A downloadable game for Windows and macOS
- The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os Pro
- The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os Catalina
- The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os Operating System
- The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os 7
In 2006, the Universal Binary version included the following enhancements: QuickTime export of the orbital animation, in addition to PICS. Endian conversions for file and disk access. Adapted source to Xcode. OS X-compliant application and file icons and plst data. Correction of an issue with sound buffers for the orbital sound. Integrated in the operating system. OS X uses Cocoa. Mac OS9 and OS X use Carbon for 32-bit applications. The Windows API used in Microsoft Windows. Microsoft had the graphics functions integrated in the kernel until 2006; The Haiku operating system uses an extended and modernised version of the Be API that was used by its spiritual predecessor. Magnussoft ZETA, earlier yellowTAB ZETA, was an operating system formerly developed by yellowTAB of Germany based on the Be Operating System developed by Be Inc.; because of yellowTAB's insolvency, ZETA was later being developed by an independent team of which little was known, and distributed by magnussoft.As of February 28, 2007 the current version of ZETA is 1.5.
The Zeta Orbital is a first-person sci-fi exploration game set on an abandoned research station orbiting an alien planet. Explore the station, uncovering clues to the crew's mysterious disappearance. They found something on the planet, and brought it back to orbit — but what else did they bring with it?
Welcome to The Zeta Orbital. Can you find the answers, navigate the station, and scavenge enough resources to escape?
Early Access
The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os Pro
The Zeta Orbital is very much an _early-access_ game, and likely to change (and improve!) over time. This is a very early build, where I'm hoping to get feedback from itch.io players to help spot bugs and suggest new content.
I'll release new versions at least weekly, with new stories, puzzle rooms, and bugfixes in each. The Zeta Orbital is built by one person (hello!), so there's a limit to how much I can get done in each week -- but I'll do my best to make sure your first-person sci-fi exploring only gets better, never worse.
A Rogue-(Like)-Like
The decks of the Zeta Orbital are procedurally generated, and you can save your progress only when moving between them. Scavenge precious resources to explore each level, but never take your eye off your oxygen supply
An Open-Ended Story
The orbital's crew didn't disappear all at once — and left their own theories about what they saw happening around them scattered in their PDAs & terminals. Piece together what really happened from snippets and suggestions as you make your way through the crew's quarters.
Every System a Puzzle
The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os Catalina
Many doors were left locked on the orbital, and many of its support systems are barely functioning. You'll need to restore what you can if you want to escape the station intact.
| Status | In development |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS |
| Author | doches |
| Genre | Survival |
| Made with | Unity |
| Tags | Exploration, First-Person, Low-poly, Procedural Generation, Roguelike, Sci-fi, Singleplayer, Space, Walking simulator |
| Average session | About a half-hour |
| Inputs | Keyboard, Mouse |
| Links | Steam, Homepage, Steam, Twitter |
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $2.99 USD. You will get access to the following files:
The decks of the Zeta Orbital are procedurally generated, and you can save your progress only when moving between them. Scavenge precious resources to explore each level, but never take your eye off your oxygen supply
An Open-Ended Story
The orbital's crew didn't disappear all at once — and left their own theories about what they saw happening around them scattered in their PDAs & terminals. Piece together what really happened from snippets and suggestions as you make your way through the crew's quarters.
Every System a Puzzle
The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os Catalina
Many doors were left locked on the orbital, and many of its support systems are barely functioning. You'll need to restore what you can if you want to escape the station intact.
| Status | In development |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS |
| Author | doches |
| Genre | Survival |
| Made with | Unity |
| Tags | Exploration, First-Person, Low-poly, Procedural Generation, Roguelike, Sci-fi, Singleplayer, Space, Walking simulator |
| Average session | About a half-hour |
| Inputs | Keyboard, Mouse |
| Links | Steam, Homepage, Steam, Twitter |
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $2.99 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Development log
- First itch.io ReleaseDec 11, 2019
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Real-Time Visualization of the Quantum Mechanical Atomic Orbitals The orbital images on this page represent the shape of the atomic orbitals. The clouds you see are the probability distribution of an electron bound to a Hydrogen nucleus. These images were created using Atom in a Box, a scientific and educational program that aids in visualizing the Hydrogenic atomic orbitals, a prime and otherwise unwieldy example of quantum mechanics. |
| Mac | iPhone | iPad |
Atom in a Box on the Mac App Store for both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs running macOS 'Big Sur' 11.2 or later See below for additional Mac versions. | Atom in a Box for the iPod Touch and iPhone is part of the debut of the App Store. |
NOTE: First announced at the 1998 Conference on Computational Physics held in Granada, Spain, I am a student winner in Computers In Physics' Ninth Annual Software Contest with Atom in a Box. Full descriptions of the prize winners are in CIP's Nov/Dec 1998 issue. This now makes me the only person to have been a student winner twice in a row in CIP's Software Contest. In addition, Apple has been kind enough to write an article about Atom in a Box in their inaugural issue of Apple University Arts. Do you speak Dutch? Prata svenska? Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Habla español? Parlez-vous Français? Parlate italiano? Also, this program appears in a 12-minute streaming RealVideo clip at the UCLA Department of Design. In addition to the many kind individuals who have registered, I thank all those who registered from institutions such as: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pacific Lutheran University, U. C. Davis, Georgia Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, University of Houston, Wesleyan University, University of Missouri - St. Louis, Purdue University, Millikin University, West Virginia University, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Universität Bern, Washington State University, Southwest Missouri State University, Douglas High School, San Joaquin Delta College, Maine Maritime Academy, Kalamazoo College, Southwestern University - Georgetown, Texas, Haverford College, Florida A&M University, Nagoya University, Miami University, Virginia Tech, Yale University, Bob Jones University, Cornell University, Kyoto University, Utah State, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Snow College, Hammond High School, Reed College, University of Washington, Wooster College, Colorado School of Mines, the Wellington School, the University of Southern Mississippi, Harvey Mudd College. Many people have registered from outside the United States: Japan, United Kingdom, Canada, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, and Italy. Through word of mouth, I have heard of my program in use at Caltech, U. C. Santa Cruz, Stanford, Harvard, and others. |
Unlike other tools in this category, this program raytraces through a three-dimensional cloud density that represents the wavefunction's probability density and presents its results in real-time (up to 48 frames per second on Mac G3s; even faster on the latest hardware). The user interface is very interactive and provides a wide degree of flexibility.
It contains all 140 eigenstates up to the n=7 energy level and the allowed spectral transitions between those eigenstates. The Mac version also allows a state formed by a superposition (see below) of up to eight of those eigenstates allowing for over 3 trillion possible states and can display a wavefunction as a picture of a cloud, use color as phase, plot in red-cyan left/right for 3D glasses, and slice the wavefunction.
You can see more example images at the bottom of the page.
What is Quantum Mechanics?
One of the great advances in human knowledge of the twentieth century is the birth of the theory of Quantum mechanics. It has led to some of the most common technologies used today, including the little transistors that make up the computers you're using to read this. One of the mysteries it revealed was the structure of the atom. Classical mechanics could not properly explain the existence of the atom. Because there was nothing to stop electrons from spiralling in to the nucleus, it predicted that all atoms would immediately destroy themselves in a spectacular high-energy blast of radiation.
Well, that obviously doesn't happen. Quantum mechanics describes that the electron (and all of the universe for that matter) exists in any of a multitude of states. The particular physical situation determines what and how many states there are. Borrowing from some of the techniques in mathematics, physicists organize these states into a particular set of mathematically convenient states called 'eigenstates'. Eigenstates are good to use because what makes one eigenstate different from another usually has a physical meaning. They also can make an horribly difficult problem managable. These and other phenomena in Quantum mechanics predict that possiblities in physical phenomena have distinct separations (e.g., 'quantum leaps') and that energy transport exists as indivisible packets, called 'quanta'. Hence the name: Quantum Mechanics.
What are Orbitals?
By applying these techniques to the hydrogen atom, physicists are able to precisely predict all of its properties. The electron eigenstates around the nucleus are called 'orbitals', in a rough correspondence with how the Moon orbits the Earth. We find that these states do not allow the electron to crash into the nucleus, but instead find themselves in any combination of these orbital eigenstates. These orbitals' physical structure describe effects from how atoms bond to form compounds, magnetism, the size of atoms, the structure of crystals, to the structure of matter that we see around us.
Visualizing these states has been a challenge, because the mathematics that describe the eigenfunctions are not simple and the states are a three-dimensional structures. The standard convention has the orbital eigenstates indexed by three interrelated integer indicies, called n, l, and m. Their range and interdependence comes out of the math in deriving the eigenstates. n can range from 1 to infinity. l can range from 0 to n-1. m can range from -l to +l. They also have physical meaning. The energy of the state, which is negative because the electron is bound to the nucleus, depends only on n and increases as n increases. l refers to the amount of angular momentum the electron has due to its 'orbit' around the nucleus. l is not equal to the amount of angular momentum but goes up as angular momentum goes up. m determines how much of the angular momentum is in the z direction. (However, the rest of the angular momentum is not l minus m or anything that simple. That's a long story that I can't fit here. Look in a Quantum textbook (a good one is A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics by John S. Townsend), take a course, or talk to a physics professor.)
What's here for me?
I have written a Macintosh application that displays atomic orbitals in real-time. Rather than just a plot of the spherical harmonics, as is shown in many Quantum mechanics textbooks, this program displays the electron orbital as a cloud. The cloud's density is determined by the orbital's probability density for the electron. There are three examples on this web page: The one at the top is the n=3, l=2, m=0 state; the screenshot above has n=7, l=4, m=0; the first example below is n=6, l=4, m=1. (The quality is poor so that they wouldn't take too long to download over the Internet. They'll look even worse if you are not using Millions of colors to view it. The program looks quite a bit better, trust me.) With the program, you can rotate the orbital around in real time. If you have red-cyan 3-D glasses, you can see it in 3-D too. The program has all the orbital eigenstates up to n=7, which is the highest occupied shell for the ground states of the heaviest elements, e.g., Uranium, Plutonium, etc.
You can download the application from the links below and have a look. The program is computation intensive. For individual users, the v1.x Mac application is US $20 shareware. Pricing of the later versions are on the App Store. You can read the details in the about box or the Read Me. Also supplied are example orbital files.
Platform Availability| Mac | iPhone and iPod Touch | iPad | |||||
Rewritten from the ground up, v2 of Atom in a Box uses SwiftUI 2.0 and multicore to reach new capabilities the previous code could never do.
After Mojave, Apple ended support for the Carbon API this app uses. If you're not sure if it'll run on your macOS, you may download it so you can test. This code base will receive no further updates. In 2006, the Universal Binary version included the following enhancements: QuickTime export of the orbital animation, in addition to PICS. Endian conversions for file and disk access. Adapted source to Xcode. OS X-compliant application and file icons and plst data. Correction of an issue with sound buffers for the orbital sound. New recognition of horizontal and vertical scroll wheels, so now you can use the Mighty Mouse's scroll ball to rotate the orbital. Known issue in the Universal version: On most Macs, OS X 10.4.x places a 60 fps governor on QDFlushPortBuffer, consequently limiting the speed with which AiB can display its animation. One should be aware of that before making speed comparisons. Hint: increase the Samples setting to make the calculations more challenging. For OS 9 and pre-OS X 10.3.9, we also provide a Carbon CFM version of AiB 1.1 (324 kB). v1.0.6 will run on both OS 9 (with CarbonLib) and OS X. The latest pre-Carbon version of Atom in a Box, v1.0.4 is no longer supported. See the READ ME for more details. | Atom in a Box -
See the App Store for pricing and availability for your country. |
| |||||
See the Atom in a Box iOS Online FAQ for Version History. Reviewers: Please email your request and your background info (e.g., your web site) to feedback @ daugerresearch.com to obtain a review copy. |
A Short Gallery of Animated Orbitals
This is the quantum state where n=6, l=4, and m=1: | Orbital Animation' src='Orbital.641.small.gif' width=192 align=center> |
The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os Operating System
This is an equal superposition of the |3,2,1> and |3,1,-1> eigenstates: | +|3,1,-1> Orbital Animation' src='Orbital.321+31-1.gif' width=192 align=center> |
This is an equal superposition of the |3,2,2> and |3,1,-1> eigenstates: | +|3,1,-1> Orbital Animation' src='Orbital.322+31-1.gif' width=192 align=center> |
The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os 7
This is an equal superposition of the |4,3,3> and |4,1,0> eigenstates: | +|4,3,3> Orbital Animation' src='Orbital.410+433.gif' width=192 align=center> |
