If you don't see your question included here, please email us.
And if the question becomes frequent enough, we'll add it!
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When will Astroflow be released?
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How will Astroflow be released?
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Will it be possible to use other simulation codes
with Astroflow?
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What operating systems (Windows, UNIX, MacOS) will
Astroflow run under?
When will Astroflow be released?
We are uncertain about any public release date at this time.
To be absolutely clear, we should point out that Astroflow is a framework
and the actual end-user programs will have different release dates and
target audiences. We are planning on having major portions of a planetarium
kiosk program done by the end of Summer 1999. Other versions will
be completed thereafter.
How will Astroflow be released?
This is uncertain. We hope to release some of the
more generic components in the Astroflow framework that will benefit other
projects under a free license. What form the release and licensing
of the end-user programs based on Astroflow will take remains to be determined.
Will it be possible to use other simulation
codes with Astroflow?
It is our intention that Astroflow will not be tied to any particular
simulation code. Layers of abstraction have been designed into the
framework to isolate the specifics of any particular fluid dynamics code.
New codes should be accomodated by implementing fairly trivial interfaces.
Multispecies and MHD codes should be handled in a similar straightforward
manner. To be fair and honest, whether this will work in practice
with any code other than ours remains to be seen, but we are highly confident
that our design will make this possible.
What operating systems (Windows, UNIX, MacOS)
will Astroflow run under?
Astroflow is almost completely written in pure Java. We have
to use a small portion of compiled native code to speed up array processing,
but this code was kept small (two pages of C) and is very generic and trivial
to port. It took us a very short amount of time to port the entire
code base (less than a half-hour) from our Linux development platform to
Windows 95. We expect ports to other OSes will be just as easy.
On a related note, the compiled code will be an impediment to using Astroflow
in a web browser, but we have a few good ideas to solve that problem which
we are exploring.
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