| Submitted by , posted on 12 December 2001 |

Image Description, by This is a composition of screenshots from the 'Flu' demo, for the Codecraft#2 8k competition. There were six entries in this category, and it won. I should mention that this was some time ago; Codecraft#3 finished earlier this year.
However, since very few of you will be aware even of the type of computers existence, I doubt many of you will have seen it. For what it is worth, the computer used was a RiscPC equipped with a StrongARM processor running at 202.4 Mhz. ARM chips have a very elegant RISC architecture and are pleasant to program in machine code. There are now several manufacturers of ARM based computers. If you are interested in learning more, search for RiscOS (and perhaps ARM). If you are not, please don't flame..
The demo had five graphical sections, clockwise from the top: Coloured metablobs. As far as I know, this hasn't been done before, but I can't follow the PC demo scene so it may be a rediscovery. In any event, it turns out to be quite easy to do using a two pass algorithm. In the first pass I simply set up 3 pairs of metablobs in separate channels. In the second pass these channels are summed then processed to find the brightness, and the proportions used to give the colour.
The rippling reflection part takes up a large proportion of the file; the compressed moon picture alone is over 3kb. (This section was added when the competition rules were changed with the maximum size going from 4 to 8kb.) If the reflections look a bit blocky, this is because interpolation was used to keep the speed up.
The 'Fish' section was written by Alain Brobecker, a very skillful French mathematician. In his words this is "a rotozoom with edges as quadratic splines and an RGB trainee". (I believe the fish tile was by MC Escher.)
The yellow thing is meant to be the front panel of a computer (Coder graphics), which slowly burns away in a 512 translucent particle fire effect. (The 'Phoebe' was a yellow computer which was canned before launch).
Finally, for completeness, "Flu Flash" was a quick animated logo. I'm afraid it didn't convert to JPEG particularly well.
Perhaps it is not surprising with the concept of "fluid" that some of these pictures don't look as good as they do in action. Nevertheless, I hope you like it even if this is not a typical pic of the day entry. No first person? No shooting? What was I thinking? :-)
Yours,
Tony

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