Hey guys,
I just came across a very useful library for any game that takes place in space, and could possibly warrant being packaged with jME in the future.
OrbitalExtrapolationKit, or OrEKit as its called on their site, is a java library used extensively for orbital predictions. the library is free to use for commercial and non commercial projects without strings, and has been used by the French and European space agencies for tracking software on their missions.
This is an absolute gem, is fairly active, robust, easy to use, and filled with just about everything you could dream of to make astrophysics a synch.
Take a look at the site, leave feed back if you want.
If nothing else this will show up in searches from now on for anyone this may interest.
Hmm, interesting. My first worry though would be that if it’s not designed for games it may not be fast enough, still an excellent resource for people to look at though and it may have good enough performance once investigated.
My casual reading so far has given the impression that the library’s “Propagator” class seems to act as a System in the data-driven Entity System approach when run in slave mode, as each iteration of calculation is stepped by a defined interval. If this is indeed how it operates, as we’ll see as i start messing with it, this may lend itself to the ES model fairly well as is.
While the internal architecture of this system is hierarchical and iterative, and thus could impede runtime performance, i suspect that limiting the number of frames the Propagator handles, and using more instances of a Propagator for other frames as needed may mitigate this loss in speed.
The source of this library is also freely available from their site and would validate or invalidate this initial impression upon further inspection.
Either way the algorithms in the source are a gold mine. There’s even classes that almost behave as components that attenuate retro thrusters for a craft to the propagation each step that its active/attatched.