Solar system with a twist 😁
giteshsai
Pilot a spacecraft from Earth through a wormhole to Tau Ceti, collect Taumoeba, and return with hope for a dimming Sun.
What it does
Solar system with a twist is a playable Python/Taichi space expedition inspired by Project Hail Mary. You begin in space near Earth, explore all eight Solar System planets, enter a fictional wormhole beyond Neptune, and travel to an illustrative Tau Ceti system. Flying close to its scenario planet Adrian collects Taumoeba, the fictional predators of astrophage. Bring the sample back through the wormhole and approach Earth to complete delivery.
The main mission explains the mystery of the dimming Sun. Optional missions guide players to Mars, Saturn and the wormhole. A navigation map, planet markers, heading assistance, proximity warnings and assisted braking make the large distances playable. The fictional cruise drive has the same 5.5 AU/s cap for every destination in both systems (6.5 boosted), with slowdown near objects. An aligned Earth-to-wormhole trip takes approximately 10-15 seconds in the tested starting state.
The simulation numerically advances Newtonian central-gravity orbits using a kick-drift-kick leapfrog integrator in double precision. JPL J2000 orbital elements initialize the planets. Separate special-relativity formulas provide Lorentz factor, Doppler shift and proper-time readouts. The cruise drive and traversable wormhole are explicitly fictional and are not represented as valid relativistic motion.
At Tau Ceti, infrared view reveals a three-dimensional pink astrophage cloud. Predators pursue separate nearby prey, consume actual agents, gain energy, reproduce and starve without food. Satiation prevents unlimited feeding; prey reproduce under a carrying-capacity rule. Real consumption drives flashes and counters, and the graph plots actual population counts. The rates are invented ecology, not real biology.
Taichi kernels render textured planets, the colored spacecraft mesh, particles and the wormhole on the GPU. GGUI displays the scene with cached text. NASA-hosted visualization assets provide planetary maps, converted through their original UV layouts in Blender. The emission-only Blender wormhole becomes a rotating game texture with a shader-created recessed interior. Adrian instead uses original curl-advected cloud artwork; it is not a measured exoplanet surface.
The central implementation challenges were preserving usable flight across astronomical scales, avoiding overshoot, keeping a fixed wormhole orientation while adding visual depth, making a dispersed 3D predator/prey system interact, and fitting detailed visuals onto a GTX 1650 Ti. Rendering is 1280x720 by default, with a 640x360 option for better performance. The approximation details are listed in APPROXIMATIONS.md.