Right now, I have a very basic demo working very slowly. I'm using tables to represent particles. A particle's table stores data like x and y position, color, and a function called "update" that decides what it does every update based on the particles around it.
Originally, I was going to store every particle in a 1d array (actually a table, but I'd be using it like an array.) The problem I saw with this method is collision detection. You would have to loop for every single particle in the array and check if they are adjacent multiple times, which I imagine would be very slow.
So I rejected that method, and now I'm using a 2d array (again, actually a table,) with a width and height equal to screen width and height (300x300.) If there is nothing in a particular cell, the value in the table is 0. If there is a particle in a cell, the value is another table representing the particle. The reason I chose this is because if I want to know if there is a particle directly below the particle checking for collisions, I don't have to loop every particle. I can just use:
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if matrix[self.y + 1][self.x] ~= 0 then (...)On top of the updating problem, I also have to figure out how to efficiently render it. I figured drawing each individual pixel for every particle would be very slow, so my current method is to create a new ImageData every frame, use the setPixel method for every particle, and then draw the whole image. That was all I could think of, and I have no idea if it's any faster than the alternative.
So, I was wondering if anyone knows any more efficient ways to update and render the game. Thanks a lot for reading!
If you want to look at the code, it's all in main.lua here.
