hi there.

the idea behind SpinnerJoy is that you've got a bunch of sticks laid out in a grid, and then you spin them all at slightly different speeds. The sticks each spin faster the further they are from the center.

That's it.

This simple premise gives rise to mesmerizing and sometimes revelation-level complexity.

usage

This distance-from-the-center effect can be exaggerated or imaggerated (?) by adjusting the "r *" factor ("r" is for "radius"). If you make it Zero, this effect goes to zip and all the sticks spin at the same speed. If you make it large, like say one, the sticks that aren't near the center spin really really fast. I like to use values around .001 or so. In addition to the radius deal, each stick has some constant amount of spin added to it. This is the "+" factor. If you set it to zero, only the radius deal will have any effect, so sticks right near the center will hardly move at all. It's interesting to make the radius effect positive and the constant rotation negative. Further more, there's an overall speed factor which multiplies both the radius and the constant, and that's the uh ")*" field.

Other things to play with are: the draw settings. Dot, Dash, Tail, Cross. These are pretty easy to understand and i won't explain them. m, n, & len m & n control the number of sticks. len is the length of each stick. rev & cen "rev" controls how often the overall speed factor is reversed. 0 means never, 100 means once every hundred frames, 1000 means once every thousand frames etc. Similarly, "cen" is how often the "center" is moved to a new random spot. It's interesting to use rev & cen together, for example, both at 1000.

Oh also, you can change the "center" by clicking anywhere with the mouse. The presets are obvious. They are preset values for all the settings. Some of them include the "Phase" of each stick as well, while others don't. The ones that don't start off in the uh initial state. "sto new" means store the current settings to a new preset. "sto ovr" means store them on top of the current preset. "X" means delete the current preset. Good Stuff. If you check the "phase" checkbox, the presets you store will include phase info. more good stuff.
The reset button resets all the sticks to their neutral state. There's three different flavors of neutral state: in the first all the sticks point in the same direction. In the second they all point towards the center. In the third they all point randomly. The << < > >> and || buttons are like the fast-forward, play, rewind, etc buttons on a VCR.

I guess that's about all.

Oh yeah. You can now also save & load .spinnerjoy files to any filename you please, in addition to the reset deals. Use save as and load for that. You can also drag-n-drop .spinnerjoy files onto the program to load them.

If you save any settings you would particularly like to share, please email them to me! - I'll put them up on the web at http://www.elenzil.com/orion/progs/spinnerjoy.

Ok. I think i'm finally done adding features to this program. If you want the source code, it's available from that same site.

orion