Smarticles

A Rust port of Brainxyz's Artificial Life simulator with some fun features.

A simple program to simulate primitive Artificial Life using simple rules of attraction or repulsion among atom-like particles, producing complex self-organzing life-like patterns.

– from the original repository

Running the App

To run this, you will need Rust installed, which you can do by following the installation instructions on the Rust website. You should then have cargo installed, which is the command line program for managing and running Rust projects.

You can check your version of cargo in the command line:

cargo --version
cargo 1.64.0-nightly (85b500cca 2022-07-24)

Once done, download or clone this repository to your preferred location and run the program using cargo like so:

cd ~/Rust/smarticles
cargo run

How to Use It

First, watch it in action. Press the Randomize button, which will spawn a bunch of particles with randomized settings. Then, press Play to run the simulation.

Try randomizing it a few times and seeing what kind of results you get.

There are 4 particle types. You can change the behavior of each with the sliders:

Power is the particle's attraction to particles of the other type. A positive number means it is attracted to them, and negative means it is repulsed away. Radius is how far away the particle can sense particles of that type.

You can adjust these parameters while the simulation is running if you want to see the effect they have:

Sharing Simulations

The Seed field is the D.N.A of your particle system. It contains all the information needed to replicate the current simulation. Pressing Randomize will give you random seeds, but you can also enter a custom one.

What does your name look like?

☝️ literally the inside of my brain ☝️

If you start adjusting parameters, you'll notice the seed changes to a code that begins with the @ symbol. These are custom-encoded simulations, which you can share by copying the entire code.

The code will be partially cut-off by the textbox, so make sure you select it all before copying.