azurescens

azurescens renders interactive fractal-like animations.

Not recommended for people with photosensitive epilepsy!

Currently it is a simple toy, and a platform for experimentation. It will probably grow more behaviors over time.

Quick start

Install Rust from rustup.rs. The latest stable release is fine. Make sure rustup has put the Rust tools in your $PATH — you may need to restart your terminal.

Clone this repository and cd into it. azurescens is not yet available on crates.io; sorry!

Build it in release mode, so that optimizations are enabled:

cargo build --release

This will take a little while, as Cargo downloads and builds a bunch of dependencies. To be honest, the Rust compiler is pretty dang slow. Sorry about that!

Then you can run azurescens with

cargo run --release

Actually, the run command by itself will rebuild as necessary. But on a first build, you may be surprised when the window opens some minutes later!

azurescens has been tested on Linux, macOS Sierra (10.12), and Windows 10. You will need OpenGL 3.2 or later.

There is also preliminary support for Android.

User interface

There is not much UI yet.

Try moving the mouse within the window to get different behaviors.

Press s to take a screenshot, as a PNG file in the current directory.

Performance

azurescens runs smooth as silk on my 2011-era non-gaming laptop, with Intel HD Graphics 3000 onboard video. If you experience performance issues, make sure you are building in release mode. If that doesn't help, you can lower the feedback resolution by adjusting FEEDBACK_TEXTURE_SIZE in src/main.rs.

Alternately, if you crave ultra-hi-def, you can increase this constant. 4096 should work on any reasonable gaming GPU.

If you've done these things and still run into performance issues, please let us know by opening an issue on GitHub.

More documentation

The algorithm

How to hack on it

Building for Android

Shoutouts

Uncountable thanks to my good friend Michael Rule, who introduced me to this whole approach. His implementation in Java may be the most comprehensive and well-crafted version that exists.

tomaka's glium library makes OpenGL programming almost pleasant. It's in maintenance mode, but so is OpenGL these days. One day I'll port azurescens to Vulkan.

#rust-gamedev on Mozilla IRC helped me with several thorny issues.

And of course, I am grateful to the thousands of people who have made Rust what it is today.