For this next leg of the build, the simulation officially made the massive leap from a quiet backend script running in the terminal into a full-blown, interactive engineering dashboard. I wanted to turn this into a live, playable workspace where anyone could mess with the variables on the fly, so I integrated real-time sliders for flow velocity and raker height alongside a dynamic polymer selector console. Now, instead of hardcoding numbers and re-running the script, you can instantly tweak the setup and watch how different plastics react to the changing fluid currents right in front of you.
The absolute highlight of this session was shipping what I am calling “Storm Surge Mode.” This is basically a brutal stress-test toggle that injects chaotic vertical acceleration forces and fluid velocity eddies straight into the simulation. It completely disrupts the clean current to mimic critical, real-world storm conditions, letting me see if the bio-inspired raker geometry can actually hold its own when things get rough out in the open ocean.
To back all of this up visually, I also had to do a major physics rewrite under the hood. Previously, there were some annoying visual path-clipping bugs where the particle trails would look jagged or cut off near the boundaries. By moving the coordinate logging logic directly inside the nested sub-stepping loop, I finally cleared out those tracking glitches. The engine now delivers pixel-perfect precision right around the edges of the rakers, making the visual simulation look incredibly sharp and professional.