Planetary bodies
Got woken up almost an hour ago by a couple having some rather heated domestics down at the transitway station, and now I'm having trouble getting back to sleep.. (I tried to snap a quick picture through the window using our new digicam, but my manual mode digicam-fu leaves much to be desired.)
So I've been messing around with PyGame for the past week or two, with the intention of creating a simple solar system simulator. Nothing too fancy, just a couple of orbiting planets. But it's been a real pain in the butt so far, since I'm not used to these Python math packages. How hard can it be to do some simple matrix multiplication, you ask? Well, I'm not entirely sure yet myself because I haven't reached that point.. Numeric has this thing called the array interface, and I'm not completely thrilled with using it thus far. I'm giving serious thought to wrapping it in my own matrix and vector classes--which, due to all the extra work it'll cause me, kind of defeats the whole purpose of using a high-level language for this.
Once I get past that, I still have the whole planetary body path prediction problem to worry about. Essentially, I need to come up with a set of equations that sufficiently simulates a stable orbit for several interacting gravitational bodies orbiting the same object(s), while allowing for major fluctuations based on other gravitational influences introduced by the user. Yeah, I don't think I'll come up with anything 'clean' that solves this problem either..
And lastly, because it kind of fits the theme of this post but not really, how about a link to Animexpansion ...
So I've been messing around with PyGame for the past week or two, with the intention of creating a simple solar system simulator. Nothing too fancy, just a couple of orbiting planets. But it's been a real pain in the butt so far, since I'm not used to these Python math packages. How hard can it be to do some simple matrix multiplication, you ask? Well, I'm not entirely sure yet myself because I haven't reached that point.. Numeric has this thing called the array interface, and I'm not completely thrilled with using it thus far. I'm giving serious thought to wrapping it in my own matrix and vector classes--which, due to all the extra work it'll cause me, kind of defeats the whole purpose of using a high-level language for this.
Once I get past that, I still have the whole planetary body path prediction problem to worry about. Essentially, I need to come up with a set of equations that sufficiently simulates a stable orbit for several interacting gravitational bodies orbiting the same object(s), while allowing for major fluctuations based on other gravitational influences introduced by the user. Yeah, I don't think I'll come up with anything 'clean' that solves this problem either..
And lastly, because it kind of fits the theme of this post but not really, how about a link to Animexpansion ...