N-Body Simulation

It’s been a while!

I’ve added few things during the last weeks:

Changes:

• Added verlet integration, you can switch between integrators by pressing ‘i’
• Added an indicator at the top of the screen that show which integrator the simulation is currently using
• Added the option to spawn new planets that orbit the sun instead of being stationary (As shown in the GIF below)
• The simulation is now computed in 3D instead of 2D (mathematically, not graphically, but it would be nice if I add that later)
• Added a very crude debug menu to the left
• Updated the solar system’s planets positions and velocities
• Added the Moon

Here’s a video showing the new spawning function in action with 500 planets or so.

Turns out the simulation wasn’t implemented properly, so that’s fixed. On another note, I’ve added a working camera system! You can now move the camera by using wasd and zoom in/out by pressing the up and down arrows respectively. Additionally, you fix the camera’s position on a planet by pressing “x” and switch the current planet you’re fixed on pressing “n” .

Here’s some other small changes I’ve made to this project:

• Planets now have a trail behind them that can be enabled/disabled by pressing “t”
• The button to show the debug lines has been changed to “1”

And that’s everything I’ve added for now, which, i do admit, is very little for almost 10 hours of work, but now that I’ve gotten familiarized with the love2d framework, i hope i can pick up the pace a little bit.

I’ve attached an image showing the solar system simulated in this program as a proof of concept. As you can see, is somewhat inaccurate because I mistyped the some of the planets’ initial velocities and never bothered to fix them.

Currently, you can spawn new planets with “w”, clear all spawned planets with “c”, pause the simulation with space and show the debug lines by pressing “e”. Hopefully I’ll remember to write all of this in the readme file