Particular Wells

Particular Wells is a desktop-first WebGL2 particle sandbox inspired by Particul.

The current version is intentionally simple:

• Click to emit particle bursts
• Particles curve inward around a central well
• Crossing the inner collector consumes particles
• The UI shows collected count, throughput, active count, and spawned total
• A debug overlay exposes FPS, sim time, render time, and render downsampling

Architecture

The performance-focused structure remains the same:

• Particle simulation: packed typed arrays and a fixed simulation step
• Rendering: one WebGL2 gl.POINTS draw with point sprites
• UI/state: a small counter system and DOM overlay, separate from the sim loop

Why This Shape

• Canvas 2D is simpler, but WebGL2 batches large particle counts much better.
• CPU simulation + GPU rendering keeps the collector logic simple while still scaling well.
• Single-well gravity is O(n) and stable, unlike full n-body gravity.

Data Layout

Particles use a structure-of-arrays layout:

• Float32Array: x, y, vx, vy
• Uint8Array: kind

Collected particles are removed with swap-delete so the active range stays dense and iteration remains cache-friendly.

Run

npm install
npm run dev

Build:

npm run build