Valentine Day Dynamic Dream

For valentine day, I decided to create a new dynamic dream: it will be an "animated" heart using particles. Time is limited, so I'm doing something simple. You will be able to tweak some settings such as change the color & background, but most things will be hard-coded.

It will use some particle system to create the heart itself. You will be able to change the color and texture used for the particles. The background will be chosen among a few different pictures, with a shader applied for blur & coloration.

Things to do:

• load/save configuration
• configuration UI
• Particle "engine"
• Background, with pixel shader for color & blur

The plan is to get a first test build as soon as possible to get some feedback, with a pre-release build on February 8 for final tweaking. I expect to make a final release on February 12.

I need to find a few nice backgrounds (flick is my friend here :D). Color selection for the heart will probably be limited to magenta and blue, with 2/3 different particle textures.

As you can see from the two pictures, I'm not really good at sketching I will try to get some screenshots of the real UI soon, so you can get a better idea of how it will look like.

BTW, for people wanting to create dynamic dreams, I can't really release any source code right now, but you can start by downloading the December 2006 Microsoft DirectX SDK (the version is important!). Creating dynamic dreams is a lot like creating screensavers: get the CD3DScreensaver class that is part of DXUtil and start hacking on it. Converting that work to a dynamic dream should be relatively straightforward once the Dream SDK is released.

Update: First Look at the Valentine Dream

Here we go: a very crude version of the configuration UI and two screenshots of the dream (with and without a background).

The configuration is loaded from the registry at startup (and initialized if the dream is started for the first time). You can tweak it by changing the registry keys as the UI is not functional at the moment.

Once I have the config UI working I will make a test build available (probably not a .Dream at first) so that you can play with it a little

(Background picture is Valentine Favorites by craftilyeverafter - Particle tutorial by Almar Joling was a great help)

Progress and a test build

Since the last update, most of the work has been directed towards the configuration UI. Loading and saving settings is now fully implemented. I also added a slider to modify the size of the particles.

What's not working correctly yet:

• Applying a new configuration is causing the dream to reset.
• The colorize shader still needs some work to make it use the particle color (the color is hard-coded right now).
• More particle textures are needed
• The colors need to be tweaked
• The "scaling" code (to adapt to the different quality settings) is not working properly.
• A few potential bugs in the config code

You can download a zip file containing the dll files and the resources, as well as a test program named TestDream that will load the dream inside it's own window. Simply open a command prompt and launch it with "TestDream.exe Valentine32.dll".

There is also a .Dream file inside, but remember that it hasn't be tested extensively, so use it with caution (make sure to take a look at the readme file).

Download: Valentine Dream Test Build