Particle Universe 1.6

The new version of Particle Universe has a number of performance improvements which should make it run around 20-30% faster. It is now an x64 application meaning that it will not run on very old 32 bit PCs.

It also features a new configuration menu which you can toggle by pressing Tab.

Changes have been made to the grid based simulation mode (press G to enable) which greatly improve performance in some cases, although there may be some scenarios where performance is worse. I've found with the updated grid mode that it may help to set the grid rows/columns to 35 rather than 20, and the high accuracy grid distance to 2 or 3. Both these settings can be found in the config file (created on first startup), or accessed from the config menu. Lowering the second of those settings will improve performance but decrease the accuracy of the simulation when simulating neaby grid squares. Setting it to 1 or 0 will give very good performance but collisions will not work correctly at the corners/edges of grid squares.

You can alter the scale of the particles by editing the size log base option in the config menu.

The default universe is now universe 8 which is a spiral where the particles have lower masses than the original default spiral, but gravity is higher.

If you haven't already done so, check out my recent video where I show a simulation with 15,000 particles. This would have taken much less time to simulate under the new version.