Description:

Step is an interactive physical simulator. It allows you to explore
the physical world through simulations.

Features

- Classical mechanical simulation in two dimensions
- Particles, springs with damping, gravitational and coulomb forces
- Rigid bodies
- Collision detection (currently only discrete) and handling
- Soft (deformable) bodies simulated as user-editable
particles-springs system, sound waves
- Molecular dynamics (currently using Lennard-Jones potential): gas
and liquid, condensation and evaporation, calculation of macroscopic
quantities and their variances
- Units conversion and expression calculation: you can enter something
like "(2 days + 3 hours) * 80 km/h" and it will be accepted as
distance value (requires libqalculate)
- Errors calculation and propagation: you can enter values like "1.3 ±
0.2" for any property and errors for all dependent properties will be
calculated using statistical formulas
- Solver error estimation: errors introduced by the solver is
calculated and added to user-entered errors
- Several different solvers: up to 8th order, explicit and implicit,
with or without adaptive timestep (most of the solvers require the GSL
library)
- Controller tool to easily control properties during simulation (even
with custom keyboard shortcuts)
- Tools to visualize results: graph, meter, tracer
- Context information for all objects, integrated wikipedia browser
- Collection of example experiments, more can be downloaded with
KNewStuff
- Integrated tutorials