3 hour coding result: OpenGL bands

On a day like today, 1st Christmas Day (we here in Holland have 2 Christmas days), and a day with no work (some people call it a 'day off' ;) ), the geek inside you gets a chance to eat away some hours with an obviously useless, but fun coding session.

Years ago, I wrote an OpenGL effect library, DemoGL, which lets you develop and execute OpenGL effects with more ease, execute them on layers via a script, play music with the effects, sync the effects with the music and what else you can come up with. It's open source C/C++ and I totally forgot about that library until today and I thought: "Why not try to do some good old demoscene effects? I was active in the underground demoscene (first Amiga, later PC) from 1988 till 1998 (demo effect coding, music), and it was all a little rusty, I remembered some stuff like matrices, vertices and meshes, but that was it. (I had to spend 20 minutes to get the sinus calculus right in radians ;))

One of the many great effects he made, the 'bands/line' effect in 'Dozen' was, in my opinion, JMagic's best. JMagic, aka, Jarno Heikkinen of the group Komplex, was and still is one of the best the demoscene has ever seen. So if I could come close to that effect he made years ago it would be great. The effect is so great because you ride on one band and look at another one which gives a great 3D feeling, flying through 3D space. Click here to download the Java demo 'Dozen' (1999).

The result is below. It's written in C/C++, running as a class on top of the DemoGL kernel, and I'm quite happy with it. It's not as great as JMagic's code, but hey, it's been a while ;). Because DemoGL can also run as a screensaver, I'll try to produce it as a screensaver tomorrow, perhaps with some weblogs.asp.net textures so Scott can distibute it as a promo-screensaver :)