's ideas of 1) showing the three axes and 2) letting us color portions of the ED would help greatly too. Coloring could be used to mark features we have found, as well as to mark the path of the backbone in an area before trying to match it with a piece of the protein.
I hope more people will weigh in with their wishes for using the ED map. I find over and over that I need to mark an area of the map so that I can zoom out, rotate things around, find an appropriate section of protein, cut it out and move it into the marked location. I also need to mark an area so I can identify it again after real world interruptions, since the game has to take a backseat to other tasks.
You could kill two birds with one stone by allowing us to select a portion of the cloud and set both the color and alpha for that portion. For areas we wish to hide, we could set alpha (transparency) to full. For other areas we could come up with our own conventions of marking landmarks using different colors. A button to reset alpha to default for the whole map (without resetting the colors) would let us find the hidden portions again. For completeness, another button could reset all colors to one value. An undo button for map marking (as opposed to protein changes) would also help.
@Susume:
A kind of user-defined palette?
Assgin each measured density value to a user-defined RGBa- or HSLa-color value?
I was not thinking of using color to mark density values or any feature the game could identify for us. Rather, let us use color (or something else) to manually mark areas of the cloud that we identify by examination. Personally I would want one color for helices I had found, one for sheets and one for large hydrophobes. Different people might want to mark different landmarks.
