StarGen-II

StarGen creates datasheets for realistic solar systems.

Starting with a small amount of information about a star (mass, luminosity and age), Stargen extrapolates the solar system from its initial dust sphere, to its accretion into planets, asteroid fields and atoms. Then it calculates the composition of the planets ground, oceans, atmosphere and climate, using physical laws and the algorithms of the orginal stargen program.

It is used for developing space simulation games.

C++ Library

Rewritten in C++, StarGen-II offers a set of classes that can be used to define the characteristics of a solar system, during the runtime of your application, or before with the command line program.

The program generates an XML file (and a plain TXT file) describing a random solar system (random seed), and the Sol solar system (seed 0). So if the model is not too bad, this 0-datasheet should roughly looks like our solar system.

When using StarGen in your program, you generate and then parse the xml file. You can keep the file, so when you need later the same solar system again, you can re-parse the same xml file.

Output Format

StarGen-II generates XML files that can be easily parsed by your software, and TXT files that are more human-friendly and contain comments, (especially units).

Interface with Celestia Catalog

You can associate StarGen-II with the Celestia catalog (files are included with Stargen-II). In that case, you can generate solar system datasheets based on real astronomical data.

Doxygen Documentation

The C++ classes are explained in the Doxygen documentation, here.

Original StarGen

The original StarGen code is developed by Jim Burrows in Visual C and can be found at eldacur.com.

About me

Find my other softwares at GitHub.