And now I've implemented it. But instead of porting it to the slowest most decrepit retromachine I can find, I'm going the other direction: What kind of visual effects can I achieve if I throw a decent GPU at it?
The video above in 馃У 1 is a screen capture from my Javascript + WebGPU implementation. It's running at 20 FPS, using about 5% of the CPU and 3% of the GPU. More to come...
馃У 6/N
History. As best I can tell, the bubble universe was invented by Twitter user @yuruyurau in 2020 as a very terse Processing.py sketch and first published in this tweet.
https://xcancel.com/yuruyurau/status/1226846058728177665
Edit: add screen capture of tweet.
馃У 2/N
Paul Dunn ( @zxdunny ) followed a few months later with an even terser BASIC version and a demo on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5aOBh7qQe8
馃У 3/N
@larsbrinkhoff got into the act with Javascript and PDP-10 assembler versions. The sources are on Github, and a video of the PDP-10 is on YouTube.
(Lars, what display are you emulating on the '10?)
https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/bubble-universe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIU7iYWZWSY
馃У 4/N
Several others have implemented it; it seems to be popular with the retrocomputing crowd. I found out about it when @PaulaMaddox ported it to her FPGA 6502 simulator a few days ago.
馃У 5/N
And now I've implemented it. But instead of porting it to the slowest most decrepit retromachine I can find, I'm going the other direction: What kind of visual effects can I achieve if I throw a decent GPU at it?
The video above in 馃У 1 is a screen capture from my Javascript + WebGPU implementation. It's running at 20 FPS, using about 5% of the CPU and 3% of the GPU. More to come...
馃У 6/N
I wrote another one! I ported my Javascript + WebGPU implementation to Python + wgpu-py, and now I have a desktop app.
And I pushed it to Github. "Share and enjoy!"
https://github.com/kbob/bubble-universe
馃У 7/N
![A tweet. Source code followed by an animated image of the bubble universe.
銈yuruyurau
10 Feb 2020
W=540;N=200;x,y,t=0,0,0
def setup():size(W,W);noStroke()
def draw():global t;clear();[F(i,j)for i in range(N)for j in range(N)];t+=.1
def F(i,c):global x,y;r=TAU/N;u=sin(i+y)+sin(r*i+x);v=cos(i+y)+cos(r*i+x);x=u+t;y=v;fill(i,c,99);circle(u*N/2+W/2,y*N/2+W/2,2) #銇ゃ伓銈勩亶Processing](https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/116/004/020/902/191/726/original/a0ec5c11d05e5deb.png)