Orbital

Orbital is a small simulation core for the web — a declarative runtime for agent-based models, rewritten fresh in TypeScript. “Agent-based” here means the older scientific-computing sense: entities in a model, each with their own state, updating themselves over time. NetLogo and MASON as ancestors, not LangChain.

We built it because we kept wanting the same thing and not finding it: a lightweight simulation framework that runs in a browser, handles thousands of agents without swallowing a server, and stays small enough to include as a dependency. The academic options were desktop-bound and Java-heavy. The enterprise ones were neither.

`orbital-sys` manages agents and scheduling. `orbital-volume` handles rendering. Two small composable modules, no magic. Several projects sit on top of it — terratwin (bamboo agroforestry for farmers in Asia), bamboo-sim (in-browser growth visualization), and more in flight.

This is the part of makerlab that's been getting most of our attention lately — building the tools underneath the tools.