Asteroid Factory

This repository hosts the compiled binary releases for Asteroid Factory, a cross-platform tool for procedural asteroid generation and geophysical simulation.

Note: This repository contains executable releases only. No source code is hosted here.

📚 Citation

If you use Asteroid Factory in your research, please cite it as:

@software{Hickmott_Asteroid_Factory_-_2025,
author = {Hickmott, William and Hoettges, Kai},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.17957777},
license = {MIT},
month = dec,
title = {{Asteroid Factory - A cross-platform tool for procedural asteroid generation and geophysical simulation}},
url = {https://github.com/whickmott/Asteroid_Factory},
version = {1.2-pre-release},
year = {2025}
}

📦 Downloads

Please download the appropriate version for your operating system from the Releases page.

Platform	Architecture	File Description
Windows	x64	Standalone executable (.exe)
macOS	Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3)	Native ARM64 binary
macOS	Intel	x64 binary for older Macs
Linux	x64	Generic Linux binary

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🚀 Installation & Running

Since these applications are distributed as standalone binaries without an installer, you may need to set execution permissions on macOS and Linux.

🪟 Windows

1. Download the Windows (x64) zip file.
2. Right-click the zip and select Extract All.
3. Open the folder and double-click Asteroid Factory.exe to launch.

🍎 macOS

Important: As this software is not notarised by the Apple App Store, you must manually allow it to run.

1. Download the zip file matching your processor (Apple Silicon or Intel).
2. Unzip the folder.
3. Fix Permissions:
   • Open the Terminal app.
   • Type chmod +x (include the space at the end).
   • Drag the file named Asteroid Factory (it has no extension) from the Finder window into the Terminal.
   • Press Enter.
4. First Run (Gatekeeper):
   • Right-click (or Control-click) the Asteroid Factory file in Finder.
   • Select Open from the context menu.
   • Click Open in the warning dialogue box.

🐧 Linux

1. Download the Linux (x64) zip file.
2. Extract the contents.
3. Open a terminal in the extracted folder.
4. Make the file executable:

   chmod +x Asteroid Factory

5. Run the application:

   ./Asteroid Factory

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✨ Key Features

• Procedural Generation: Create voxelised asteroid models from STL files using multi-scale Gaussian Random Fields.
• Physics Simulation: Automatically calculates Density, Permittivity, Thermal Conductivity, and Seismic Velocities.
• HDF5 Export: Saves all generated fields into a hierarchical HDF5 format for scientific analysis.
• Visualisation: Includes a built-in HDF5 slice viewer and a lightweight 3D wireframe previewer.

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📝 Licence

MIT Licence