Post #302432

2026-02-13 17:31 UTC

I was wondering what would happen if you played Newton Wars (aka Gravitational Combat), but had a full visualization showing you which target/planet you would hit when shooting in that direction with that force! So I wrote a #glsl shader to figure that out, and it&#39;s really pretty! :rainbow_heart_eyes: This is how it works: If you hover over a red pixel in the diagram, you can be sure you&#39;ll hit the red planet! The lightness is how soon you&#39;ll hit it.

Replies (5)

@blinry@chaos.social 2026-02-13 17:38

Here's a similar diagram for where a particle would end up if you just drop it at that point!

Open ##2790950
@RedGlow@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-02-13 17:36

@blinry@chaos.social very cool idea and beautiful to see! would love to see what happens to the image as you move the planets :D. chaotic systems are really great :O

Open ##2790953
@bornach@vis.social 2026-02-13 17:42

@blinry@chaos.social Now do that with a spinning banana and gorillas on each planet

Open ##2790961
@jab01701mid@mastodon.social 2026-02-13 17:57

@blinry@chaos.social One day back in about 1995, I was bored and decided to write a small DOS program to render VGA graphics for a planet orbiting a sun. Rather than simply plotting a circle and rasterizing it over time, I wrote an actual Newtonian physics equation solver for the gravitational pull, and chose mass and distance and angular velocity for the bodies. I basically tuned the params by binary chop and intuition until I had it semi-stable for a minute, and declared victory !

Open ##2790962
@grant_h@mastodon.social 2026-02-13 18:55

@blinry@chaos.social the dotted line is the path of the force/ particle?

Open ##2790963