Hello author here. I'm a little surprised to see this on the front page of Hacker News. This is just a simple demo for my educational programming language Easylang. You can easily edit the code and increase the particle count for example. In the IDE you can then create a link with the code embedded in the URL.
https://tiki.li/run/#cod=dVLNbsIwDL7nKT5p0gRDdEGMA9PYM+yO0FT...
Well, that looks suspiciously like caustics in and around a swimming pool on a sunny day.
How hard would it be to push this into 3 dimensions instead of 2? It made me think of a starting point for a model of the universe and galaxy interactions.
I built a similar thing that includes forces between particles meant to simulate a sort of fluid or, as you scroll down, a gelatinous solid. There’s a bit of free energy injected to keep things moving so it’s actually a very bad fluid sim, but I think that makes it a better interactive toy in exchange.
One of the fun parts of naively n^2 particle simulations is trying to find ways to reduce the algorithmic complexity of collision detection. I remember messing with sweep lines and similar, though I don’t remember what optimizations made it into the final code. [0]
Looks really good and is also relaxing to watch when it’s compressed. Did you open sourced it?
And your projects are really nice too. Wall smasher is amazing!
I'd like to share mine as well. There's a bit of more interaction between particles but I don't remember the exact logic. Code should be easy to read: https://kaeruct.github.io/projects/short-experiments/dots/
I like how some of the particles get thrown out of the cluster on wider elliptical orbits, they look like comets.
Agglomerative clustering
I like this.
This reminds me of the header on the home page of one of my favorite network theory books:
https://networksciencebook.com/
The version in the banner is interactive with your cursor!
See https://bleuje.com/animationsite/2024_1/ for a collection of programmatic black and white animations made with https://processing.org/
He publishes the source code on https://github.com/Bleuje/processing-animations-code/tree/ma...
Note, you can edit the code.
Here’s my version, with particles affecting each other: https://tiki.li/run/#cod=dVPbToNAEH3fr5jExLQacFH7UNP6Db43jaF...
Having a hero background that was a variation of this was really popular about 10 years ago or so. You’ll still find them on plenty of websites built around that time.
It's still extremely common in web site templates for cryptocurrency and AI companies. Sure, it's cliché as all hell, but that doesn't stop people from using it.
Reminds me of the Ex Machina end credits [1] (and the Android live wallpaper I made as a homage to it [2].)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRJ-fPAO3Go [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.figmentano...
Anyone else's brain find this... I guess stressful, rather than relaxing? Something about them connecting but never hanging on, and the bits never all coming together, I think.
Rather like connections in life maybe.
All I see is blonde, redhead...
My independent implementation: https://www.nayuki.io/page/animated-floating-graph-nodes
Neat, I’ve also made something like this with processing https://robw.fyi/constellation.html
this is great nice work
This made me realize how much I miss screensavers. I used to sit and just stare at them meditatively as a teen.
I think I learned more about chaos theory by hacking a first person Rössler attractor "rider" into xscreensaver (instead of the usual Lorenz attractor) than by any other thing.
Also the cool effects in music players.
Made a version with charged particles. Probably bad physics all around, but here it is: https://shorturl.at/ocvEO
Funny how the "shortened" url is actually longer than the real url. Any reason you shared it using the former?
You mean shorter than `https://tiki.li/run/`? That one only works after the real URL is loaded at least once. The un-shortened URL was huge as it contains the whole app in base64 encoding or some such
https://tiki.li/run/#cod=pVVLj9s2EL7zVwxgoLCzXa20yTbeIJtD2h4...
It doesn't take much to get decent physics :
https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/questions/9541/lenn...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennard-Jones_potential
With the right parameters you get to see the solid and fluid phases of matter !
What? No bonding?
It seems to me that it is inevitable: every programmer goes through a phase where they do a bounded billiard ball simulation. It’s like a right of passage.
rite* of passage
A "wright of passage", a "craftsperson of passage", someone who facilitates or creates transitions -- like a metaphorical bridge-builder
Rite, as in the ritual one performs to pass to the next stage of their goal.
Nice. Have you tried a version where the particles have a small atraction/repulsion? (Bonus points for a bar to choose the force.) (1/r^2? can I choose the exponent?)
I was expecting a +/- charge interaction like this as well, but that was just based on my brain's default interpretation of the word particle in the title with this being HN and all. It took a second for my brain to switch to just a visual fx particle system use of the word.
Nonetheless, my default thoughts do not take away from it being a fun visual to zone out to for a bit
This is a very slippery slope towards making a full blown 3d three.js octree based n-body gravity simulation, at least for me :)
it doesn't have to be 3d though. another idea would be to assign mass values to the particles and see if after an amount of time if everything settles down to some sort of orbital track around each other. but either idea moves it from being a relaxing visual into a bit of sciencey simulator that totally changes to the scope of the project
This would make the perfect hero background to my portfolio site!
That... is... mesmerizing... ... ... ⠋ ⠙ ⠹ ⠸ ⠼ ⠴ ⠦ ⠧ ⠇ ⠏ ⠋ ⠙ ⠹ ⠸ ⠼ ⠴ ⠦ ⠧ ⠇ ⠏
Thank you. I wonder if I could use it for meditation. If only it would not require a blue screen.
Hypnotizing. Watching this with Beanie playing in the background. Mate that feels good
This is a lot like how I imagine a mesh net with mobile nodes working.
I feel like that's what's happening to my neurons when I'm browsing Reddit. And Hacker News.
I'd love to see the connection line come from both particles and join between them! Ooo and also if they can like start with random colors and slowly as they meet their colors average out
As an aside, I described this to Claude and had it recreate it in javascript with some other features I wanted. It took me 30 seconds to write the prompt and it worked flawlessly.
Will anyone ever write fun things like this again once the machine can do it for you? How will young people ever get interested when the machine can do all the work for you?
Nice. Reminds me strongly of levitated.net (sadly broken due to no Flash) and complexification.net (sadly broken due to no Java).
Geeking out over Jared Tarbell over dial up basically got me into computers in the first place.
Cute. First thing I did though was to see if moving my mouse or clicking affected it. Doesn't seem to, please add that!
curious what do ppl usually use to make these animations? i’ve used pillow with python in the pass but that only really works with images and seems clunky
Neat!
I wrote a "game jam fail" game involving pulsating blue "cells" that cluster together and form attacking aliens:
Would love to see this with boids simulations :D
I can't relax, the fact that connections don't affect their speed/direction infuriates me.
I didn't think I'd care, but I had the same reaction.
there is a website on the internet that has this in the banner or background, but i cannot remember what it was.
What if you incorporate game of life type rules into this?
Need DVD version