VGA screen. More subtly, pentagrams and skulls, similar to Edvard Munch's The Scream, are rendered into the flames."/>

Eyecandy: Turn your computer into an expensive lava lamp.

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

Documentation

External References

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