Last update took COMPUTE to 200,000 particles per planet. This one takes it to 1,000,000 but it took rebuilding gravity from scratch to get there.
New: Barnes-Hut gravity
Gravity is now solved with a Barnes-Hut octree, an algorithm also used in professional astrophysics N-body simulations
Instead of summing every pair of particles, space is divided into a hierarchy of cells, and a distant cluster is treated as the single mass it effectively is
The reason it matters: summing every pair across a million particles is on the order of a trillion force calculations per step. The tree gets there for a fraction of the work
This is what raised the ceiling five times over
New: a million particles per planet
COMPUTE now pre-calculates collisions of up to 1,000,000 particles in a single body on a modern GPU
Stable at the top end, not just technically possible
New: longer, steadier replays
COMPUTE now streams the recording to disk instead of holding it in memory
Much longer recordings, and no more trading replay length against a memory budget
Steadier playback at the particle counts where memory used to be the limit
New: bodies settle before they fly
Every body is now relaxed to equilibrium before the simulation starts, so planets begin as stable spheres instead of visibly contracting and pulsing through the opening seconds
Particles spawn on a close-packed lattice instead of a random scatter, so there is far less to settle out in the first place, and settling finishes faster
A body that starts stable collides cleanly. Wobble used to carry into the impact
New: body shapes
Lattice: a hollow 3D space frame resembling a cage
Hollow spheres and sieves available to build with
Improved: black holes
Accretion disk stays locked to its black hole in setup and all the way through replay
Correct disk placement when you position a black hole
Plus
Framerate cap removed: the simulation now runs as fast as your hardware allows
Changing inclination no longer rebuilds particles while you drag the slider
Fixed leftover geometry when switching body types in setup
Various stability and memory fixes