Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A simple 2D fluid and gravity simulation with WASM and WebGL
I really like the look of the famous album art for Unknown Pleasures [1]. It was originally created by Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory from the signals of the first discovered radio pulsar [2]. I made a spectrogram that produces a similar look. It runs FFT in Rust and visualizes it with WebGL. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UnknownPleasuresVinyl.jpg [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1919%2B21
This is an interactive 2D particle simulation where small elements gravitate toward the user's cursor or touch location and can form stable orbits under the right conditions. Built with WebAssembly and WebGL, it's… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. A simple 2D fluid and gravity simulation with WASM and WebGL launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
A experimental audio visualizer built with WebGL (React Three Fiber and Three.js)
2023 · pouria.dev · its alternatives →
- 2
I went down the rabbit hole on a side project and ended up building this: Strange Attractors(https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors). It’s built with three.js. Working on it reminded me of the little "maths for fun" exercises I used to do while learning programming in early days. Just trying things out, getting fascinated and geeky, and being surprised by the results. I spent way too much time on this, but it was extreme fun. My favorite part: someone pointed me to the Simone Attractor on Threads. It is a 2D attractor and I asked GPT to extrapolate it to…
Oct 2025 · blog.shashanktomar.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Hello HN! We’re a small creative studio specializing in real-time 3D experiences. Netlify approached us to design and build an interactive experience to celebrate reaching 5 million developers. Inspired by the classic game Marble Madness, we created a gamified experience where users control a ball through playful, interactive levels. The goal was to blend marketing content with the look and feel of a game to engage users. The app is built with Three.js [1], using our custom render pipeline and shaders, and uses Rapier for physics simulation [2]. The 2D content is overlaid on the WebGL view…
2024 · 5-million-devs.netlify.com · its alternatives →
- 4
I sometimes pick up random projects just because I can, this was one of those times. I made it as a week long project a while back this year but never shared here, so thought to go for it haha. I created a game inspired by Doom and the backrooms called The Backdooms under 2.4kb in minified html. (for reference, this entire post would be around 1.8kB haha) I had to use a not popular way of using GZip with Zlib headers (had to write my own script for compressing it, also in the repo) to eventually convert it a size 40 QR code that works right in your browser using Decompressionstream API. This…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5GI
Just for fun and self education, I've built this over a weekend to teach myself why orbits exist, not just show planets going around. Something that was never clearly explain to me in school. It opens with a guided tour that builds the idea up step by step: two bodies and the equal/opposite force, inertia (the Sun is removed and Earth just drifts straight), then "an orbit is falling and continuously missing," cosmic velocities with a little rocket, Voyager 1 & 2's real gravity assists (the clock runs the actual 1977–1989 dates so the planets orbit into their grand-tour alignment and the…
Jun 2026 · qunabu.github.io · its alternatives →
- 6IB
2022 · multiplanetary.website · its alternatives →
- 7IA
Somewhat inspired by a recent post here, I also made a three-body simulation on a whim, meaning to try out macroquad[0] (verdict: really nice!). Thanks to the engine I could trivially target wasm as well, so others can get mesmerized too. The source is available here: https://github.com/sulami/three-bodies [0]: https://docs.rs/macroquad/latest/macroquad
2024 · three-bodies.sulami.xyz · its alternatives →
- 8
This is an web audio experiment I've been wanting to do for a long time. Basically an ambient music composition, but all the sound elements are laid out in space, and that musical space can be explored freely. It's definitely inspired by in-world music that sometimes appears in games. I basically took that concept, keeping the music aspect, and dropping the entire "game" aspect. I also turned it into a more "traditional" non-interactive album, but since I started with code, why not program the whole thing? Had a blast making the entire album from code, the complete source for the album is…
2024 · ambient.garden · its alternatives →
- 9IB
Mar 2026 · structuredlabs.github.io · its alternatives →
- 10
Fluid simulation in liquidfun-wasm
2021 · birchlabs.co.uk · its alternatives →
- 11
I didn't realize Universe Sandbox ran on MacOS, and I was in the mood to play around a bit. Some functions it's got: - Random system generation - Sonification is super fun too - Habitability Simulation (Just for fun, don't cite this please) - Replacing, spawning, deleting objects I've had tons of fun building this, so I hope someone else can share the joy. It's free and runs in the browser. I'd love to hear any feedback. I think this is at a state where I might leave it as it is, but if people are interested in other features, maybe I'll keep working on it. I've kept saying I'll stop working…
Dec 2025 · luna.watermelonson.com · its alternatives →
- 12EW
2020 · exophysics.net · its alternatives →
- 13
Gravity WebGL experiment in the Solar System
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
A pretty simple but fun to play with simulator for a concept from mathematical physics called the "2D Coulomb gas". I originally made this for my Bachelor's thesis to create pretty pictures and build intuition but have recently gotten it a fresh coat of paint and better performance curtesy of WebGPU acceleration (ported with liberal help from Codex to get through all of the boilerplate). Play around with it - hopefully read up more on the 2D Coulomb gas because it is an incredibly deep topic research wise.
Feb 2026 · simonhalvdansson.github.io · its alternatives →
- 15IR
This weekend's coding session was dedicated to recreating Jeffery Ventrella's "Particle Life". As you can imagine, I had a lot of fun with it. I recently saw this here on Hacker News and found it strange that I’d never come across it before. Source code: https://github.com/vnglst/particle-life The color palette is by Alex Cristache. https://twitter.com/AlexCristache/status/1791122643816431930
2024 · particle-life.koenvangilst.nl · its alternatives →
- 16
- 17
Highly addictive detector simulation game from CERN
2014 · particle-clicker.web.cern.ch · its alternatives →
- 18
- 19AI
(space = reset) Fluid mechanics is an extremely interesting topic and I have been creative coding for a couple of months now. Therefore I started working on flow fields in processing. It had so much fun playing around with the different parameters in this project, I decided to rewrite in p5.js an added a control panel. You can change most of the parameters (within some constraints I thought to be reasonable), randomize the values and export and import settings. Hopefully some coders here get inspired and also join the great creative coding community.
2024 · synapse.nugatio.com · its alternatives →
- 20
We're integrating with the awesome project Matter.js (http://brm.io/matter-js/) as a Physics engine for our HTML5 animation app. Here's a quick demo video showing it specifically in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHI-hNjiors In developing, I'd often spend hours playing with it making complex rube goldberg setups and pinball machines :).
2015 · tumult.com · its alternatives →
- 21
I'm calling this "Vibe Discovery" — distinct from vibe coding because I didn't know the requirements upfront. Started with "make something with the accelerometer" and discovered through 6 iterations that I wanted a WebGL marble game. The interesting part was the dev setup: Claude Code running in Termux on a Redmi Note 9 (4GB RAM). The same-device feedback loop — code, test accelerometer, react, iterate — made rapid discovery possible in a way that laptop-to-phone deployment wouldn't.
Jan 2026 · kikkupico.com · its alternatives →
- 22AA
An ASCII/Node based fluid simulation library built using vanilla JS and CSS Grids.
2020 · batman-nair.github.io · its alternatives →
- 23
Real-time 2D gravity sandbox with causal propagation (finite c), GW-strain heatmaps, and a virtual LIGO probe. Numba JIT, CPU-only. - alessandro-pioli/AstroCausal_Engine
Sep 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24AW
2014 · qntm.herokuapp.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Unknown Pleasures, a tiny web experiment with WebGL alternatives
- Strange Attractors alternatives
- A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify alternatives
- I made a Doom-like game fit inside a QR code alternatives
- Gravity – Interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein alternatives
- I built a gravity simulator in pure CSS alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →