I happened onto a cool result, I think.
I set it to spawn 120 nutrients per tap.
It turns out that 120 nutrients spawned in a single location becomes a small, infinitely stable red dot that oscillates between a doughnut shape and a solid shape.
As I recall, the folks here are good at doing pretty amazing things with shaders.
I barely understand how shaders work; is this something a shader could do on its own?
@UberGoober It should be doable. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Game of Life demo, but I was able to do that with shaders. I’m not that familiar with the code that does this demo or the calculations, so I’m not 100% sure if it can be done or not.
I did see that demo, and the huge disagreement I got in with @LoopSpace notwithstanding, it was exactly what this brought to mind.
@UberGoober hey, I’m not sure if coroutines would help here. I use it in my project to render the ‘booting’ and ‘loading’ screens. Coroutines allow me to use Codea to process data while also drawing an animated screen at 60fps. I’m not sure if they can be used to improve the number of drawn entities because the draw loop is one thread in itself. Maybe if there was a way to split the Main.draw function into coroutines that would work but I don’t know enough about it yet.
@skar - curiosity, how do you set up booting/loading screens. I tend to use a timer to display intro screens. Do you mean the gadgets for showing loading progress?
@Bri_G i think you already have it but check out my physics project demo. First I set up a load listener in the draw function. When the listener is triggered it sets up a loading screen which is just a rect and text. Then it also creates a coroutine Thread and this thread does the calculations while the loading screen plays. The thread is also inside the draw function. The booting screen is almost the same except it gets triggered in the main setup function.
@skar - thanks for the reply and description. Yes I did load your phsics demo, very impressive. Could it be extended to fluid movement/flow?
I’ll go back over your code and your prompts above. Thanks again.