matthewh806/orbital

Orbital

Gravitational orbit simulations on your computer!

Setup and running

While this project is still in development I haven't focused so much on packaging it up and making it all run nice and smoothly.

The project is made up of a C++ component (for running the actual simulation and saving the data to disk) and a simple python script for plotting the output using pyplot. A shell script is also included to automate all of the individual steps.

The C++ portion currently doesn't require any external libraries or dependencies, so compiling that is is as simple as:

g++ -o ./build//orbital -Wc++11-extensions -std=c++11 src/*.cpp

Running a simulation is then as simple as: ./build/orbital [iterations] [timestep] where both [iterations] and [timestep] are integers. This outputs the orbits of all of the bodies in .dat files

The Python script uses matplotlib.pyplot for outputting the data on a graph. So get that via pip (or whatever). At some point I'll include a requirements file and setup a venv in the shell script.

The python script can be run with python plotter.py *.dat.

But nevermind all of those individual steps, I've included a simulate.sh script. This:

• Checks if the build directory exists and if not runs make (compiling, linking the C++ code)
• Runs the simulation for [iterations] [timestep]
• Calls the plotter.py and displays the output graphically