Gravit - A gravity simulator

Created by Gerald Kaszuba

About

Gravit is a gravity simulator which runs under Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It's released under the GNU General Public License which makes it free. It uses Newtonian physics using the Barnes-Hut N-body algorithm. Although the main goal of Gravit is to be as accurate as possible, it also creates beautiful looking gravity patterns. It records the history of each particle so it can animate and display a path of its travels. At any stage you can rotate your view in 3D and zoom in and out. Gravit uses OpenGL with Lua, SDL, SDL_ttf and SDL_image.

Screen Shots

Features

• It looks pretty :)
• View the simulation in 3D using stereoscopic imaging!
• Can be installed as a screen saver in Windows
• You can record, then play back at any speed
• Stores every particle's position for every frame in memory
• Compresses history when needed, for very long recordings
• Mouse controllable rotation
• Console with script execution
• Colours can be based on mass, velocity, acceleration, momentum or kinetic energy
• See an octtree being created in real-time
• Save/Load functionality
• Update display/input while recording a frame

Details

• It is written in C and uses Lua, SDL, SDL_ttf, SDL_image and OpenGL.
• It uses the Barnes-Hut Algorithm.
• Gravit was called Graviton, but i changed the name because someone already used Graviton for their project!

Documentation

So far I have made a several pages of documentation. i'll attempt to keep it up to date. The Gravit documentation is here.

Discussion and Support

I recently added Gravit on Google Groups if you need some support or want to talk about Gravit.

You can sign up directly here:

Download

Gravit 0.4.2 has console tab completion, some new shortcut keys, when accessing the console with drawosd 0 the console will now render, added stereoosd command to view the osd in stereo, few bug fixes.

Read the ChangeLog for the more details.

• gravit-0.4.2-win32-installer.exe Gravit 0.4.2 Windows installer (864,834 bytes)
• gravit-0.4.2.tar.gz Gravit 0.4.2 Source Code (214,999 bytes)

Older downloadable files are available and you can browse the source code.

Resources

• NEMO - A mature open source gravity simulator. Also lists many gravity simulators and resources.
• Gravity 6 - A free Windows gravity simulator focusing on the Solar System.
• Wikipedia - Gravit's article on Wikipedia
• Ohloh - Gravit on Ohloh