ridwan-standing-by / particlelife

A particle simulation Android app, designed to illustrate life-like behaviour emerging from particles obeying a set of simple rules.

Particle Life

A particle simulation Android app, designed to illustrate life-like behaviour emerging from particles obeying a set of simple rules. Also, an Android Live Wallpaper. Check out the app on Google Play!

Each particle exerts a force on other nearby particles, depending on their species (represented by the different colours). This can either be a repulsion or an attraction, and is not necessarily symmetric. For example, red can be attracted to green, but green could be repulsed by red, which would result in red "chasing" green.

To avoid particles speeding up forever, a global friction is applied that slows particles down. Additionally, all particles repel each other if they get too close for comfort, like a kind of degeneracy pressure.

Play around with different settings to discover which parameters result in the most "life-like" creatures.

If you feel like you want to give your critters a nudge in the right direction, enable Hand of God to herd (by swiping) or beckon (by pressing) particles to your whim.

particlelife's Issues

Minify app

Minify release build of the app to reduced download & install size further

Live Wallpaper

Add option to add a live wallpaper based on some settings.

Drop down menu for species force dialogs

The species force dialogs are quite hard to understand as-is. It would be good to allow the selected species to be chosen from a drop down menu to make it more explicit which species' point of view is being modified.

Graph/diagram for About section

The About section is currently a wall of text. A labelled graph or diagram of an example force vs. distance would help easily describe the core concept of the app.

Add method to import/export runtime parameters

Would be nice to add a means to capture the world as a JSON string to export, and to import a JSON string (with appropriate validation).

Add crash reporting

Add Bugsnag crash reporting with breadcrumbs on key UI events like button presses.

Extract only needed icons from material icons

The androidx.compose.material:material-icons-extended takes up ~8MB (around 80% of the APK download size). We need only a couple of icons from it, so we can greatly reduces the app bundle size.