Eyecandy: Turn your computer into an expensive lava lamp.

Ambience

Initial Release Date
November 28, 1994
Color Palette
21b
Max Resolution
312x199
License Status
Freeware © Tomasz Piotr Pytel
Codebase
x86 Assembly
Platform(s)
MS-DOS
Author(s)
Tomasz Piotr Pytel (Tran)

Description

Ambience is the second of Thomas Pytel's three trippy, infinitely running eyecandy demos, the others being: Timeless, and Luminati. It morphs constantly updated texture-maps in the background, while scrolling various sprites and other effects on top.

Thomas Pytel provided some advice for users with a projector setup...

So kick back, relax, and project it onto your ceiling... Or better yet, a building adjacent to your house! Share the experience with your neighbors. Best of all, on a cloudy night, project it onto the sky!!!

Ambience tried to simulate a hi-color (21b, 2m color) image by rapidly swapping between multiple images with each screen refresh. This worked very well on PCs with CRT monitors fast enough to output images near the 60Hz refresh rate. A combination of phosphor persistence and human persistence of vision would merge multiple 7b images into a single hi-color image. The effect still works with non-CRT displays, but becomes solely dependent on human persistence of vision to combine the images and tends to look rather flickery.

The closing image probably best demonstrates this, where each image consists of the name Tran covered in opposing, diagonal, rainbow stripes.

Even frame imageOdd frame image

These, when overlaid, display hi-color diamonds.

Persistence of vision combined frames

I'm a bit unsure of the 21b claim. I've never been able to capture more than 2 8b images via DOSBox, so it would seem more like 16b.

The song Drops in Time by Ryan Cramer is used for audio. Alternate music can be specified with the "/s" command line. The Mod Archive provides a wide array of S3M files.

Video

Video captured /w VGA capture card capable of capturing hi-color effect rather than DOSBox.

Screen Shots

Download

Documentation

External References

Discussion

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