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.