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-0.1but 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.
