starship-design: testers wanted

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

I've been working on a small project to test some of the ideas I want to
use in a more elaborate relativistic simulator.  The result is a program
that graphically displays the effects of relativistic motion at constant
velocity or with constant acceleration, including color effects of
doppler-shifting on a color display (it should work with 8-bit
colormapped displays or 15-, 16-, and 24-bit true color displays).  It
displays either a randomly-generated star field or a cubic lattice of
stars, and you can specify many parameters like velocity, acceleration,
time scale, and number of stars to display using command-line arguments.

To run this program, you need:

A version of UNIX with the gettimeofday() system call (known to work in
Linux, Digital UNIX, and Solaris; probably most other modern UNIXen will
work)

X11R5 or later (only the Xt and X11 libraries are used)

An ANSI C compiler (tested with gcc and Digital UNIX cc)

Probably some amount of programming knowledge about C, UNIX, and X

I haven't worked up elaborate documentation about the program, so you
may need to be willing to read the source code to figure out how it
works.

If you're interested in looking at it send me mail privately and I'll
mail you the source.  I'll also try to get some preliminary
documentation done for ease of testing.