Half-Baked World

This is another Mac OS X screen saver, which I've been working on but haven't really “finished” to my satisfaction. I’ve decided to publish it anyway.

• Kevin's World screen saver (236KB)
• Source code (44KB)

The basic idea is that there is a grid with various terrain types (which is incrementally modified), and various “mobiles” wander about it. The terrains so far are ground, mountain/wall, water, and bridge. The mobiles are bouncing rollers, edge followers, and fish.

The camera picks several mobiles (usually two) and keeps them in view, choosing different ones after a while, or if the group wanders too far apart.

What's missing:

• More mobile types. Mobiles that modify the terrain. More modes of locomotion: flying, hopping, etc.
• Better camera control, so that it doesn't spend as much time showing stationary mobiles or wide-area views, and will follow individual mobiles longer if they manage to move significant distances.
• Better collision handling. I've already incorporated ODE to manage the basic position-and-velocity, but haven't updated the collision system to take advantage of it (if you're familar with ODE: the space system is not used; no contact joints are created; collisions are handled by setting velocity components to 0). As a result, mobiles may get stuck or run into walls and vanish, won't ever bounce or tumble, etc.
• A better name.

Here are some rather small screenshots:

( more images )