This series contains six modules for use with the After Dark screensaver. The following is a brief description of each:
Crabs
Crabs is a genetic simulation of a population of “crabs.” These crabs feed on the white pixels of the screen. When crabs are born, they are bright green on a color Macintosh. When they reach maturity and start producing offspring, they turn bright blue or red. As they age, they become lighter and lighter until they turn white and die. If a crab begins to starve, it will turn bright yellow and slowly become lighter until it starves and becomes white. Each crab has attributes such as size and metabolic rate (which both affect speed), life expectancy, birth weight of offspring, breeding cycle and movement patterns. These attributes are for the most part inherited by the offspring with some random genetic mutations. The rate of food production is regulated by the user.
Diatom
This module draws random designs based on the discrete Fast Fourier Transform of two random data spikes. Sliding the ‘Number of Lines’ slider to all the way to the right will cause a random number of lines in the interval [10,1000] to be used. Moving it all the way to the left causes data in the file ‘Diatom.data’ to be used to draw the diatoms. This file is located in the After Dark folder within your System folder and consists the data for a diatom on each line. The data is composed of three numbers in the form: first data point, second data point, number of lines. The data points can be positive or negative and can optionally be followed by a lowercase ‘i’ to indicate imaginary numbers. If you see a diatom that you like, press the <CAPS LOCK> key and it will be recorded into the ‘Diatom.data’ file. When you are playing back diatoms from the data file, a bullet, ‘•’, will appear before the data displayed at the bottom left of the screen.
ICONS!
This module will fill the screen with icons taken from a resource file (type ‘rsrc’) selected by the user. The background color can be set to black, white or random. On a color Macintosh the random setting selects from one of the eight colors available in the original QuickDraw model. The foreground is also set to a random color on a color Macintosh. The icon files must be located in the After Dark Files folder within the System folder. If you select the ‘Desktop Icons’ file, this module will use the icons available to the Finder in the Desktop file.
Invert
The Invert module simply inverts the screen by starting at the outside edges and working toward the center. The speed of this process is controlled by the user.
Maze
This module generates a random maze on the screen and then proceeds to solve the maze. The size of the maze pathways can vary from five pixels to 21 pixels. It doesn’t work well with the randomizer module because of the large memory requirements of Maze.
Polygon Art
Polygon Art draws “art” derived from randomly generated polygons.
If you enjoy and use these modules please send $5.00 to:
Calico Publishing
12751 Woodford Way
Bridgeton, MO 63044
We will keep you informed about upgrades and future modules.
