…is gladly over as I prefer winter. But the title is there to describe the latest addition to the NewtonPlayGround, namely Springs. Implementing them was rather easy, and I took my informations on springforces from this article. Right now there are only unlimited springs in, but I also plan on implementing limited springs. If you’re interested, you can see a video of the newly added springs here (1.75 MBytes, WMV). Depending on how you use them they give some nice, unpredictable (at least for humans) results that make for some great fun.
One thing I noticed while adding this new feature (as with most of the newly added features, I first implement them into a simple testing application and port them later on to the PlayGround, this makes finding error easier) is how big the NewtonPlayGround actually grew over the last months. At first I started it out as another Newton-Demo, but it has now grown into a huge application with almost unlimited functionality. Right now, only the main source is already over 10 thousand lines of code, not counting stuff I’m reusing from older projects (like code for shadow volumes, matrices and vectors, loaders, and so on). And though I recently removed all memory leaks (thanks to FastMM4) and sticked to clean coding-rules I’m wondering about the bugs users will find once the new version is out. Since there is so many stuff one can do with the NewtonPlayGround it’s impossible for me to test out everything. But I just hope it won’t get too bad after release.