Introduction
This is a program for interactive visualisation of Gadget N-body simulation snapshots. It can automatically identify and read all of the formats described in the Gadget-2.0 documentation and produce dot plots (optionally colour coded by particle properties such as temperature, metallicity etc) or SPH smoothed density plots of the particle distribution. It can handle simulations with too many particles to display by random sampling the particles to keep the number displayed roughly constant as the viewpoint is moved around. Other features include the ability to:
- Read user defined particle properties from HDF5 or type 2 binary snapshots
- Select particles by position or by other properties and track them between snapshots
- Make histograms and scatterplots of particle properties, optionally highlighting any selected particles
- Make simple movies
Prerequisites
The program is written in a mix of C and Fortran so you need working C and Fortran compilers to build it. GTK-2 is required for the GUI. It also has some optional dependencies:
- HDF5 - if you want to be able to read HDF5 snapshots
- PlPlot or Cairo - for plotting graphs and annotating the main display
- LibPNG - for writing out screenshots and movie frames
Obtaining the code
The code is now distributed via github. Please see the releases page for the current release version.
Documentation
The tar file contains a README file with instructions for compiling and running the code.
Screenshots
The main program window with particles in a halo selected
A plot of internal energy vs density for the displayed particles