Orbital
Orbital is an open-source project for civic simulation: agent-based models of real places, built on public data, published so that the people who live there can run them in a browser and argue with them.
Read the thesis. Simulation is argument. Accessibility, not computation, is the unsolved problem. The earlier essay at simulate.world makes the case in nine short chapters; the primer Simulate the World makes it in full. Both.
Use the tools. A late-binding event bus for a dynamic pool of heterogeneous agents. Declarative manifests. An entity-component pattern. A rendering layer that listens to the bus instead of being called by it. The patterns were worked out in Rust first and then in JavaScript, where the current packages live. The bus and Volume.
Explore the work. Playable models of the Colorado River and the Strait of Hormuz, a coral reef sandbox, a news desk for computational journalism. The work.
Join in. Feedback, questions, suggestions and code are all welcome. Contribute, or go straight to the Discord.
Code is MIT licensed, on GitHub at orbitalfoundation and on npm under the same scope. Orbital is led by Anselm Hook with the contributors named on the about page.