Spacetime Simulator

Inspiration

Our inspiration mainly comes from the book "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawkins which one of our team members coincidentally had. We used it for a lot of the algorithms, and it inspired us immensely in the design.

What it does

The project simulates the spacetime plane where the user can place various celestial bodies. The bodies will then interact with each other relatively accurate to the real world. It's meant to simulate the spacetime continuum in a simple way but be somewhat accurate and easy to use.

How we built it

Almost all code was created by our team, however some libraries were used. The main ones are pygame and a ui_control library created by Mr. Sharick. Little AI was used in the making of the code and when it was used it was used to generate ideas for the algorithms.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of issues with our code while building it. When creating a collapsing star, the star would often disappear into nothing. Due to time constraints, our team had to scrap the idea altogether. The gridlines which simulate the ones seen in many models were also difficult to debug and make working. However, our biggest challenge was within our team itself. We split into two due to our differing ideas creating two different projects.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The spacetime gridlines are the most impressive part of the project, where the lines are distorted based of the gravitational pull of the various celestial bodies around it. The ui controls are not impressive coding wise but are useful and easy to use.

What we learned

We learnt mostly about various new functions in pygame. Also, we learnt advanced physics including the Einstein field equations and other advanced concepts.