Firefly is a visualization app for simulations generated by the FIRE galaxy formation simulation (http://galaxies.northwestern.edu/fire-simulations/)
The code is in python and runs using the Omegalib toolkit (https://github.com/uic-evl/omegalib)
You can grab a binary installer from the Releases page (OSX only for now). After installing, firefly will be available as a terminal command. To run firefly open a terminal window and type
> firefly <datacconfig.py>
Where dataconfig.py is a *data configuration script that describes what file(s) to load and how to display them. Read more information on this
in the Configuration section
To uninstall firefly open a terminal and type firefly-uninstall
TODO
You use the installed firefly executable to run a custom version of firefly. This is useful if you want to fork a copy of this project and want to test your own changes before creating a new binary distribution, or if you want to keep multiple version of firefly side-by-side.
We assume you are getting a version of firefly from this repository, and want to put it under your user account (ex. /Users/myself).
First, clone this repository (or just download and unzip if you don't care about version control):
/Users/myself> git clone http://www.github.com/febret/firefly
Then you need to modify default_init.py from your installed firefly binary distribution. If you installed in the default path on OSX, this
file is in /Applications/firefly.app
default_init.py looks like this:
# Change this if you want to run a custom version of firefly
appScript = 'firefly/firefly.py'
# Initially set an empty data path variable. This will be filled by the dataset config
# file (if we choose one). If the app runs with this unset, we will show a splash screen.
datasetPath = None
# Execute the firefly script after the data config file had a chance to load
from threading import Timer
def main():
queueCommand(':r ' + appScript)
bt = Timer(0.1, main)
bt.start()You need to modify line 2 to make it point to your copy of firefly, ex:
appScript = '/Users/myself/firefly/firefly.py'Now, when you run firefly from the terminal, your downloaded version of firefly will run instead of the vanilla one installed in the
binary distribution.
REQUIRES: git, cmake
First, install the Omegalib maintenance script:
> mkdir omegalib
> cd omegalib
omegalib> (on LINUX) wget https://uic-evl.github.io/omegalib/omega
omegalib> (on OSX) curl https://uic-evl.github.io/omegalib/omega -o omega
omegalib> chmod +x omega
Then download and build firefly:
omegalib> ./omega get firefly:master nuitrcs/firefly
This will download and build firefly and all the required dependencies in a directory called firefly.
You will need to copy firefly/modules/firefly/default_init.pyinside firefly, overwriting the existing default_init.py
You can then try running firefly using omegalib's orun:
omegalib> cd firefly/build/bin
omegalib/master/build/bin>./orun <path-to-data-config.py> -i
These are the full instructions for building and running on windows, assuming you downloaded omega.bat from here: https://uic-evl.github.io/omegalib/omega.bat and you are in a terminal in the directory where you downloaded it
> omega get firefly:master nuitrcs/firefly
> omega choose firefly
> copy firefly\modules\firefly\default_init.py firefly /Y
To run firefly, double click on choose_firefly.bat (find it in the same dir as omega.bat) and type orun in the opened console.
If you want to package this version of firefly type:
omegalib>./omega pack.app master firefly
This will create an installer binary in omegalib/packs/firefly.