"Tim Nikias" <Tim### [at] gmxde> wrote in message
news:3C0BB040.B5345E20@gmx.de...
> How about taking a look at povray.binaries.animations. There'll you'll
> find lots of that, but mostly entitled "particle system".
> Though a note in advance might be useful: tracking particles and having
them
> respond to each other is like a sqaured-programm, the more particles you
> use, the longer parsing-times get.
> And water just doesn't look well with too few blobs...
>

I have been playing with programming a simple particle system, but what I
use to avoid the program getting unweilding beyond a few particles is
implementing proximity routines.  Rather than having each particle check
each other particle, you divide the working area into cubes and have each
particle report its location, then particles only need to look up what
particles are in its immediate area and check against them.  Of course this
isn't a perfect system, mine uses solid balls so there is a limit to how
many objects can be an a specific area of space, but with particles that can
overlap or that have expulsion/attraction that can exceed quite a distance
from their surfaces, you can end up having a large number (or even all)
particles within specific locations and end up having to do all the
calculations anyway, but that may be an unavoidable effect of the type of
system.

-tgq

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