Thursday, October 15, 2009

First Release Of Redesigned Particle Code Is Up


The first release of the redesigned Particle code is up and can be downloaded from SourceForge.

What's In This Release
The code has the following features:

* It has been placed in the public domain.
* Particle base class that is independent of FreePOOMA.
* Particle classes for all observed Hadrons of the Standard Model, this is in addition to the elementary particles.
* Particle decay functionality added.
* Template-based classes that allow for any type of number to be used for particle properties. For example, you can use floats, doubles, complex numbers, or quaternions for these properties.
* Math utilities that provide matrixes, vectors, vertexes, and quaternion classes.
* Programmer's Guide in both Microsoft Word and Apple Pages formats.

What's Not In This Release
This is basically a 'To Do' list. These features will be added in the near future pretty much in the order listed below.

* FreePOOMA integration. This will be added in the form of a wrapper class around the new Particle classes.
* Collision detection and reaction code.
* An atomic model, i.e. a way to combine particles into atoms.
* A molecular model, i.e. a way to combine atoms into molecules.
* Support for fields.
* OpenGL integration.

Once again I'd like to thank the folks at The Particle Data Group for helping me when I ran into problems.

The code is available as a zip file here: Particle Zip File.

In the future I'll be making posts that cover the code in a bit more detail.