Space ship in weird 3D world

Due Date: Friday October 27th 2006

Idea: A space ship travelling in a 3D world must contend with force fields of various strengths (both attractive and repulsive). The ship only has thrusters for extra speed and can steer.

Physics:

• Ship is a point mass
• Ship is steerable in all directions
• Ship moves at constant velocity when not using thruster (i.e. Newton's law of inertia holds)
• Ship has a thruster to momentarily boost speed
• Force fields that attract and repulse ship
• Force fields should generate a force proportional to the inverse square of the distance between it and the ship
• Force field generators can not move and are not affected by other forces

Rendering:

• View from ship's cockpit as main interface
• Translucent colour gradients of force field strength

Core:

• Take user input from keyboard (or mouse) to steer ship and enable ship booster
• Save user input to a file
• Replay user input from file to get same results
• In other words, there are 2 input methods, direct-human or a 'replay' file

Scenarios. You need to create the following 3 scenarios:

• Pin ball table -- all forces repulsive
• Trap Escape -- Ship must navigate a path surrounded by attractive forces. [Think of a tunnel made of attracting sides]
• Freestyle -- combination of repulsive and attractive forces

Submission Requirements:

• README file containing notes on what libraries you used and how to get them (if not included)
• REFERENce file containing notes on what references you used. This includes books, web pages, discussion with friends, etc. This is an 'engineering journal'.
• Makefile or build script or detailed instructions on how to compile
• Source code
• Sample user input files for all three scenarios
• Must be submitted as a single file (zipped or gziped archive).

Notes:

• Field strength must be scaled so that things look/feel 'right'
• Default velocity and thruster speed scaled so that things look/feel 'right'
• Must run on either Linux or MacOSX using OpenGL.
• Each student does own assignment (no group work this time).
• Any programming language can be used
• Recommend using pre-written linear algebra and ordinary differential equation integration libraries

Bonus: (implementing any/all of these features will be worth extra marks)

• Rear-view cockpit mode
• Give visual indication of areas in space that are in-escapable based on ship's maximum power (ie if you get too close, you will get sucked in)
• Top down (2D) view (animation and 'complete path')