funney three planet system
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like the system

An Article is now open in Wikipedia under the name Planets (GPL Program)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_(GPL_Program)


--------------------------------------------------------- ---------------
The following is a system with 7 planets 2 of which have satellites( 3 the first, 1 the second one)
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::
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:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::

No wonder they say the three body problem is chaotic. This one runs pretty wild for a long time, before they finally merge.

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OK. I also just figured out the save/load thing. I was expecting it to prompt for name or number.

I knew if I posted a message I'd immediately find out how to get the options menu back.

I absolutely love the program. It's truely fascinating. I spent a good part of yesterday watching it.

First a bad link report:
I tried downloading the latest version off the link on the home page:
http://planets.homedns.org/dist/planets-x86_Linux-0.1
but the link is bad.

Comments:
I downloaded the program as part of the Edubuntu update. I've noticed that the s and l commands don't appear to work on the version I have. Also, the web site reports features that aren't listed in the Help screen that starts with my version so I suspect I don't have the latest.

Before I throw out my questions, keep in mind that I've only had a working Linux system (Ubuntu) for 3 days so I'm a (near) total newbie. I also have no idea how to compile the source code and my programming skills date back to pre-history. I could probably edit it but I have no clue how to compile it, so bare with me if some of these questions/requests seem too easy.

Questions:
- How do I tell which version of Planets I have? It's not listed in the Help file, nor on the title bar.

- There was an Options screen whereby I could tell how many planets I had, etc. etc. I turned that off last time to see more of the screen but I can't turn it back on. I've tried o, alt-o, ctrl-o, right-clicking in hopes of a context menu, etc. etc.
Finally, I just let it run over night to see what solar system(s) formed from a 1200 random planet array and figured I could just save what was left, restart the program, load what I had saved and have the options menu available again. I can't re-load what I had (or it didn't save) and after re-starting the program, I still don't have the options menu. How do I get the menu back?

- I note from this discussion site that there are obviously ways of posting planetary systems. Where is the file one puts this in? I've only just discovered this so I haven't gone looking for it yet. Forgive me if it's painfully obvious. I think a mention of this in the help file would be good.

(probably) easy requests:
These are things I could possibly handle myself if I could figure out how to compile the source.
1) The program version number really should appear somewhere in either the help menu, the options menu or the title bar.

2) I thnk it would be really helpful to have a menu system whereby one could (re)select the options menu, save and load planet sets, etc.

3) I've played with small solar systems and it's fun but what I really find interesting is to create 1000+ random planets in pause mode and then sit back and watch order ascend from chaos. To that end, the program NEEDS some method of inputting 1000 number of random planets without having to press the R key 1000 times.

4) Some statistics would be nice. I'd be interested in two things, mainly: mass of the current largest plannet and speed of the current fastest planet.

5) The follow up to item 4 would be the option to center the display on the either the largest or fastest planets listed above.

6) Planet labels would be nice. I've thought it would be interesting to track the movements of a single planet in a cloud. Currently, I have to watch it which is tedious. A "locate planet X" function would be good. To be useful, these labels should be added or removed at any time, not just when the planet is created. I thought of this last night when I created a 2000 planet cloud and within the first half hour one planet had an encounter that made it take off like a bullet (based on it's trail length) through the cloud. I tried to track it for another hour but had to go have dinner. I would have like to have known where it ended up. My thought would be to assign a planet number to a label. Hence if planets "Dog", "Cat" and "Fish" all ended up being absorbed by planet #6 then locating any of the three would all point to planet #6.

7) Variable trail lengths. The trail lenghts are handy for getting a feel for the chaos that exists in a large cloud of planets but it slows things down. On the other hand, as a system of planets evolves in the cloud, I'd like to be able to select objects in and near the system and give them longer trails. I'd also like to give a few selected planets perpetual trails that would be inherited after collisions. These trails would visually track a planets movement throughout a cloud from the time the planet was selected for special observation.

8) When starting a large cloud there are a large number of collisions within the first hour. I thought it would be neat to have (optionally) a circle drawn around each collision site for, say, 5 seconds, so that one can sit back and watch the fireworks.

9) Finally, in the intrest of speeding up large scale simulations (and forgive me if this is already being done), I think it would be helpful to be able to set some user-defined distance from the center of mass and cull the planets that go beyond it on the assumption that they are now too far out to have any significant effect and are unlikely to ever return.


Not so easy requests that are probably beyond my programming skills even if I do figure out how the compile thingy works:

1) When I randomly select stars, they all appear within the view that I currently have. When you generate them by the thousands and then step back (unzoom) you see that you've generated a clearly rectangular cloud. Hence, if my request for random starts being generated in bulk is ever implemented, could it be done in such a way that the the stars are created relative to the center of the field of view at a random angle, but randomly within a specified distance of the center. Essentially, I'm talking about the inital seeding being done with polar coordinates rather than cartesian coordinates. With large numbers of stars this should produce a clearly circular cloud, not a rectangular one.

2) While I appreciate that many people are interested in modelling planetary systems, what fascinates me is the formation of a solar system from an accretion disk. The suggestion above would create the disk shape but there would need to be a method of giving thse bodies an inital push in more-or less the same direction to get the disk rotating. I"m proposing that, if the above suggestion is implemented, it also include an initial velocity offset in addition to random velocity already being generated. That offset would vary with the distance from the center and, with the right set of values in the options screen, a rotating accretion disk would be formed. I'd love to generate 1 million objects in an accretion disk and let it run for a month.
 

Finally (whew, thanks for hanging in there) a bug report:

I've noticed that when adding random planets, the planet count does not change until the simulation is run. If you're only adding 10 planets, that's not a biggie, but if you're adding 2000 with the intent of timing how long it take 50% to get absorbed (hence it's good to have a nice, round, starting number) it's a bit of a pain to have to keep starting and stopping the simulation to get the current count. The planet count doesn't really depend on the simulation actually running.

Thanks for considering all this, and I promise the next post won't be nearly as long.

Here is a system with an interesting 6-mooned planet, along with various other planets. I recommend viewing this with a trace length of 20.

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i created a huge sistem
enjoy!

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Brilliant program and lots of fun. It can do bubbles instead of planets too! Start with an empty universe, turn on bounce (important) and then just add lots of equal sized planets close to each other, but not touching. They just settle into a wobbling ball. Adding new planets is fairly safe, but don't add them too far away or the whole lot gets blown apart. Here's a sample.

zoom 1.00000000000000000000e+00
center (2.71571164577252091021e+01, -2.38608721895672992730e+01)
delta 4.50000000000000011102e-01

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Hie, Look the ball up/left !

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center (9.49662173856363324376e+02, -3.07727435685377486152e+03)
delta 4.50000000000000011102e-01

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body
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What will happen if small star arrives near sun?

zoom 5.0000000000000000000e-01
center (0.00000000000000000000e+00, 0.00000000000000000000e+00)
delta 12.50000000000000011102e-01

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body
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Another one:


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center (0.00000000000000000000e+00, 0.00000000000000000000e+00)
delta 12.50000000000000011102e-01

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body
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Some mine - how to destroy earth-moon connection:)

zoom 5.0000000000000000000e-01
center (0.00000000000000000000e+00, 0.00000000000000000000e+00)
delta 12.50000000000000011102e-01

body
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   id 111111111


body
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I down loaded Tc1/Tk & then I got a virus warning.
Can you tell me what is going on?

The Orbiter forum (http://www.orbitersim.com main page http://orbit.m6.net/v2/boardtalk.asp forum page) has a number of astrophysical experts.

I'm not trying to "sell" Orbiter, but it should be noted that it is a full blown spaceflight simulator way beyond the sophitication of Planets as far as I know. It does have its limitations. I'm using it to test the feasibility of realistic spacecraft concepts and found that it takes to long and doesn't provide useful "telemetry" for analysing trajectories, drag forces, atmospheric conditions, etc. to verify against CFD or wind tunnel tests or actual flight. Also, a proper spacecraft requires a module as a DLL to interface with Orbiter through an unusually clean and crisp API. While I'd love to do this, I don't have the ability to program at the moment, and I've bumped into the limitations of the "Generic" DLLs.

For math questions, go to the Space math and physics forum, where we discuss the hard core stuff. For actual coding questions, the Add-on or Orbiter SDK forum would be best. Don't think you'll offend anyone (just don't call Orbiter a "game";))

Personally, I'd love to have an "dirtbike" analysis tool where I can quickly whip together a two dimensional trajectory, have it plotted, and click somewhere on it to get the numbers...and then try to fly to that in Orbiter, the big fancy 3D Runge-Kutta "limo". Trying to develop the trajectory and required command inputs _in_ Orbiter is very time-consuming and tedious...especially as often as I screw up...I do have a "skateboard" type of device...an Excel spreadsheet with over 700 lines and 30 columns in it!!

Hi Yaron,

Any advice (beyond planets;) for a science/numerics guy
(C, Fxx, IDL, Matlab,...) who is trying to test Ocaml
for building simulation/data analysis software?

You can basically select any units you want --- you just need to set the gravitational constant, G, accordingly. Unfortunately, G is not
currently settable from the universe files. If you're interested, I might be able to add that feature without too much trouble.

y


On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 10:30, QT - charlott sophia wrote:
--
|--------/ Yaron M. Minsky \--------|
|--------\ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/yminsky/ /--------|

Open PGP --- KeyID B1FFD916
Fingerprint: 5BF6 83E1 0CE3 1043 95D8 F8D5 9F12 B3A9 B1FF D916
< replied-to message removed by QT >

Hi!
Obviously you are using some physics to get it all running. Could you give me some clues as to what the units are on the numbers in the text files? I tried to put in our solar system, but could not get it right, since I don't know if I am looking at metres or miles, seconds or years...
That would be really cool!

Thanks!

i tried to make something BIG, with sun and moons ....

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Glad you like it. You're right that it would be nice to have a place for posing galaxies, and I'll get one up eventually. For the moment, however, you can just post them here. The galaxies are just text files, after all. I'll post a few to get things started. Just copy them out and past them into a file in your .planets directory.

Here's one that works well if you first turn on bouncing by pressing B:

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delta 5.99999999999999977796e-02

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And here's another with two planets orbiting each other, each with its own small planet in a close orbit:

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Rather fun... Pause it and scroll all over the place putting in planets with large vectors all heading away from the center... Make your own big bang! :)

You need a place on the web site for exchanging galaxies.

Very cool this program!!! I could use it for hours...

Excellent for kids and adults alike!
I laughed, I cried, ... it was better
than "Cats"!

On Fri, 2002-07-05 at 17:30, QT - Marco Paganini wrote:
> Very cool! Reminds me of one very old (and very cool) EGA Game
> called "Spacewars" where you played against an opponent on the
> keyboard. The trick was exactly to orbit a planet. It was cool
> to find new "stable orbits" that worked to your advantage...
>
> But, back to planets. :)
>
> I miss:
>
> - An option to freeze the simulation when I add a planet

Well, you're in luck. Press "p" to pause the simulation. You can add planets in pause mode. Then "p" again to get out.

> - A rollback option (so I can correct the planets/vectors)

"g" goes back to just after the last planet addition, "u" goes back to just before the last planet addition. Basically, "g" is to replay recent events, and "u" is to undo.

> Sound would also be cool! :)
>
> Anyway, it's cool as it is.

Glad you like it.

y

Very cool! Reminds me of one very old (and very cool) EGA Game called "Spacewars" where you played against an opponent on the keyboard. The trick was exactly to orbit a planet. It was cool to find new "stable orbits" that worked to your advantage...

But, back to planets. :)

I miss:

- An option to freeze the simulation when I add a planet
- A rollback option (so I can correct the planets/vectors)

Sound would also be cool! :)

Anyway, it's cool as it is.
Paga

Yeah, it's a UNIX program really, and is easy to use from UNIX, but it's not well set up for Windows, and I don't have the time (or inclination, really) to set it up to be really easy for Windows.

As for "l" and "s", I have a guess as to what the problem might be, and will take a look at the code. As a temporary fix, if you know how to change environment variables, try defining one of your directories as HOME. planets should create a subdirectory of that called ".planets", and put the files in there.

Great effort, neat program. Not for the novice who just wants to play around unless you can develope a better setup process.

? "l" and "s" don't work for me. wrong directory(s) maybe?

thanks

Ralph

PS AMD700 on win2k

Great effort, neat program. Not for the novice who just wants to play around unless you can develope a better setup process.

? "l" and "s" don't work for me. wrong directory(s) maybe?

thanks

Ralph

Take a look at the webpage. There's a link to a Tcl/Tk download (roughly 7Mb, sadly) that you should install and then reboot before trying to run planets.

missing tc83.dll file? how do I get that?

I just recompiled my RPM on a redhat 7.0 system, and I supspect this newer RPM should work on Mandrake now.

Actually, it is the 3.04 version of ocaml that is installed (from Mandrake Cooker). I guess that we will have to get after Mandrake. I have another question to raise with them anyway. I've other stuff to attend to now but will get back to this.

Glad to hear that the Windows version works for you.

As for Mandrake, in order to compile, you need ocaml 3.04, which comes with camlp4 included. Probably the usual mandrake package is an earlier version of ocaml.

And I do encourage you to take a peak at ocaml. It's a lovely language. Although it does have its own warts (slighly clunky syntax being one), it is both fast and full of high-level language features that make programming a lot of fun, once you get the swing of the whole functional programming and type-inference thing.

Regarding cygwin, my silly, dumb error. I took the Freshmeat version of planets and expect that to run on Windows. Hence the error. Windows version does rather better. Fun program, judging from what little experimenting I did. Thank you. Thank you as well for good, informative error checking re any missing tcl.dll or whatever. And apologies for the false alarm.

Mandrake Linux? Well, I've ocaml loaded now. About time, you might say. I'm no programmer, really; but peaking at ocaml documentation has been on the agenda. Unfortunately, planets would not compile. Could be my set-up. The error statement was:
ocamlopt.opt -I +labltk -pp "camlp4o pa_ifdef.cmo" unix.cmxa str.cmxa labltk.cmxa libjpf.cmxa -inline 50 -cclib -lunix -c augSet.ml
sh: camlp4o: command not found
Preprocessing error
make: *** [augSet.cmx] Error 2

If you have suggestions, I would be pleased to try again. Then again, if Madrake Soft would give it a go, that would be the better test.

Edited by author 02-20-2002 05:13 PM
Yet another reason why we need LSB-compliant distributions.

I can't explain the problem with the windows distribution -- it's certainly not something I've seen before. There's a somewhat newer version of the windows binary linked from the website (0.1.4. Up until 5 minutes ago, 0.1.3 was the one linked to from the web page.) You might want to try downloading that one. Tell me if you have any luck.

As for mandrake, I'm a little saddened to hear that it doesn't work. It's unfortunate that distributions are so non-uniform. Anyway, I encourage you to build it from source. You do need a recent (3.04) installation of ocaml, but if you've got that, building it is cake. Just type "make planets".

No luck with binaries. Cygwin error is --> Syntax error: "(" unexpected. Problem with my cygwin installation, perhaps? I don't know. This is on NT.

Mandrake Linux 8.1 no-go also. Planets wants libtk.so.0. The rpm Find site suggests that this comes from a RedHat package. Enough dependency issues that I'll hold off until my Mandrake installation is up-dated.
Of course I could try compiling....

Statically linking to Tcl/Tk would be nice, but Tcl/Tk is a big beast, and I don't know that there is a good way of doing such a static linking.

I'm not sure a manual describing the inner workings of planets would be of much interest except to someone who is interested in modifying the source code, which I am very much in favor of. This is particularly true because planets doesn't really do anything terribly interesting in terms of the physical simulation. It's just a dumb, 1st-order approximation.

If you'd like to know more about the details of planets, I'd be glad to tell you about it. And if it results in an interesting document, I'll post it to the site. Perhaps you should email me directly (yminsky@cs.cornell.edu), and tell me something about your background, so I get a sense of what you do and don't know about the material, and pitch my explanation accordingly.

Hi, I havent tried it yet, but it is something that I was thionking about making myself. Anyway, I wanted to know if you could me a Windows version that is staticlly link with TK, that would make me happier right of the bat. I'm going to reboot to linux and try it out now.
Oh also, I would like to see "The Science, Physics and Math Behind Planets". If you give me a head start on the info I could help out.

Thanks for the feedback.

The translations, the packaging and the initial-help screen are all good ideas that I'll look into and try to get done soon.

Dear author.

I am a danish teacher in fysics, and I have tested the programe whith my class (After spending 1,5 hour playing whith it because it was fun).
I used the Linux version.
I have the following comments:

- My pupils liked it very much.

- As a teacher in Denmark I would like to be able to translate the program into Danish - Pleace use gettext or another way of easy translation.

- Would it be possible to make a kind of handbook that told a bit about graviation, Newtons and Keplers laws and the link to real planet behavior? (Look at the Kstars handbook http://kstars.sourceforge.net/handbook/index.html for an example).
That would make it even more usefull in education.

- As you don't have any menubar (witch is great) you need another way of telling the users how to get the fun startet. I would sugest a kind of splash screen (Although I normaly hate them) telling the commands to get started and to get help.

- I woud like a way to install the programe in binary form, so all users can use the program. Are you thinking of making a RPM- and DEB-package?

I am looking very much forward to translating your programe into Danish.

Gunner Poulsen.
E-mail mailto:gp@lyngbjerggaardskolen.dk

Hi. I thought it might be nice for people to have a place to give me feedback on the Planets. I know there are some people who've had problems installing on Windows (or who have simply been annoyed that they have to download Tcl/Tk to even use the damn thing.)

Anyway, I'd like to hear feedback, good and bad.