Devlog 1 - Cells

Quick update to my Particle Life project. I did some work to stabilise the physics, there were a lot of small mistakes in the code that added up to very erratic behaviours. For example, the repulsion force that’s supposed to stop the particles from overlapping too much was partially inverted and actually made things worse. I’m starting to get better results now but it’ sstill not perfect.

I also added a little grid to visualise the relationships between different ‘species’. I’m still relatively new to Pygame so it was interesting trying to get the dragging and clicking working

The last change is less noticeable but I did some light optimization. I basically added an invisible grid, so instead of checking the distance to every particle every frame, each particle only looks at neighbouring cells. It’s an improvement, but there’s still a long way to go as far as optimization. Hopefully I can figure out how to get it to run on the GPU soon