marauder
10-29-2009, 07:37 AM
I am currently beginning a new set of projects and need help deciding what language to write these projects in.
I'm a high school physics teacher, and I have a fair amount of experience with programming. I'm familiar with both C++ and Java, and have worked extensively with Fortran while performing research for my thesis in college. I've written a lot of Fortran programs since them for various topics in physics, but I've only ever needed to print results to a data file so they can be graphed later. Now, I'd like to write a program that will actually simulate the motion of the objects on screen, rather than just producing a graph.
More specifically, my first goal is to create a simulation of two galaxies colliding. Each galaxy will have a set number of stars orbiting a central nucleus, and the point is to observe how the stars behave as the two nuclei get closer and closer. My question is, what language would be able to do this? I used Flash and ActionScript in high school to create similar simulations, and something along those lines would be perfect, but I no longer have that resource as an option. So I'm looking for something open-source. I've been looking into either getting back into Java, or trying Python (the fact that this can interact with Blender to create 3D animations is very tempting, if only there were more documentation on that aspect). Can anyone offer any advice and point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance for any help you're willing to offer.
I'm a high school physics teacher, and I have a fair amount of experience with programming. I'm familiar with both C++ and Java, and have worked extensively with Fortran while performing research for my thesis in college. I've written a lot of Fortran programs since them for various topics in physics, but I've only ever needed to print results to a data file so they can be graphed later. Now, I'd like to write a program that will actually simulate the motion of the objects on screen, rather than just producing a graph.
More specifically, my first goal is to create a simulation of two galaxies colliding. Each galaxy will have a set number of stars orbiting a central nucleus, and the point is to observe how the stars behave as the two nuclei get closer and closer. My question is, what language would be able to do this? I used Flash and ActionScript in high school to create similar simulations, and something along those lines would be perfect, but I no longer have that resource as an option. So I'm looking for something open-source. I've been looking into either getting back into Java, or trying Python (the fact that this can interact with Blender to create 3D animations is very tempting, if only there were more documentation on that aspect). Can anyone offer any advice and point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance for any help you're willing to offer.