I just finished the final touches on the pulsar visualization. I changed the beams to be more cone-like for visualization purposes, added control panel functionality and packaged it all into a .exe for you guys to try

I’ll try to create alternative for the goated non-Windows users

https://github.com/Coverst-ux/space-sim/releases/tag/v1.0.0 <- .exe file

https://github.com/Coverst-ux/space-sim <- github repo/readme

I thought the hardest part would be the pulsar physics, turns out it was the rendering that was a genuine pain

I reworked the field lines into 3D instead of the ugly previous 2D, added rotation, added a beam that you see in pulsars, and basic camera controls. I’m quite happy with how its all coming together.

Devlog 3

The pulsar is finally starting to look 3D

Today I connected it to the camera system from the rest of the simulator, so I can rotate and zoom around it properly now. I also added a 3D background starfield, which surprisingly helped a lot because you can actually between the front and the back of the simulation

The magnetic field lines were also moved from 2D plane into a 3D plane around the neutron star. I added some glow to them and worked on a feature where the lines that go behind it just disappear instead of awkwardly just being in the background

There were a couple annoying bugs with lines randomly disappearing and even entering the star itself, but those are fixed now

It still has a LONG way to go visually, but I think it’s starting to resemble the kind of pulsar simulation I had in mind

Devlog 2

I finally got the rendering to an (Okay?) place.

Most of my work was on the physics side of the pulsar. Which isn’t exactly the “most exciting” per se. So I decided to get the visualization and get it looking like an actual simulation instead of a bunch of nerdy physics.

The big blue ball in the middle is the neutron star ofc. And those lines are the magnetic field lines that surround the star.

Tracing them was quite the pain. I had to trace the magnetic field from all the different points around the star. Then, figure out how to like follow it in both directions and have a copy of each field line on each side as you can see.

It is DEFINITELY not staying like this. I wanna get it up to par with the rest of my work which is in the README (go check it out 😊). Although, not having models/assets is a big obstacle so I’m forced to draw everything with Pygame.

Currently, the physics is simplified so I can get a minimum viable product of the simulation.

So now I’m stuck between two choices:
A) Get the simulator to look significantly better
or
B) Unsimplify the physics and make it technically impressive

I’ll go start figuring out that one next

Researched and wrote notes for the simplified pulsar physics. Implemented the 3D magnetic field calculation. Tested the logic, scaling, and guards for invalid behavior. Compiled the pulsar module and confirmed that all tests passed.

My next course of action would probably be connecting the C++ physics engine to python for visualization.