March Madness/Day 14

Looks like everyone was busy with the Maker Faire or Mothers' day today, so I've knocked together a quick demo in processing to fill the gap.

It's a simple animation of a tree which sways in the breeze. The tree is drawn using recursion, and the angle of the branches is altered each frame by a small amount determined by three sine waves at different frequencies to get a slightly random feel to the movement.

You can get processing at http://processing.org, and it's a good way to play about with animations and games without needing to set up or deal with any libraries. You can get it for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux amongst others. You can also use it to talk to an Arduino: http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Interfacing/Processing

If you haven't dealt with random number generators before, this is a good example of how they work. The branch drawing routine uses a random angle for each branch, but the draw loop seeds the random number generator with the same number each frame. If you seed a random number generator with the same number, the sequence of numbers you get out will always be the same, although they will be difficult to predict. Try taking out the call to randomSeed - the tree will shake crazily from one frame to the next.

The value used to seed the random number generator is itself random, made by a call to random before the first seeding, so you will get a slightly different tree each time you run the program.

The program is at: http://svn.hacman.org.uk/2010_March_Madness/Day_14