Too Many Asteroids?

December 4, 2014

I posit: there is in fact no such thing as too many asteroids.  At least, if we’re talking about the virtual ones in the Gravity Simulator.  I like to stay far away from them in the real world.

I’ve been working on the Gravity Simulator more, adding in features / fixing bugs for version 0.30.02 — which is coming shortly to computers near you!  But along the way, I’ve been getting distracted … erm… doing research making some pretty, silly, and pretty silly orbits.  Thought I’d share some of the latest.  Most were created thanks to the new auto-fire feature, that let me draw *a lot* of stuff really quick.  Because more is better.

Ring of Asteroids

More than a wee disturbance in the force, I’d say.  That ring is made up of about 300 individual asteroids, so many that it looks solid.  But as you can see, it’s clearly not.  As you watch the video, notice which asteroids the planet flings away from the star, and which get pulled closer in.  Why?

For a more, erm, patriotic version of this, let’s remove the star and planet entirely:

Kind of like the big bounce — everything coming together, but just missing the center.

Now how about if we get that ring moving…

We are well on our way to screensaver material, here, folks!  A lot of asteroids of course means a lot of lines.

If, instead of putting down tons of asteroids, I instead add tons of planets (right on top of one another) — we get this:

Those yellow planets are all orbiting around one another very closely, while orbiting that distant yellow star.  Since forces increase significantly as two planets get closer, having them all on top of one another requires a lot of accuracy — though I’m happy to see that the sim is cut out for the task.

You, too, will be able to play with the auto-fire soon.  Pop over to the forums to keep an eye on the progress, or to get an advanced copy.  Otherwise, it’ll be posted on Humble Bundle soon.

-Andy