Newton Evolution

Recently I received an email from a developer asking me if he could take over the maintenance of Newton Particles. On one side I was happy cause someone was interested enough to keep the flame of Newton, on the other hand, I was thinking “damn” I have so many features I still want to implement to make Newton a rockstar particle library. If you read my previous post I had quite hell for 2 years building a poker app for Betclic. Now I’m moving to another project, I wanted to enjoy the calm of the end of the year to get back to work on Newton.

Today I’m happy to announce Newton 0.3.0 is released.

Particles interaction with Widgets

Now particles can interact with your app widgets. For example, if you want your particles to bounce off your buttons, it’s doable and easy. Just use a NewtonCollider and wrap your widget with it and that’s all:

Newton(
  effectConfigurations: [RainPreset().toConfiguration()],
  child: Stack(
    children: [
      NewtonCollider(
        borderRadius: BorderRadius.circular(20),
        child: Container(
          width: 200,
          height: 100,
          decoration: BoxDecoration(
            borderRadius: BorderRadius.circular(20),
          ),
        ),
      ),
    ],
  ),
)

Copy code from configurator

From the beginning you can directly test building an animation with the configurator. There are still some limitations, you cannot add a post effect animation but now you can directly copy the code when you are satisfied with an animation.

Introduction of Presets

To be honest my main concern when developing Newton was to have a highly configurable but also easy to use library. The first objective seems to be met but not the second one. You needed to tweak 30+ properties to get the perfect animation. Having presets allows you to have a good starting point to start an animation. If you have an idea for animations feel free to open a PR.

Newton(
  effectConfigurations: [
    RainPreset().toConfiguration(),
  ],
)

API coherence

The configuration API was a bit messy. You had properties scattered around and it wasn’t always clear where to find what you needed. I reorganized everything into logical groups like PhysicsProperties, VisualProperties, EmissionProperties, and so on. It makes the code more type-safe and easier to navigate.

I also renamed RelativisticEffect to PhysicsEffect because let’s be honest, the name was confusing.

Performance improvements

I pushed Box2D to reach the limits from 150 to nearly 300 particles with constant FPS. I won’t be able to go further with Box2D but to be honest I’m not satisfied…

But I did add viewport culling, which means particles outside the visible area are automatically removed from calculations. This helps a lot when you have particles flying off screen. I also optimized the rendering pipeline and improved how colliders report their positions to reduce unnecessary work.

There’s also a new particle pool system that reuses particles instead of constantly creating and destroying them. It’s more memory efficient and should help with performance on lower-end devices.

What’s next

To be honest when I started this library I wanted to be able to have 1000+ particles to be able to add really neat and unique animations to your app. Box2D seems to have reached a hard cap and I’m investigating other engines to reach this goal.

If you have ideas or want to help with this investigation, feel free to jump in. I’m also open to suggestions for new presets or features that would make Newton even better.

You can check out the full documentation at https://newton.7omtech.fr/ and the source code on GitHub. As always, feedback and contributions are welcome!