Screen savers
A friend approached me one day and asked if I knew how to write screen savers. Uh-oh, I said...
She spoke of a field where coloured dots - representing ions - swirl around a black hole. So I dusted off some code I wrote in 1999, reread up on Newton's laws of motion, and started tinkering. I haven't seen the original, and have only been working from a vague description of it, so this isn't a clone or derivative so much as an inspired work.
The result is a Windows screensaver called Storming Ions, and is MIT-licensed.
Wishlist
- The option to throw in extra ion trails once in a while so as to liven up a pseudostable state.
- Option to run the initial state vector backwards a little so that one sees some ions become "captured" by the black hole's gravity?
- An absolute frames limit, so that if the ions do all get stuck in a pseudostable orbit we stop in favour of a (more visually interesting) fresh run?