Added click functionality; when clicked it reverses the direction of gravity, sending the particles skittering around the field. I also made gravity adjustable. I’m hoping the weekend, with my first two “days off” of this project will give me enough time for an interesting new piece for the beginning of next week — genuine particle collisions comes to mind as one possibility, as does blitting the movement of the particles so they leave “tracers” behind them, which I imagine could be quite a piece of eye candy. And a special thanks to the commenters; I appreciate all the feedback, and it’s cool to know someone besides me is playing with these.
Another significant step. First, I added boolean functionality for sliders; they now can control boolean values and display “true”/”false” instead of 0/1. In general, the sliders are coming along. Meanwhile, to show off these sliders I also built in “follow” functionality; if follow is enabled, the particles will swarm around the mouse, in a very satisfying way. Try letting them collect in one spot and then watching them scatter as they try to follow your pointer around.
This is more like it! I’ve created a class for sliders; here they control the number of balloons and the radius and alpha thereof. Handy little trick, one which I imagine I’ll end up using a lot. I’ve implemented names, minimum and maximum values, and generally a whole bunch of stuff to make sure it gets dragged and released correctly. I’m quite happy with how this has turned out; also, this project is also beginning to develop a bit of a visual style, something I’m enjoying as it happens, without necessarily pulling or pushing it in any given direction. Maybe a more directed design is in the making?
Well, a little disappointing, but I’m having some trouble with what I had planned for today, so here’s a little bit of an improvement; the same as #1, but plus random color generation. Pretty! Hopefully the next step will work with some more tweaking…