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Evidently Kenneth Long found it in the old BMUG archives (External File Library, TBBS folder, Source folder). He cleaned it up and made it run under ThinkC 5.
I found it in my overstuffed Source folder ... I must have pulled it down from somewhere (AOL?). I used the algorithm for building the "webs", kept William's method of building the sets of points in a linked list, and folded it into a screensaver module.
After playing with it for a few days, I started extending it ... expanding it! You can affect many parameters of the drawing now.
The Color Change slider allows you to control the color change between drawing one line and the next. Smaller values give gentler gradiations ... larger values tend to make each "web" more multi-colored.
The Erase slider allows you to choose how often the module will clear the screen to black. If you like to see the colored "webs" build up on top of each other, use larger amounts ... smaller amounts will allow the module to clear the screen more often.
The Step slider gives you control over the spacing between the lines ("strands") in the each "web". Smaller values will give greater space, causing the "web" to look more like a spider web.
The MaxVertices slider (what a bad name, eh?) allows you to choose what is the maximum number of vertices each "web" may have. These are the corners of the web and are randomly chosen. Smaller numbers create more simple web shapes ... larger numbers will cause more complex polygons to be used.
•To give the most time to your system, use smaller MaxVertices.
•The higher the Step value, the more "strands" per web ... each "strand" is colored with a slight Color change from the last one. So, higher Step value equals more color changes per web - so you might wish to lower the Color change amount to compensate (or not!).
•To get the original 1986 application behaviour, try:
___Color change:___<anything, it wasn't colored>___
___Erase:___<Always>___
___Step:___<20>___
___MaxVertices:___<4>___
This will create nice webbed triangles, webbed saddle shapes, etc.
• I tend to like gentler color gradiations (100 or less), hardly erase, a lot of vertices ... and I can't decide whether I like the smaller steps or the larger steps.
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Programmer note:
•I use HSV mode to build the color.
•Each web gets a randomly chosen Hue (0 ... 65535).
•The Saturation starts in the middle (32767).
•For each line/strand, I bump the Hue by the slider amount (0...1000) and I bump the Saturation up by an amount that will lead us to full saturation by the last line of the web (something like ((65535-32767)/max_lines) ). It turned out that lesser Saturation starting amounts caused the web to start out too near-white ... fading into the color. Come to think of it ... that was kind of interesting and neat. Of course, if the Hue gets bumped to over 65536, I mod it so we're starting from 0 then.
