GSim | Devpost

GSim Logo

Inspiration 👨‍🔬👩‍🔬🌎🪐

Just like a lot of Physics students, I remember learning about Newton's Law of Gravitation but it was always difficult to truly grasp the quantities and imagine the motion of planets and celestial bodies. Even when I would take notes or solve questions, my pages would dissolve into a spaghetti-like mess of squiggly and crossed-out lines.

We built GSim to help students like us visualize the effects of mass and planet distance on the forces between different planets, and the motion that arises from these forces.

What it does 👀🌍🪐

GSim is a simulator tool to help students visualize the motion of planets. Users can add planets and delete planets using the plus and minus buttons, respectively. They can also move around the different planets to change the distance between planets using their cursors. Lastly, the selected planet's mass can be changed using the ringed planet slider. After changing all of these variables, users can click on the rocket ship play button and watch the simulation transpire before you.

How we built it 🧰🛠🔧

We built GSim using the Unity Game Engine and C#. This helped us manage all of the inputs and all of the physics for the simulation.

Challenges we ran into 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️

Idea Generation We found the theme of space quite difficult and initially decided to make a space-themed guided meditation experience with mindfulness, focused, and loving-kindness meditation. However, due to a lack of time and high-quality assets, we decided against it. To get this idea, it took us almost 5 hours of brainstorming.
24 Hours Most hackathons we have done before have been about 48 hours or longer so a 24-hour hackathon was quite challenging because our usual timings and workflow had to be sped up.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏆🏅

Building a Full Simulation/Game in 24 Hours While we have built games using the Unity Game Engine and C# before, we thought 24 hours would make this task close to impossible. Still, we managed to come up with a simulation in this limited time and we're proud we could do so.

What we learned 🧠🧠

Unity Post-Processing To make this project, we had to use a lot of different post-processing effects and work with a new post-processing stack. We will definitely use these new post-processing effects to better future games and projects.
Working with Data Structures in C# We had to use a lot of different data structures like arrays, collections, etc. to make this project. While we had used these before, there were some methods we didn't know before which will definitely improve our programming skills.

What's next for GSim ⏭⏭

We have two features we want to add to GSim in the future. First, we want to add another input for the initial velocity for the different planets. This would allow our simulations to account for circular orbits and circular motion, as well. Secondly, we want to allow users to simulate planets in three dimensions.