Advanced XODUS Techniques: Simulation Visualization

Abstract

One of the biggest hazards in developing a simulation is the pressure to make it user-friendly. If you ever make the mistake of making a simulation easy for people to play with and understand, they will suddenly discover gaping holes in your model design, and start to think up all sorts of “improvements” for you to make An even more unpleasant situation can arise when you have sent off the final page proofs of your simulation paper, and decide that now is a good time to provide it with a colorful display so that people reading your paper can run the simulation themselves. Inevitably, the display will reveal a fundamental bug in the simulation that no one (least of all yourself) would ever have noticed in all the hundreds of lines of simulation code. The prudent builder of simulations will avoid any compromises when it comes to obfuscation. This chapter, then, is for the reckless, since its stated goal is to reveal all, to shine the bright light of day on the hidden crannies of simulations where bugs lurk, and to display the gory details using the rainbow colorscale in an animated three-dimensional draw widget.