Takes time. And I am so short on simple ideas.

Except the set here is the fourth order mandelbrot and the output is given by the orbital density at each pixel weighted by |Z_n – Z_n-1| and I played with the colors a little.

Edit: I replaced the original rendering with a much larger one. 1401×1401 for those of you looking for backgrounds. It was supposed to be 1400×1400. Some loop is limited incorrectly.

Edit 2: Replaced the replacement with a new rendering. This one has 400 samples per pixel. That’s awesome.

Edit 3: I added a 3001×3001 render.

Like the title says.

It’s a tree. Sort of. Pretty!

Next up we have a particle system! Cool. Go download it if you want to give it a try. I would recommend doing so if you have a Zune because it looks a lot better in motion.

So when I heard that XNA 3.1 supports the Zune HD I decided I would take a look at it. It took probably a couple hours to get a simple physics program running on the device. To put that in perspective, it took less time to get a primitive 2d physics engine running on the Zune HD than it did to write hello world on my iPhone. Maybe there’s just something wrong with me. Maybe there’s something about Objective C or the iPhone/iPod Touch platform that I just don’t get, but I think I’m done with iPhone development. May the future be dominated by C#.
The program uses the accelerometer and the touch screen and runs at 60 fps. Even if they aren’t letting us touch the Tegra yet, you can tell that it’s fast. If you have a Zune HD and XNA 3.1 and feel like trying it out, you can download it here.

Continuing on the previous theme. I feel that these would be suitable for a background if I can manage to render them slightly larger. I’m working on it. If I feel like it. What I’m doing here is I’m drawing lots and lots of paths through electric fields. The line is always 80 clockwise from the local direction of the field. Red and blue are not positive and negative, these charges are all considered the same for this since if they were of different sign you would have singularities and that’s not very pretty. The current resolution of the program is locked at 1000×700 so it’s just small enough to be useless as a background for anything larger than a cellphone. Feel free to give it a try though. If you hold down the mouse button, new lines will only be generated within a small radius of the mouse.

It being a Thursday, after all. Cellular automata and something else which doesn’t have a well defined name that I know of. It draws spirals. Go check it out.

Edit: Changed some constants. This program has a billion constants. The download is still the same by the way, so don’t download it again.

I wrote another program which generates a genetic tree showing the ancestry of every individual in the population. Here is everything I’ve written so far in a neat package. Though I’m afraid there is no sourcecode for you at the moment.

A shot of part of a population of 50 organisms

A close up

Experimenting with some different rendering styles.

Edit: Here’s some organisms which were actually evolved.

Edit 2: I’ve been inspired by this man.