Paphos Life

Really brilliant & quite mesmerising.

I love animations like that. They are the natural evolution of the old home PC demo scene, where many great animators of today cut their teeth.

I used to love things like fractal generators and lissajous curves, but the popularity of suitable software to show them has declined in recent years. It is probably because regular graphics have improved so immensely, if that makes sense.

It's funny how things evolve though. One of the first computer programs I played around with was a Game Of Life simulator. That was cellular automata, where a cell would survive if it had two neighbours, but die if less or more. That sort of thing (I am simplfying it a bit here). Years later I looked it up again, and was amazed with how far the idea had progressed. There were stable shapes you can create which would march across the screen, and fire out other stable shapes which would in turn produce their own offspring.

If graphics etc have progressed that much in a few decades, imagine what they will be like in 100 years time...

I was working for a PC company in Oxford in the early 80’s and saw the advent of what was termed the MPC or multimedia PC. It was a spec where a CD drive was fitted and it could display animations and video the size of a postage stamp. It looked really exciting at the time. It took a number of years before full-screen video was possible from a DVD. Animation takes a massive amount of computing power. One of my colleagues joined a computer firm who supplied super-computers to the Film industry and the early CGI graphics were still rather raw.

This animation has untold numbers of computational lines to display all the shadows, mirror effects etc. A human could no longer code that alone and a graphic program is needed to work out the vast amount of code to display that. I have been a follower of fractal animations and the like as well and this displays just how far it’s progressing. Soon, they will only use actors for the pure acting and scenes will all be CGI - many are now.

Dominic wrote: ↑Wed Dec 20, 2017 8:05 am If graphics etc have progressed that much in a few decades, imagine what they will be like in 100 years time...

Amazing animation, thank you. I agree with Dominic, the way things improve so quickly now is incredible. An interesting time to be alive. Now all I have to do is find a way to live to be about 250, and remain well and strong, so I can go on seeing all the extraordinary stuff that the world has to offer.....