Yeah, the weird thing is that this is not an atlas packer! It's a very crude long texture with arbitrary bounds, and most GPUs have a maximum texture dimensions

Yeah, the weird thing is that this is not an atlas packer! It's a very crude long texture with arbitrary bounds, and most GPUs have a maximum texture dimensions, so given enough particles this would have broke. Even a simple skyline algorithm to pack rectangles would have worked far better and it's hard to see how to make that into modern C++ like the author shows.