Thanks for that! This is amazingly faithful to the original! And although aliasing is pretty-much my arch-enemy in life, here the aliasing and all the slightly-odd z-chatter stuff somehow adds to the charm!? Brilliant!
I totally loved the plasma effect from whenever I first saw it, and implementing it myself in Pascal/DOS was one of the first times I really started to understand a 'shading'-like context where you are coming up with a value for every pixel, the pixels can be made to have 2D 'coordinates' (even though they are actually a 1D chunk of VRAM! -> modulo to the rescue!) and that you could transform the 'space' such that you feed in the coordinates (including time) and evaluate different-enough sine functions (then sum them, in this case) to create a beautiful soft-waves-evolving-over-time result! Was definitely an eye-opener about how to make it have nice colors as well! Great to see things like this being documented in this way!
As someone who has seen this effect before, but was unclear how it was done, this article is very "and now draw the rest of the owl". They define a basic equation, it's about what I expected, but the end shader code doesn't use it in that form, and I found it pretty difficult to parse, I can't say I'm much better off in the end.
Isolate each of the additive sine functions by commenting out all but one and view the different elements. Sine wave left to right, Sine wave up to down, Sine wave diagonal, Sine wave circular - and then observe the resulting pattern is just the sum of the atomic parts. Play with it to learn.
The article sums up quite well which principles are at play here. The fun part it's suggesting (without words), is either to pick it apart and see what each part does, play around with the constants in there, or start from scratch and roll your own... (all with the Shadertoy linked below the article maybe?)
I would say most interesting texts (articles, books, school, ...) should leave stuff up to the reader's mind to figure out. That's how someone really learns. Versus pre-baked stuff like television etc.
If something does not resonate at first that's pretty normal. You could still take it apart and start investigating words or concepts that ring no bell, for example: waves, interference, demoscene, owls, Feynman.
It’s early February. Have you really read so many articles you couldn’t understand in one month that you have a “usual” way of dealing with it? You should consider whether you would benefit from curating your sources better, or if use of AI as a crutch has already decayed your ability to understand stuff on your own unrecoverably…
Love seeing plasma explained again. It’s wild how a few sines and cosines can still look this organic decades later. Feels very demoscene-pure: simple math, clever color mapping, and suddenly you’ve got motion and depth. Also cool to see specular highlights layered on top, old tricks, modern hardware.
Would have been awesome if there was step by step visualization where simple color transforms slowly upgraded until you get final result for easier understanding of what each thing is doing.
Otherwise quite hard to visualize changes in you head.
All I hear is the music from Second Reality (the plasma cube part).
https://youtu.be/iw17c70uJes?si=_KWmUg608NxgyrXv&t=348
Someone did a complete rewrite of it in js - https://covalichou.github.io/second-reality-js/
Thanks for that! This is amazingly faithful to the original! And although aliasing is pretty-much my arch-enemy in life, here the aliasing and all the slightly-odd z-chatter stuff somehow adds to the charm!? Brilliant!
Every once in a while, at random times in life, I hear "I am not an atomic playboy" in my head.
I wonder what would happen to that music style if you went 16-bit/44.1 kHz with the samples. Has something like this been tried?
I assume the 'grunginess' is a big part of what makes it work, but I'm also curious.
I totally loved the plasma effect from whenever I first saw it, and implementing it myself in Pascal/DOS was one of the first times I really started to understand a 'shading'-like context where you are coming up with a value for every pixel, the pixels can be made to have 2D 'coordinates' (even though they are actually a 1D chunk of VRAM! -> modulo to the rescue!) and that you could transform the 'space' such that you feed in the coordinates (including time) and evaluate different-enough sine functions (then sum them, in this case) to create a beautiful soft-waves-evolving-over-time result! Was definitely an eye-opener about how to make it have nice colors as well! Great to see things like this being documented in this way!
As someone who has seen this effect before, but was unclear how it was done, this article is very "and now draw the rest of the owl". They define a basic equation, it's about what I expected, but the end shader code doesn't use it in that form, and I found it pretty difficult to parse, I can't say I'm much better off in the end.
Try https://www.shadertoy.com/view/tftfzj
Isolate each of the additive sine functions by commenting out all but one and view the different elements. Sine wave left to right, Sine wave up to down, Sine wave diagonal, Sine wave circular - and then observe the resulting pattern is just the sum of the atomic parts. Play with it to learn.
The article sums up quite well which principles are at play here. The fun part it's suggesting (without words), is either to pick it apart and see what each part does, play around with the constants in there, or start from scratch and roll your own... (all with the Shadertoy linked below the article maybe?)
I would say most interesting texts (articles, books, school, ...) should leave stuff up to the reader's mind to figure out. That's how someone really learns. Versus pre-baked stuff like television etc.
If something does not resonate at first that's pretty normal. You could still take it apart and start investigating words or concepts that ring no bell, for example: waves, interference, demoscene, owls, Feynman.
Enjoy! ;)
What I usually do in 2026 is copy the code and article and have Claude clarify the unclear parts for me. then is ok.
But that's sort of the author's job: if they wish to publish an article on a topic, they should make it both comprehensive and comprehensible.
It’s early February. Have you really read so many articles you couldn’t understand in one month that you have a “usual” way of dealing with it? You should consider whether you would benefit from curating your sources better, or if use of AI as a crutch has already decayed your ability to understand stuff on your own unrecoverably…
Love seeing plasma explained again. It’s wild how a few sines and cosines can still look this organic decades later. Feels very demoscene-pure: simple math, clever color mapping, and suddenly you’ve got motion and depth. Also cool to see specular highlights layered on top, old tricks, modern hardware.
Plasma-Pong was a great game
Specular is a cool addition!
Loved the intro but that code sample could've used proper variable names.
Would have been awesome if there was step by step visualization where simple color transforms slowly upgraded until you get final result for easier understanding of what each thing is doing.
Otherwise quite hard to visualize changes in you head.
Exactly. Like someone stated, it was a bit like "draw the rest of the fucking owl"