Mr. Pig’s House of Bacon

This help file is for version 1.1.0.* of my Orbit Simulator. If you are not running this version some commands/features may be moved, missing or not mentioned in this document.

Commands/Keys/Mouse

• Enter – Pressing enter starts/stops the processing of the simulation.
• Left Click
  • Single Click – A single left click selects or moves an object. If you click on an object you will select it. If you have an object selected and click on blank space you will move the selected object to that location.
  • Double Click – Double left clicking on an object will open up its settings window where you will be able to change its name and configure various physics/appearance settings.
• Right Click
  • Single Click - A single right click will deselect any selected objects.
  • Double Click – A double right click will create a new object at the given location.

If you’re just getting started I recommend opening the example file provided in the download archive called “Basic Orbit”. You should then double click on some of the objects and see how they are configured.

Creating a System

Let’s recreate the system found in the Basic Orbit file. First make sure you have a blank canvas (File->New). Alright, in order to do this we need to spawn two objects – one which will be the sun (the object we will orbit around) and the other will be the earth (the object that orbits). To do this double right click in the center of the screen and then double right click a fair distance away from the newly created circle – I’d say about an inch and a half.

Now double left click on the first object we created. This will display the settings window for that object. This will be our “sun” object (you can call it what ever you like). We need to set its mass to something very large so that our next object will have little affect on its location in space. Let’s try something like 5000. Now click apply. OH NO! What happened?! We made the object’s mass so large that it takes up the entire screen! Let’s fix the problem. Change the relative density property to 25 and click apply. Ahh, much better. Click save and close.

Now double left click on the second object we created. This will be our “earth”. The object’s default mass is fine, as is its default relative density. All we need to do is set a magnitude and direction of its velocity vector. By default the objects have no velocity. This would be bad for our setup as the earth would move directly twoards the center of the sun and the force of gravity each object applies on eachother would approach infinity. So in order to fix that we’re going to set a starting velocity. I’d set around 4 for the magnitude and you should set the direction so that it is perpendicular to the line connecting the center of the earth to the center of the sun. The direction is measured in degrees below the horizontal. So if I put the “earth” directly above the “sun”, I’d set the direction to 180 or 0. If I put it directly to the left of the “sun”, I’d set the direction to 90 or 270. Click save and close.

You may now want to go to File->Save and save your current configuration so that you can fix any problems that you may find during the simulation. Once you start the simulation there is no way to return to this setup without first saving, then loading this configuration.

Now press enter and watch it go!

Notes

• Before changing settings make sure you stop the simulation. The settings window updates constantly so it will be impossible to change settings for an object while the simulation is running.
• Save files may not be compatible between versions.