Orbital Mech Lives Again!

A long time ago I made some software for the Mac called Orbital Mech™. I sold about 2000 copies of it, but it was a net loss so I had to close up shop around 1990. This was for the original Mac, mind you, so I had to develop special high speed floating point math routines to make it run quickly enough.

Now, finally, I'm beginning development on it again, this time in Flash and for the web. So far, I've just got the basic stuff, smaller bodies orbiting a large body. Check back weekly to see new developments.

nbodies - Change the number of bodies in the simulation.

restart - Restart with new, randomised positions and velocities for the secondary bodies. You might have to hit this one several times to get an interesting simulation.

replay - Replay with the same positions and velocities. When you get a good randomised simulation, you can play it over again to watch how it works.

continuous - Cycle continously, as opposed to stepping.

step - Step for the number of cycles indicated in the input box. For example, if step if 0, it just plays continously as usual. If step is 1, the when step is clicked, the simulation will step through one calculation cycle and then stop. If step is 10, then it will go through 10 cycles before stopping, and so on, and so forth.