Facticity

I have worked on various projects over the years that involved tracking and analyzing the behavior of dynamic (moving or otherwise changing) objects. I was involved in writing timing/benchmarking analysis software for one such system and a simulator to verify the message processing capabilities of another system. I have long wanted to write my own simulator and related tools from scratch and contribute these to the open source community that has helped me so much in my own intellectual and software development efforts.

I intend for this simulator to be useful for testing systems that track and analyze the behavior of people and other animals, bacteria, manned and unmanned vehicles, etc. Ideally this software will be useful for simulating rescue and law enforcement operations, interaction and other behavior of large numbers of autonomous entities, et cetera. That is of course a long term goal since I am just starting this effort and am a long way from having a useful simulator right now. I would like to extend this tool to cover general network simulation but there are already a lot of tools that provide that capability and do it better than I ever could, given my lack of free time to develop this.

Since this is my hobby, along with philosophy and parenting, I have no idea when I will get any particular part of the simulator built and working. If you’re interested in playing with it, you’ll just have to check back once in a while to see if it has the features you’re looking for (or can be easily modified to add those features). Feel free to contact me to tell me about bugs, suggest features you’d like, or contribute code.

I do have a short term goal for this project in that I need a simulator something like the one I’m planning for work. So while I’m doing this on my own as a hobby, I do plan to use it at work as it becomes more functional. Thankfully, my home development machines consist of both Macs (with OS-X) and Ubuntu/Mint PCs so they are very conducive to productive development.