Feature request for Universe 2.0

These features would be nice to have:

• Customizable laws of physics (imagine Tuesday being Newtonian physics day, and Wednesday Aristotelian physics day)
• Unlimited undo, backups
• Neat aliens (not rocks on Mars)
• Forgiving thermodynamics (why can't I exceed 5000 degrees C when focussing the sun with a parabolic mirror?)
• Lower speed of light.
• Time travel (if we fix this, we might manage to make the customer's deadline!)

The following are showstopper bugs:

• Documentation!
• Incomprehensible error message when dividing by 0 (division should either work for all arguments or be removed from the system; currently it just confuses the users).
• Premature termination.
• Perpetuum mobile still doesn't work.
• Primitive beliefs of dominant lifeforms.
• Continuum hypothesis is independent of just about anything.
• Doesn't work in the debugger.
• Ugly color scheme.

I could go on, but this should be enough to get people working...

This Universe update should include the ability to turn the "breathing" option on, or off, or at least put it on stand-by for a time. This would be infinitely handy for sneaking up on someone, eating without swallowing air, and for swimming underwater.

Also, it would be very handy if we could turn "sound" off in the Universe, or "vision". This would make it much easier to identify with blind, and deaf people, and probably make the world a much better place for it.

Toggle switches would be the key thing here, toggle switches on everything.

I'd hope that this Universe 2.0 would make time travel possible, so that I could go back and stop a few wars.. of course, this would kind of, you know, change the entire world dramatically, but who cares, I'm ready for something new already. :)

Oh, oh! Also, I'd like to be able to turn on an option that "refreshed" or "changed" the scenery, or "skin", every time you blinked. This would mean every time you opened and closed your eyes, the image before you would be totally different. Of course this feature would need a settings list, so that you could choose how many blinks between each change, how dramatic the change would be, etc., etc.. but it does have potential, I think.

Bugs in 1.0:

• Pi and e are irrational. This has held back mathematical and scientific development immesurably.
• Undo still isn't implemented
• geometry should either be euclidian or non-Euclidian; this should be independant of scale.
• relativity still has some major bugs

Suggestions for next time:

• either reveal Yourself to everyone, or stay hidden, but having twenty-odd mutually contradictory religions causes way too much trouble.
• document everything!
• implement that undo button
• how about making Pi = 3?
• make the metric system mandatory from the beginning
• the universe should be themeable
• division by zero should be allowed

How about you just open source the whole deal? It would be a lot more convenient and I don't think you'd have trouble attracting developers. (See also the final section of Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning... Was The Command Line).

Saving The Now in some convenient way, making it possible to go back if needed.

This would really help out when looking for something in an unfamiliar city. If one has to make a decision in a crossroads about which way to drive, one could save that moment and go back if the wrong decision was made.

I really miss this feature. Otherwise the universe is pretty much ok as far as I'm concerned.

The discontinuity involved in the collapse of the wave function is a total hack. And there are a whole lot of magic numbers (pi, the speed of light, etc.).

If there's no possibility of an undo, I'd at least like to see a pause button.

Re-enable cold-fusion. Rather than fixing the bug, they should have just documented it and made it a feature.

The class hierarchy should be re-designed. As it stands, it is often impossible to tell exactly which class a given object is in.

in response to Ariston's now-deleted writeup, which recommended that use of the 6 inaccessable dimensions be opened up to end users:

While your ideas may sound nice from your perspective, I am afraid that you simply do not understand the concept of object-oriented programming. I suggest you find a copy of the paper published in ACM titled Methods and Standards - Information hiding, which provides a vastly simplified but still enlightening treatment of some of the issues at heart here.

in response to several writeups within this thread:

While we realize that the rather non-intuitive values and uses of pi, e and the golden ratio may cause consternation among users, we hope you can understand that this was absolutely necessary in order to maintain backwards compatibility. Do not try to ask what it is for backwards compatibility with; that information is not provided to entities with conscious attachments to the material plane, unless they are under NDA. Just trust us; it makes sense. Suffice it to say that the Ordinal Number system (1, 2, 3, etc) is actually the one that follows "unnatural" patterns, not the values of e and pi (in any consistent geometry, at least). Keep in mind that the Fibonacci Sequence service and its so-called "ordinal quantity" user interface are not necessarily things that we are are under any obligation to provide, and that they were implemented solely as a courtesy to users. Be happy we were able to get them in.

Oh, and some of you have reported issues you may be having involving the nature of square roots of negative numbers or behavioral quirks in the concept of infinity (i.e. relative sizes of infinite sets and/or the whole "divide by zero" issue). These are NOT bugs. They are inherent consequences of deeply rooted design decisions. STOP ASKING ABOUT THEM.

We apologize for the problems with apparent "inconsistencies" of quantum mechanics, geometry and relativity issues across levels of what you choose to call "scale"; we are currently working on the usability concerns with these patterns, and our top developers are currently experimenting with new ways of looking at this particular problem in hopes of finding a viable alternative.

Thank you for your time; if you have any more questions feel free to contact our customer service representatives, or consult our 24-hour automated help system. Note though that Verthandi, Urd and Skuld are not responsible for general technical support; please do not bother them unless specifically referred.

Unfortunately, many of the Request For Enhancements mentioned above are partially implemented in the current version. The main reason was the rush to get it out the door - seven days is not enough time to go from rough specifications and a beta version to a full working version.

Different requirements by the various marketing devisions have also confused the issue. Some wanted a soul, some wanted reincarnation, and others refused to promise the end user anything at all. With such wildly differing promises to the consumer, things got a bit hectic. When push came to shrove at which point one of the VPs said 'hey, it compiles! ship it!' and it went out the door with a big bang and much fanfare.

Initial sales of universe v1.0 were good, and the sales market sold them faster than we could make them. Physicists now account for this period as the 'inflationary' period. After things cooled down a bit and sales leveled off customers kept sending in bug reports. As a quick patch the developer team wrote up a black hole hack and released it. This allows the user to shove anything that is causing a problem into the void and not worry about it again. At no time should the event horizon be removed from this patch - naked singularities are prohibited by the Universal Decency Act. We are aware that in several trillion years, there is the chance that these may be exposed again, however we believe that most forms of government have difficulty over such lengthy periods of time and hope to have it repealed by then.

Thank you for your interest in Universe version 1.0 and please be certain to update the service pack regarding dark matter and dark energy. Things seem to be picking up again and we would hate for you to miss out on these latest features.