Particle Constellation
Particles stream in from a screen edge and ease into a glowing geometric outline (triangle, hexagon, star, or spiral), then hold, pulse, and link up before scattering and re-forming. Click to jump to the next shape.
Build a self-contained, performant Canvas 2D visual effect in a single React + TypeScript component.
Effect: "Particle Constellation".
Description: Particles stream in from a screen edge and ease into a glowing geometric outline (triangle, hexagon, star, or spiral), then hold, pulse, and link up before scattering and re-forming. Click to jump to the next shape.
Current settings: shape = Cycle all, points = 90, links on, hue = 280, color = Single, second hue = 200.
Tags: Canvas 2D, particles, constellation, formation, geometric.
Requirements:
- Use requestAnimationFrame with a delta-time (dt) step, clamped to avoid jumps on tab switches.
- Render crisply: fully clear the canvas every frame (clearRect). Do NOT fake motion blur by painting a translucent background each frame, because that causes permanent 8-bit "ghost" burn-in. If you want trails, store each particle's recent positions and draw them as an explicit fading tail.
- If many short-lived particles are spawned, use an object pool (pre-allocate, reuse, swap-remove on death) to avoid GC pauses.
- Scale the backing store by devicePixelRatio (cap ~2) and handle resize.
- Pause when the tab is hidden or the canvas is off-screen; respect prefers-reduced-motion.
- Expose the listed settings as adjustable props/controls.