Vigilant Octo-Robot

A conversation about particle systems, effects queues, and their applications - with Matt Hayes

Getting setup:

$ git clone git@github.com:mysterycommand/vigilant-octo-robot.git
$ cd vigilant-octo-robot
$ npm install
$ npm start # uses webpack-dev-server

… and that should be it! Uses Webpack and Babel to bundle everything as a ./main.js and serves the ./source folder (with it's simple index.html file pulling in the JS).

Credit where credit's due:

This work is heavily inspired by a talk by Seb Lee-Delisle from 2007 called AS3 Particles: 1000% Extra Free.

The repo is organized into branches and step-wise PRs. Branches are labeled by number 01 - 13, and each PR has been created agains the previous numbered branch (I hope that makes sense).

Branch #13 (PR #17 because I had a couple hiccup PRs along the way) is an implementation that uses the ParticleField class built up through branches 1 - 12 in a practical way. It pre-creates (pools) a bunch of DOM nodes and recycles them when rendering into a scroll container. In this way there are only ~25 (on my screen anyway) "particles" being rendered each frame and scrolling through a 5,000 (or longer) item list should be fairly snappy.

That particulare use case was inspired by the Complexities of an infinite scroller article (and repo) published by Google. Their implementation handles a bunch of other issues, but I find the ParticleField abstraction to be a convenient/reason-about-able way to model that behavior.

Makes heavy use of Babel & Webpack, particularly:

"babel-loader": "^6.2.4",
"babel-plugin-transform-runtime": "^6.9.0",
"babel-preset-es2015": "^6.9.0",
"babel-register": "^6.11.5",
"chai": "^3.5.0",
"eslint": "^3.1.1",
"lodash": "^4.14.0",
"mocha": "^2.5.3",
"webpack": "^1.13.1",
"webpack-dev-server": "^1.14.1"