electric sheep

[egypturnash]

zenmouse reminded me of the Electric Sheep project. I used to use this as my primary screensaver but I'd quit, as I felt like a leech - it was written such that it'd stop trying to calculate a frame once the screen got slept.

This seems to have been fixed now, though I'm not sure what it does when it's halfway through a frame and you bring your computer back up. Maybe I should look around the source out of curiosity. It's come a long way in some other respects, what with now using Bittorrent to distribute the final animations (sadly not in the Mac version), cute graphics to verify your voting input, and the ability for humans to drop keyframe definitions into the mix.

It's an interesting use of distributed computing: instead of hunting for aliens or studying protein folding, it's just... creating art. Drawing fractals. Drawing complicated fractals that capture the same kind of "ooh, cool!" impulse as the Mandelbrot set did back when you first saw it back in the late eighties, except they're endlessly animating and surprising. I'm pretty damn jaded to fractals after all that time; these are still cool.

The little thumbnails on the site give only the barest hint of the wonders; have a look at the sample videos.

Warning: this needs a lot of hard drive space. I suspect in five years or so computers will have enough spare power to render this stuff in realtime, but right now, it works by having you render individual frames that're put into several-meg animations on the server, then sent back down to all the users.

The Electric Sheep project runs under a Creative Commons license these days; I'm considering experimenting with its imagery for adding texture to my work. We'll see.

Also see Apophysis for Windows, Oxidizer for Mac - same flame fractal rendering code.

ps: I dunno about the Windows or Linux version, but if you prime the pump by manually torrenting some animation files, it won't work if you drop the numbered directories they arrive in straight into the support directory on the Mac - the mpg files need to be in ~/Library/Application Support/Electric Sheep/00202=67501=67501=67501.mpg, not ~/Library/Application Support/Electric Sheep/2084/00202=67501=67501=67501.mpg.

Comments

[zenmouse.livejournal.com]

Oxidizer is a buggy piece of shit, as far as I can tell. I need to try Apophysis.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Oxidizer seems a little glitchy (unsurprising for something labeled as '0.3') but I got it working pretty quickly. Big thing I noted is that it doesn't always close the 'Breeding Progress' window when you fill the Gene Pool.

Its interface is, however, not exactly intuitive...

[zenmouse.livejournal.com]

*chuckles* Apophysis is beautiful in comparison, but you can't tweak it as much.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Oxidizer needs to get some of those UI-pretty-obsessed coders that populate the Mac world nowadays involved. The kind of people who dedicatedly trick out a one-pony app into a Thing of Beauty because what your disc burning really needs is smoke coming off the top of the window and the ability to detect blowing on the computer to interact with it.