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Comment by ariehkovler | Hacker News Reader

This captures two of my childhood computing obsessions. I spent so long messing around with Polyray and generating raytraced pictures for convering into Magic Eye stereograms. I also had some Windows 3.1 fractal generator program, where you could mess around with the formulas and zoom in (slowly) and make them cycle colours.

Looking forward to playing this a lot. I particuarly like the clever use of fractal mathematics to make accurate collision detection physics. Though it helps that he's using a sphere as the user-controlled object.

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I thought you were talking about the raytracer I was obsessed with as a kid, POVRay, but indeed there is also a project called polyray.

I spent many a weekend rendering hundreds of .tga files and throwing them into .flc files since that was the only way I knew how to make "videos". I mostly did renderings of planets turning with texture maps, trying to get something similar to what I saw in Star Control 2, and I told myself I was making them for my own video game, but I never got past fiddling around with povray. Anyway it looks like polyray has a lot of the same facilities. I wonder how I was unaware of it for the couple years I played with povray?

I remember staying up all night waiting for my first renders to complete on my brand new amazingly fast 80286 with 80287 math coprocessor. It was amazing.

For some time now I've wanted to modify my ray tracer to do realtime RDS (random dot stereograms). Just another item on my bucket list that I might never get around to. I suspect doing high frame rates and animation may keep your eyes adjusted very well, but that intuition might be wrong.

I played with Bryce 3D (from the MetaCreations era) as a child. Sooo many generic landscapes.

you should checkout Tom Beddard, a master in the area, that has partnered with the founder of MetaCreations. A little googling will show you some cool stuff.

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