Kessler

Maybe you remember the old Apple screen saver. This is an attempt at recreating something like it, except as an animated desktop background for the X Window System. Made for personal use -- the color scheme might be is probably broken on your end.

Licensed under the MIT License.

A Low Res Preview:

Built using

• x11rb
• rand

Future work:

• Fix the color scheme badness going on right now.
• Installation? (i.e. optional start-on-login)
• Configuration:
  • General config: FPS target, particile settings
  • Specify the number of roots/curves, their colors, etc.
  • Possible integration with rhai to allow user-defined curves?.
• Further optimizations:
  • More memset in unsafe code probably. It seems that writes to the image I'm using as a buffer are what is holding this back, according to perf.
  • Faster curves somehow?

Configuration options:

TODO:

./kessler --fps --particle-growth-rate --max-particle-count --etc.

How does it work?

While there seems to be a lot of highly non-linear bad-ness going on, it is actually rather simple. The program generates a bunch of Bézier curves as a function of time, and then applies some noise. The fade-to-white effect simply comes from a saturating add to the color buffer instead of an overwrite.