Day 14, we’re trapped in a cave that’s being filled in by sand.
I really enjoyed this puzzle, actually. It reminded me of those early particle sandbox simulators.. I found a couple bugs in my AOC library in the process. Oops.
Visualization
Figuring out how many full particle paths to show was tricky. If I had a little bit more mental energy (and time to run the rendering) I’d like to do something like a particle path heat map, or at least do motion blurring of the particles. As it is, we see a few paths, and then switch to rendering first 10% of settled states, and then 2% of settled states.
I threw in a particle counter in the top left because, well, I have font rendering code and I may as well use it.
Update 2022-12-14
I had a bit of inspiration and realized I can visualize this as a continuous flow of sand, if I’m careful about the order of updating particles. Et voila!
Original
New Features
No new features, but I’m working on supporting for blending a stack of frames into a single frame to produce motion blur effects. Stay tuned, hopefully we’ll see something later this year…