Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 17:12:55 -0000 X-Mailer: YahELite Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

If you're into physical particle systems, Cyrille & Damien Henry have a mass/spring plugin, which was called PMPD when I saw their performance.
Else, GridFlow could do things like that too, but it can also do density models, which are more like "we have the space and then there's matter in it" whereas particle systems are more like "we have matter and then it's somewhere in space". PMPD would be a good tool for exploring gravity - but you would have to explore the escape velocity scenario, where links (springs) are broken if an object attains a certain angular momentum, and a different (repulsive) mechanism comes into effect (and what about dark matter/energy or as it should be termed, the foo fudge factor (FooFF)).

Also - how fast is your computer? They normally use supercomputers to do this, I think you may have problems on a standard machine. Modelling aspects of the universe such as doppler shift would be easy, but it's a problem of scale...perhaps you ahould start with a solar system?

Best, Ed

Well I am working on PMPD and particulary on the morphing exemple for a live show in two weeks, my computer (athlon 2600+, 333Mhz bus freq, 512 RAM, and Nvidia 64Mo) can handle the 125 spheres with no problems, it's slowing down if I use text with 'round' fonts and more than two letters, So I could make an emulation of the largest planets (from mercury to pluto-charon) with our sun without problems, but the solar system has more than four hundred thousands planets if we are counting, centaurs, troyans, comets, ect...there is an encyclopedia of solar planets I don't remember the adress yet. So, a cluster of several computers (maybe with pure-dyne) would be needed to make an accurate model, indeed...

patco