Recently, I promised you that I'd write my own screensaver. Well, here it is - an implementation of [cached]Conway's Game of Life using [cached]xscreensaver and OpenGL. It's based on the Python implementation I wrote, but quite a bit faster thanks to some trickery. Here's how it looks like:
Since I need to blit a lot of pixels for each frame (all changed cells + all those that died recently and are fading away), I decided to use an OpenGL texture for drawing. That way, my dense array gets painted directly to the screen. To avoid unecessary copying, I've interleaved the …