Creating a particle system in 2D

In this recipe, we are going to learn how we can build a basic particle system in two dimensions using the Verlet algorithm.

Getting ready

We will need to create two classes, a Particle class representing a single particle, and a ParticleSystem class to manage our particles.

Using your IDE of choice, create the following files:

• Particle.h

• Particle.cpp

• ParticleSystem.h

• ParticleSystem.cpp

How to do it…

We will learn how we can create a basic particle system. Perform the following steps to do so:

1. First, let's declare our Particle class in the Particle.h file and include the necessary Cinder files:

   #pragma once
   
   #include "cinder/gl/gl.h"
   #include "cinder/Vector.h"
   
   class Particle{
   };

2. Let's add, to the class declaration, the necessary member variables – ci::Vec2f to store the position, previous position, and applied forces; and float to store particle radius, mass, and drag.

   ci::Vec2f position, prevPosition;
   ci::Vec2f forces;
   float radius;
   float mass;
   float drag;

3. The last thing...