Orbital
Orbital is an open-source project about civic simulation: agent-based models of real places, built on public data, published in a form that ordinary people can run in a browser and argue with. This site is the reference for that work, the thesis, the tools and the models built with them, and the tools remain in use.
Browse the primer. Simulate the World is a detailed, book-length case for civic simulation. Its thesis in two sentences: simulation is argument, and accessibility, not computation, is the unsolved problem. Read about the primer.
Use the tools. Orbital is implementation-agnostic. The patterns were exercised first in a series of Rust agent sandboxes and then in JavaScript, where the current packages live. At the bottom is a late-binding event bus for a dynamic pool of heterogeneous agents. Above it sit declarative manifests, an entity-component pattern, and a rendering layer that listens to the bus rather than being called by it. The bus and Volume.
Explore the work. Models and pieces built with these tools, from a coral reef sandbox to playable models of the Colorado River and the Strait of Hormuz. The work.
The code is published under the MIT license on GitHub at orbitalfoundation and on npm under the same scope. Orbital is led by Anselm Hook, with contributors and supporters acknowledged in the primer and on the about page.