The Nameless Particle Engine (NParticles) is a particle and n-body simulation engine with GPGPU support. It is written in C++ and uses OpenGL 4.3 as render and GPGPU framework.

Table of contents

• Compilation
  • Dependencies
  • Compile library with cmake
  • Compile samples manually
• Sample applications
• API
• Licensing

Following libraries have to be installed to compile the engine:

• OpenGL (>= 4.3)
• GLEW (>= 1.11.0)
• GLFW (>= 3.0.4)
• GLM (>= 0.9.6)
• Boost filesystem (>= 1.50)
• pkgconfig (to find GLFW3)

The version numbers are those I used for compilation. Older versions may work as well (except for OpenGL!) but are not tested yet.

Some Linux distributions do not install the FindGLM.cmake module when installing the GLM library. This file can be found here. Download this file into a directory (e.g. cmake/Modules inside the root directory of this engine). To make it available for cmake, add following line to the CMakeLists.txt inside the root directory:

SET(CMAKE_MODULE_PATH ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/cmake/Modules ${CMAKE_MODULE_PATH})

Note: To run the engine, the OpenGL extension GL_ARB_shading_language_include is required! Future releases may get rid of this extension since it may not be supported by all drivers.

Just create a build directory: mkdir build Change to this directory, execute cmake and run make: cd build && cmake .. && make

This creates a static library placed in lib/ inside the root directory. This library can be used to be linked again applications using the engine.

The samples shipped with the engine are stored in the bin directory located in the root directory of the engine. To execute these samples, they have to be called from inside the bin directory.

To manually compile one of the samples, following command can be used (from within the build directory):

$ g++ ../samples/solarsystem.cpp -o solarsystem -std=c++11 ../src/*.cpp -I../include/ -lGLEW -lGL -lglfw -lboost_filesystem -lboost_system

The documentation of the sample applications can be found in doc/samples.md.

NParticles ships with a doxygen API. Just run doxygen in the engines root folder.

A class diagramm (full and simplified version) are located in doc/diagrams. You need Umlet to view them.

NParticles is published under the zlib license. The detailed license text is provided in license.txt.