Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to DawnCue
Hi HN! I built HelioSim, a real-time N-body gravitational system simulator running directly in the browser via WebAssembly. It’s written in C++ and uses OpenGL ES 3.0, GLFW, and Emscripten. The entire simulation and rendering pipeline runs in WebAssembly. Features: - Real-time N-body gravitational simulation - Predictive orbit trails - Collision handling - Time controls (slow motion / fast-forward) - Dynamic body spawning This was my first larger WebAssembly project, and I was honestly surprised how well modern browsers handle a C++ + OpenGL ES pipeline compiled to WASM. One interesting…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
Sup HN, So I got tired of bouncing between Flightradar, MarineTraffic, and Twitter every time something kicked off globally, so I wrote a dashboard to aggregate it all locally. It’s called Shadowbroker. I’ll admit I leaned way too hard into the "movie hacker" aesthetic for the UI, but the actual pipeline underneath is real. It pulls commercial/military ADS-B, the AIS WebSocket stream (about 25,000+ ships), N2YO satellite telemetry, and GDELT conflict data into a single MapLibre instance. Getting this to run without melting my browser was the hardest part. I'm running this on a laptop…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Odyssey 3▲159A world model that simulates physics in real time
13d ago · odyssey.systems · its alternatives →
- 3AS
I really like the look of the famous album art for Unknown Pleasures [1]. It was originally created by Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory from the signals of the first discovered radio pulsar [2]. I made a spectrogram that produces a similar look. It runs FFT in Rust and visualizes it with WebGL. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UnknownPleasuresVinyl.jpg [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1919%2B21
2024 · aestuans.github.io · its alternatives →
- 4IB
2022 · multiplanetary.website · its alternatives →
- 5
PixelSpace▲68A tediously accurate scale model of the solar system
2014 · joshworth.com · its alternatives →
- 6
- 7IA
Somewhat inspired by a recent post here, I also made a three-body simulation on a whim, meaning to try out macroquad[0] (verdict: really nice!). Thanks to the engine I could trivially target wasm as well, so others can get mesmerized too. The source is available here: https://github.com/sulami/three-bodies [0]: https://docs.rs/macroquad/latest/macroquad
2024 · three-bodies.sulami.xyz · its alternatives →
- 8IB
Mar 2026 · structuredlabs.github.io · its alternatives →
- 9
AstroGrid▲113Explore the entire universe in your browser, in real 3D
Apr 2026 · velonspace.com · its alternatives →
- 10
- 11NB
2018 · novoselrok.github.io · its alternatives →
- 12
I didn't realize Universe Sandbox ran on MacOS, and I was in the mood to play around a bit. Some functions it's got: - Random system generation - Sonification is super fun too - Habitability Simulation (Just for fun, don't cite this please) - Replacing, spawning, deleting objects I've had tons of fun building this, so I hope someone else can share the joy. It's free and runs in the browser. I'd love to hear any feedback. I think this is at a state where I might leave it as it is, but if people are interested in other features, maybe I'll keep working on it. I've kept saying I'll stop working…
Dec 2025 · luna.watermelonson.com · its alternatives →
- 13WP
This was my recent weekend project, aimed at teaching me JavaScript, a bit of HTML5, and (mostly) WebGL. The orbital data are from NASA JPL. I was inspired in part by this Flash app: http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/orrery_2011_bce.swf, but wanted to do something in 3D. Coming from the games-dev world, this is my first introduction to web coding. The UI is jquery. I mostly used http://learningwebgl.com/blog for the 3D stuff. Being WebGL, it will work mostly on Chrome, Firefox 4 Beta. Forget about IE. I needed to figure out how to render text to the WebGL canvas - I…
2011 · solar-system-explorer.com · its alternatives →
- 14ST
Solaris - a real-time WebGL simulation of Lem
Jun 2026 · solaris.franzai.com · its alternatives →
- 15SS
Switching back-and-forth a bit between Spacemacs and Neovim, I got inspired by https://github.com/ctjhoa/spacevim and thought to myself "Hey, that's a great idea!", and so I went into my first time actually toying with vim script (love-hate relationship atm). The result of the last couple of days so far is the ground work for a Neovim specific port of Spacemacs, located here https://github.com/Tehnix/spaceneovim. The major difference between that and the existing spacevim is that the layers are separated out from the core, and can be updated via an…
2016 · its alternatives →
- 16
I'm calling this "Vibe Discovery" — distinct from vibe coding because I didn't know the requirements upfront. Started with "make something with the accelerometer" and discovered through 6 iterations that I wanted a WebGL marble game. The interesting part was the dev setup: Claude Code running in Termux on a Redmi Note 9 (4GB RAM). The same-device feedback loop — code, test accelerometer, react, iterate — made rapid discovery possible in a way that laptop-to-phone deployment wouldn't.
Jan 2026 · kikkupico.com · its alternatives →
- 17AW
I’ve spent the last few days prototyping a browser-based game engine stack designed for instant-load, "Roblox-for-Teens" style deployment. The goal is to lower the floor for AA indie devs who want high-fidelity physics and instant web distribution without the overhead of Unity or a heavy Godot export. The Stack Engine: A headless WASM/WebGPU implementation. I’m currently using custom flags and selective streaming to bypass standard browser memory and execution limits. Physics: I’ve ported Jolt (Guerrilla Games) but modified the solver to mimic the original Blam! engine (Bungie/Halo…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey HN, Like many of you, I'm tired of public AI leaderboards that mostly recycle the same saturated/overfitted benchmarks (MMLU, HumanEval, etc.) and often miss fast/cheap variants or real daily pain points. A couple days ago I launched AIBenchy — a small, opinionated leaderboard running my own custom tests focused on end-user/dev scenarios that actually trip up models today. Current tests cover categories like: - Anti-AI Tricks (classic gotchas like "count the Rs in strawberry", logic traps) - Instruction following & consistency - Data parsing/extraction -…
Jun 2026 · aibenchy.com · its alternatives →
- 19
With the current inflow of LLM aided software, I thought I would share a cool "hand-coded" project from the previous era (I wrote this in highschool so roughly ~8 years ago). Hedra is an open world 3d game written from scratch using only OpenGL and C#. It has quite a few cool features like infinite generation, skinned animated mesh rendering, post processing effects, etc. Originally the physics engine was also written from scratch but i swapped for the more reliable bulletphysics.
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
SpaceSim▲7Explore a free 3D space simulator in your browser. Travel across the Solar System, change time, inspect source-backed worlds, and collect postcards.
Jul 2026 · spacesim.co · its alternatives →
- 21
Real-time 2D gravity sandbox with causal propagation (finite c), GW-strain heatmaps, and a virtual LIGO probe. Numba JIT, CPU-only. - alessandro-pioli/AstroCausal_Engine
Sep 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Hi there, looking for feedback on my new project "Featherless.AI" The idea is to allow users to run all the models on hugging face instantly. Via the OpenAI API compatible endpoint. Why? Because its a real chore to download models and spin up GPUs, especially if you want to test multiple models. Not to mention GPUs cost multiple dollars an hour to rent. And if we want more people to use open source AI, we got to make it easier for them to try and play with all of them. So what if instead of spinning up dedicated GPUs per model (which is what every provider is doing) We can startup a LLM…
2024 · featherless.ai · its alternatives →
- 23
Hey HN, I wrote a compute shader emulator that started as a 50-line script to help me understand reduction shaders. What makes this implementation interesting is its technical approach; I've leveraged Nim's macros and closure iterators to simulate lockstep execution of logical threads. The emulator runs GPU compute shaders on CPU, simulating workgroups and subgroups with proper synchronization. It supports GLSL subgroup operations and provides nice debugging messages. The emulator works with Nim code that follows compute shader patterns I've documented some technical aspects here:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hi all! I've been doing spacecraft system engineering since grad school and got to keep doing it after school at Care Weather. I tried several approaches for keeping hundreds of napkin math equations and connected simulations up-to-date, but none of them were both reliable and easy to use. To solve that, I made Oneil, a design specification language with clean syntax for specifying and evaluating math describing a complex system. Oneil has been really helpful as we design one satellite iteration after another for ground testing and spaceflight. I'm really interested in hearing feedback and…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →