The Game of Life on Steroids

Mesmerizing colorful animation from an underdamped blur algorithm.

(c) 2014,2016 Neels Hofmeyr neels@hofmeyr.de

Published under the GNU General Public License v3.

Burnscope produces a mesmerizing animation that I discovered by accident when I was a teenager. I've recreated it in memories of old times. It repeatedly applies a simple underdamped blur algorithm to a seed image, allowing the color values to wrap when overflowing. If you can explain how this staggering everchanging complexity can spring from such a simple algorithm and just one pixel as seed, please send me an email ;)

burnscope_fft is the latest greatest: it's fast and has numerous features the other two (burnscope and burnscope3) don't have.

With burnscope_fft, you can attach a game controller and influence the animation. You can save to raw video file with music playing along (to make a music video). See the -h option.

./burnscope_fft -h

Usage examples:

sudo apt-get install gcc libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev libpng-dev libfftw3-dev libsndfile1-dev
cd burnscope
make
./burnscope_fft -g 320x200 -m 2
./burnscope3 -g 320x200 -m 2 -p 70

To find out all features, you'll have to read the source code:

• keyboard shortcuts
• PNG images dropped into burnscope_fft
• ...

burnscope3 uses three independent burnscopes to feed the color channels r, g, and b. It's not as great as I had expected.

Many enhancements come to mind. If you enjoy playing with this, I would be glad to hear about it!

I've also implemented this algorithm for the rad1o, in the blurn l0dable. (rad1o/f1rmware#115)

Patches welcome!