The most basic BioDynaMo simulation (i.e. our Hello World program) is a static single cell. It is the default model that comes with the installation of BioDynaMo. In this section we shall go over the three simple steps of running this simple simulation.

Step 1: Create your simulation

Run the following command to create a new project called "hello_world":

biodynamo new hello_world

Step 2: Build your simulation

Go into the newly created directory hello_world with:

cd hello_world

And build the project files with:

biodynamo build

Step 3: Run your simulation

biodynamo run

You should see "Simulation completed successfully" as the output.

Extra: Cell division

Let's make the simulation more interesting by adding a biological behavior to the cell: cell division. Open the src/hello_world.h and add the following line to the simulate function after the cell is created and before it is added to the resource manager.

// Add the biological behavior to the cell.
cell->AddBehavior(new GrowthDivision(32, 3000));

Rebuild and rerun the simulation to have the cell division take effect. visit the next exercise to learn about the visualization features of BioDynaMo.