🦠 Particle Life App

An interactive desktop app that simulates Particle Life.
Particle Life is a simple particle system that exhibits complex emergent behavior.

Get Started

📦 Installation (Windows)
🎬 Video
📄 Docs
💬 Discord Server

Preview

Particle Life App – simulation preview

Run This App From Source

You can easily run this app from the source code.

Make sure you have the required tools installed:
Git
JDK ("Java") with a version between 17 and 25.
(Check your version with java -version.)

Download the source code and navigate into the folder:

bash
git clone https://github.com/tom-mohr/particle-life-app.git

bash
cd particle-life-app

Run the app:
```
bash
./gradlew run
```
After some time, the program should launch and you should see particles on your screen.

Feel free to mess with the code!

Note: Your local JDK is only needed to run Gradle, i.e. the ./gradlew command.
Since this project uses Gradle version 9.2, you need at least JDK 17 installed locally.
The app itself will run with Java 21, which Gradle will download automatically.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter any problems, ask for help in the #tech-support channel on the Discord server.

How to make a release (on Windows)

Confirm that everything is working correctly and check in with others
that the current state of the main branch is ready for release.
Choose a new version string.
You can find the current version string in gradle.properties.
The version name should comply with semantic versioning.
Talk to others if you are unsure about what to choose here.
Update the current version string in gradle.properties.
Run ./gradlew zipApp from the project root.
This generates the zip file particle-life-app.zip in ./build/zipApp/.
It includes the Windows executable (.exe) along with other files.
Go to the Releases section of this GitHub repo and click Draft a new release.
Click Choose a tag and type the new version name, but prefixed with v, e.g. v1.2.3.
Click Create a new tag.
Set the release title to match the tag name.
Use the description to summarize the changes of all commits since the last release.
Add the generated particle-life-app.zip as an asset to the release.
Click Publish release.