Flowfire
- Initial Release Date
- March 8, 1998
- Color Palette
- 8/18b
- Max Resolution
- 320x200
- License Status
- Open Source
- Codebase
- C++, x86 Assembly
- Platform(s)
- MS-DOS
- Author(s)
- Hugo Elias
Description
Flowfire renders a burning flower-like pattern in the center half of a VGA screen. More subtly, pentagrams and skulls, similar to Edvard Munch's The Scream, are rendered into the flames.
The flame simulation used is quite good, easily surpassing other similar effects from the time. There are a few noticeable defects however, such as rendering the rightmost portion of the flame in the leftmost column, and maintaining less horizontal rendering than the flame effect consumes (i.e. 160px).
It also cheats a bit, rendering a pre-generated flame stored in ASCII in it's flame.dat. Such is also the source of the skulls and pentagrams, as can be seen when viewing the dat file with a text editor set to 160 columns. A version with line-feeds inserted and the characters replaced to be more visible can be seen in the Documentation section below.
Hugo Elias provides a fairly in depth review of his mechanism of simulating fire on the FlowFire homepage, as well as a number of ways the effect could be improved upon. He also provides a later article on the subject of flame simulation post his visit to SIGGRAPH, though the related Windows demo seems to no longer be available.
Video
Screenshots
Downloads
-
Flowfire (Windows DOSBox edition):
The MS-DOS version compatible with Windows via DOSBox.
-
Flowfire:
MS-DOS Flowfire
Documentation
External References
-
Hugo Elias's Homepage:
The good-looking textured light-sourced bouncy fun smart and stretchy page.
-
Fire:
The Flowfire homepage.