So I stayed up entirely too late last night / this morning and decided to go ahead and add reacti0ns to Sandbox.  Turns out, it was far easier than anything that I’ve implemented thus far on this project.  I spent some of the day (when I wasn’t at the family Thanksgiving celebration) tweaking a few things to make it look a little better.

Basically, reactions have four parts: a core, reactants, a chance, and (possibly) a product.  The core is the particle that will be reacting.  The reactants (each given with a concentration) are the neighboring particles.  The chance adds a bit of randomness to reactions and allows particles to fade (see the fire below).  The product (if present) is the result of the reaction.

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For the past few years, I’ve been fascinated by falling sand / particle simulation type games (like this one).  Enough so that I’ve set out to make one a fair number of times.  Each time, I’ve advanced my own techniques by a little bit, finding new and better ways to make digital sand.

This time around, I’m going to try to use C# with SDL.NET for all of my graphical work and a simple grid for all of the particle data.  Rather than looping over the grid, I will be using quadtrees to only update the regions that actually need to be updated.  So far the results are promising!

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