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Location: Seattle, WA, United States

I am a Christian. I develop software for Amazon.com. I also sometimes do theater in various capacities, write now and then, and I enjoy some undefinable essence that can often be found in fantasy.

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Drip

I have recently been playing with a screensaver called Borkware Drip. This started when I visited my friend Mike a few weeks ago. I showed him the screensaver, and we both had a lot of geeky fun watching how the system of the drip screensaver functioned, and analyzing the statistics of where the drips were going to land. We were also thinking about ways to play around with it.

Then, when I had him over last Monday, we decided to do that, and edit the source code so as to change the colors of the drips based on all sorts of different things, including how far the drip had traveled and how far into the simulation we were. We also massively sped up the simulation so that instead of watching each drop come down individually, you could see them piling up a little more like sand in an hourglass. I don't have any pictures from how things looked Monday night, because we didn't have a good way to take screenshots; last night, I added code for saving off pictures to the screensaver itself, and also played with the drip coloring some to make it "prettier". Today, I added trails behind the drips that gradually fade away, so that even though the simulation is running too quickly to watch individual drips make their way down, you can still see what route the drips are taking.

Here's a picture of the screensaver with the drip trails: (Click to see full-size, which is fairly big but under 175k)


Here's some pictures of completed simulations: (These get saved automatically now)

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4 Comments:

Blogger Goldberry said...

Wow! That is so cool! I wish I could see it running...

June 11, 2007 6:52 AM  
Blogger Soaring Gryphon said...

Oh, you like it? I thought you would just shake your head at my geekiness. It's at a point where you can't customize it much except by editing the code, but I'll email you what I have so you can set it as your screensaver and enjoy it. :-)

June 11, 2007 7:04 PM  
Blogger Faramir said...

Yes - the static version doesn't hold a (dripping) candle to the dynamic view! ;-)

June 11, 2007 7:37 PM  
Blogger MarkDalrymple said...

I'm glad you've enjoyed the screen saver. I don't want to know how long I stared at the original Apple ][ version way back when. I'm not greedy about the code, so feel free to post it and send it around. Feel free to send it back my direction too, it looks cool.

++Mark Dalrymple

August 12, 2007 6:47 AM  

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