I made a small yet important update to the mission viewer yesterday : element substitution.
When I asked Lanky (the guy who's responsible for most of the new ResearchNet assignment) how he made his special-element missions, he said he had asked Zach to simply replace certain elements with the greek ones. After feeling a bit stupid for not thinking of that myself, I went along and added that option to the viewer. And then when showing this to Lanky, he suggested an any→any substitution option, so that's now possible as well.
[img id="img-mivi-example" src="[$IMGBASE]conversion-00.png" cap="Conversion settings for Ru→Ω, Os→Σ, and Hs→Δ (which is element 203)." /]It works as follows. There is now a “conversion bar”, seen in [$FIG][[ref:img-mivi-example]]. There are three types of fields here:
- A conversion enable checkbox.
- Search input-fields for the special elements Θ-Av. Av is the symbol for Australium.
- A batch-converter field, where you can specify any-any conversions by entering search:replacement pairs.
The example from [$FIG][[ref:img-mivi-example]] has 'Ru' for the Ω substitution, so any Ru's will be converted to Ωs. The batch string will be parsed into Os→Σ and Hs→Δ substitutions. As you can see, you can use either the element's symbol or number here – the special elements have numbers 200 through 204.
[br]
The conversion process will change both the elements in the molecule, and in the formula. At present, the formula substitution uses a simple text conversion, so it can get confused by single-letter elements, but otherwise it works fine. Only valid SpaceChem elements are considered, so you shouldn't be able create a mission code that crashes the game (I hope).
[br]All in all, this change presents two interesting possibilities. First, the ability to create puzzles with special elements with relative ease. Second, the ability to break bond-limits. for example, you could change O-C-O into O-H-O using a 'C:H' batch. Not that anyone would be wildly Mad enough to use that as a target, right? Right?!?
[br] Ahem, so yeah: http://coranac.com/spacechem/mission-viewer.