LifeSaver - Game of Life as Screensaver

Recently, I promised you that I'd write my own screensaver. Well, here it is - an implementation of Conway's Game of Life using xscreensaver and OpenGL. It's based on the [Python implementation]({{ root_url }}/blog/2012/02/25/game-of-life/) 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 ...

A fairly minimal xscreensaver

Today, I wanted to write my own screensaver, so I started looking for frameworks. Quickly, I found xscreensaver, the de facto standard (?) for screensavers on X11.

The readme does mention two example screensavers developers should use to start out, but they still contain some superfluous stuff (GOTOs !). To get a better understanding of the framework, I set out to reduce them as much as possible. Without further ado, here's the result of my work. Stay tuned for my finished screensaver.

/* xscreensaver, Copyright (c) 1992-2008 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
 *
 * Permission to ...

Plotting with julia

Maybe you've already heard it: There's a new language on the block - Julia. She seems to be a hot contender for the new standard scientific computing language, maybe also replacing R for statistical analysis.

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

Of course, it's a very young language, so they standard library is quite small right now. For example, you can also plot to ...

Task Engine

Some years ago, I was fascinated by the inner workings of the games I played. I already had learned C++, so I set out to find out more about the libraries and techniques specific to graphics programming.

My journey began with NeHe, an excellent series of tutorials for OpenGL beginners. (The lessons are available in many languages, not just C++)

Next, I read up on engine design. Of course, ambitious as I was, I aimed for a fully scalable multi-threaded engine. Had I wanted to create an actual game, this would have led to endless frustration (as ...