I made a little sketch that scans the folder structure of a specific folder and renders it using particles. Each one is connected to its parent and they all repel each other, nothing more to it. It works really nice, I implemented different rendering modes, zoom, pan, manual particle positioning, etc.

Here are some screenshots.

The problem is that on more than 500-800 folders it becomes VERY slow. Do you think that it's possible to make it usable for around 100k-200k particles, probably ported to C++ or something faster

I can post the source if needed.

thx

I am not sure that C++ will really be faster than carefully written Java... In such application, graphical rendering speed is also important (using OpenGL?). You also have to profile your application (perhaps using VisualVM if it is available on Apple platforms) to see what is really causing the slowdown. Sometime, in Java, it is due to excessive creation of short lived objects, making the garbage collector to have too much work. It is the case on the current JBox2D for example (creating objects that are just pairs of float to return results) and they saw great speed-up by taking alternative routes, less in Java spirit but effective.

Thank you Cedric, I'll definitely have to try toxi's verlet library from that thread, seems much faster.

Unfortunately it's not the drawing that slows thing down, one of the rendering modes is noDrawing() which turns every visual feedback off to give full power to the simulation, it doesn't help a lot.

I don't need realtime speed, since it's for print, but if it works close to realtime with 10.000, it should be decent with 100.000 particles.

cheers