Voodoo Lights Redux
Built in Unity 6. Runs in the browser, on Windows, and as an Android screensaver.
Voodoo Lights was a screensaver Sergio Durante wrote around 1998 for 3Dfx Voodoo II cards. Its site is long gone and the screensaver itself survives mostly on the Internet Archive, so I rebuilt it from scratch in Unity.
Neon comets on black. Everything is additive and HDR, so bloom does all the work — there is no geometry to light, the comets are the whole picture. Each one rides its own 3D Lissajous curve, three sine waves with independent frequencies, so the drift never repeats and never leaves the frame. Behind them a starfield, and now and then a shooting star.
Then the part the original never had: the comets hunt each other.
- Singles prey — one head, one trail
- Multis predators — catch a single, take its colour as another trail
- Killers hunt the multis once they've over-eaten
A well-fed multi is a spinning bundle of coloured ribbons. An over-fed one bursts in two. Killers thin the predators back out, smashing them into the singles they swallowed. The last multi is protected, so the cycle runs forever without going quiet.
The space key toggles the hunting. Hold the left mouse button and every comet is dragged to the cursor — which usually overfeeds a predator and makes it explode.
The whole thing runs in the browser, compiled to WebAssembly. It is the same build as the Windows one, so it wants a real GPU — if it struggles, the capture shows it running properly.
