Hello All,
We have been playing with particle systems at my school and I have come up with this example below:

http://klaweht.com/blog/noc/particles/applet/
this is the source code zipped: http://klaweht.com/blog/noc/particles/Archive.zip

as you can see, it is so slow right now and the the reason for this is I am creating this circular shape in the run() method of ParticleSystem class which is below:

Code:

 void run() {
    for(int i = 0; i < 36; i++) {
	origin = new Vector3D(cos(i)*40.0, sin(i)*40.0);
	particles.add(new Particle(origin, new Vector3D(random(-2,2),random(-2,2)), new Vector3D(0,0),1));
    }
    for ( int i = particles.size()-1; i >= 0; i--) {

	Particle p = (Particle) particles.get(i);
	p.run();
	if(p.dead()) {

	  particles.remove(i);

	}
    }
  }
 

my guess would be taking it off from there and adding a class that would draw the circular shape. But I want to ask to you guys at first.  what would be the good way of optimizing such a code? Lookup tables? I am clueless about them.

thanks in advance.