breve - A 3D visual simulation engine
Jul 27, '04 09:23:00AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 10 out of 10]
[This is the Pick of the Week for the week of July 12th]
Shamelessly lifted from the website, breve is "a 3D simulation environment designed for the simulation of decentralized systems and artificial life." In other words, breve is a tool for people who are much smarter than I am! breve basically allows you to program a "world," complete with entities who respond to the rules you create. The world is created with a simulation language called "steve" (no relation to Jobs, I'm sure!). You then run your program, and you can watch your population (and its behaviors) evolve over time in an OpenGL rendered view of the world. You can zoom, rotate, and interact with obejects in the universe through this view, creating an interactive environment. There are people doing some amazingly interesting research with breve, but that's not why I chose it as a PotW.
When you install breve (it's a full GUI app; a simple drag and drop does the trick), you'll find a whole suite of demos installed with the program. To a non-scientific-type such as myself, these demos provide a glimpse into the world of simulation, and they're quite fun to watch. They range from the quick and simple (fireworks; try it with the Speed menu on Slow) to the complex and very slow to run (the "walker" examples in the Physics section should be run for 12+ hours, in order to let the walkers evolve and learn to walk). You can record any simulation to a QuickTime movie, too, so you can come back later and watch the entire progression.
When you run the demos, you'll also see the source code that creates what you're seeing on screen. If you're so inclined, you can change the variables and re-run the simulation to see what effect your changes have. If you've got the time and desire, you can even learn "steve" and write your own simulations. That, of course, is beyond my skill set, but I do enjoy running and tweaking the demos. Thanks to Sean Luke at George Mason University for pointing this one out to me!
Note: breve will stress your system -- running some of the more complex demos maxed out both CPUs on my G5 -- so don't be surprised if other tasks on your machine slow down a bit when the demos are running.
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