Solar, a solar system simulator

Solar was my third year university project.

It is a “Build your own solar system” kit. The user can create a star system of their own design by adding bodies (“planets”) and assigning them a mass, position and initial velocity. The simulation can then be set into motion, and the user can find out how stable (or unstable) the system is.

The simulation can be run at a variety of speeds, forwards or backwards and paused and edited at any time.

This directory contains archives and PDFs of the project report and a poster and slides I produced for the project seminar, as well as (of course) the project source code. The usual ./configure && make should compile it. By default it creates an empty universe for you to play with; there are some more interesting demo universes in the examples directory that you can load by using the -f argument:

./solar -f examples/balls

There's also a Darcs archive of the source:

darcs get http://robots.org.uk/src/solar/solar/