UI fun using JS (modelling accretion discs)

http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/challenge ... 1180451277


This teaches us two things;

• 1. JS can do fun things,
  2. It's trivial to calculate realistic orbits based off gravity, but it won't be fun to play on.

How that?

Would you really want to be on a planet that is jiggling about like that?

In an actual system, the orbits have stabilized over millions of years. Further, the planets in those sims wind up being are a little large for the size of the sun: All the planets in our system combined have just over 1/1000 the mass of the sun. Bottom line, a real gravity sim wouldn't have that much chaos.

Why would you have to create such a messy system anyway? Put planets on stable Kepler orbits, like in (with smaller scales) KSP, SpaceEngine or good old Sol. No need to play on nascent systems still in the process of accretion. Well, a map option for that could be interesting, but I don't expect it to be the main map style.

edit : Ninja'd, and as mrknowie said, the mass of the central star helps considerably.

True, but you have a new source of fun in a "real" sim, instability due to numerical inaccuracy, due to relative mass/size/distance scales, the inaccuracy in your numbers may cause some funny behavior from time to time. Fun to watch and toy with, but sources of randomness that cause really bad things to happen (i.e. why is that asteroid flying at my planet w/ no engines). Not likely, but given enough game hours it will happen, and my impression is people dislike that.

I think this system may actually take longer to "settle" (as close as star systems actually ever get) than a real system, due to the lack of gas, and stellar effects creating damping forces, causing more collisions early on.

think the simulation was awesome. who said we cant have chaotic orbits aswell? but simpler said, a stable orbit is alot easier to implement, and i do believe you can decide how the orbit will be in for instance, the solar system editor.