Simulation Struggles With <200 Particles

[SGNull]

With physics implemented, it is time to address the elephant in the room. The performance was known to be poor from the beginning, but with the addition of physics this has become far more pronounced. This more than likely comes down to optimizations, but it could also have something to do with the graphics.py package.

To be more specific: 200 particles now seriously lags the simulation.

[SGNull]

This is now the main focus of the project. I would really like to aim for 200 particles at 60 fps.

[SGNull]

Here's an idea: Create some kind of list of tuples for every particle before running the program. Do this in such a way that it would be sufficient to loop through this list of, say (aparticle, bparticle) and call aparticle.do_the_things(bparticle) followed by bparticle.do_the_things(aparticle), and have calculated all of the interactions between the particles. This would remove the need for a nested for loop.

This might not result in a performance increase, but it feels like it should.

[SGNull]

Added that list of tuples, and named it "Universe Pie". It doesn't cause a drastic increase in performance, but I'm pretty sure it improves performance a little bit.

[SGNull]

The more optimized I'm making the code, the more I'm starting to think it has something to do with the packages, or even python itself.

[SGNull]

Judging by the results of issue #8, it seems more likely that particle physics is the real culprit.

[SGNull]

I just found the biggest culprit. I noticed that increasing the radius of the particles resulted in significantly worse performance. This kinda would make sense, as particles out of range do less calculations, and the force distance is relative to radius (in the current settings). However, the range increase/decrease is negligible when going from, say, 5 to 7. So, I ran a few tests, and noticed it was taking about 3.5 seconds to do 100 steps, which is about 0.7 more than I was getting with the smaller radius.

I then commented out the draw() function. 1.6 seconds on average to run 100 steps. WOW. Looks like we need a new draw function, or a completely different package than graphics.py.

[SGNull]

Made this its own milestone.

[SGNull]

Just did some looking, and my older particle simulator was way less optimized, but it ran at 500 particles!!! With all the problems I've been having, I can't believe it! This is either a python thing, or just a combination of drawing and something else. Maybe it's numpy?

[SGNull]

I'm at the point where the packages I'm installing to speed things up are written in different languages to bypass python's slowness. This is just going to be easier to write in a different language, plain and simple.