Fugu, software for Lua-based form generation, is now open source! That means you can download the source, examine it, tweak it, and compile it for the arbitrary operating system of your choice! This is a huge and final step for me in the Fugu project.
Unfortunately, for me at least, the Fugu project is ending and my next projects are beginning. I would love to have continued with Fugu as I never achieved my intended goals with it, but maybe someday I will revisit it with some renewed gumption. To give myself some hope that Fugu won’t die of code attrition, the decision was made to release the source unto the world.
The Fugu Website has been updated with a link to the source code. I have also uploaded version Fugu 0.2.2 for windows, which has a few minor patches, and includes a screen-space ambient occlusion shader (read: a prettifier). I couldn’t get the SSAO shader working on osx, and so I haven’t updated the binary. The code is available though, so if you’re interested, take a peek, submit a patch, and upload a new binary! ;)
I would like to thank the people who alpha tested Fugu for me, it was a great help to get the early feedback that I did, and I still welcome bug reports and other issues. If I’m able to easily fix any issues, I most likely will, as I’d like to see Fugu reach a nice stable state (even if it doesn’t have all the features I would’ve liked.) I also want to thank CEMA, for giving me the opportunity to build it, and in particular Jon McCormack, who gave me free reign to let my brainwaves transmute into machine code. James Wetter wrote all the awesome generalised cylinder code in Fugu, and along with Jono Mullins kept me enthusiastic about pursuing my goal of automatically generating tentacle monsters.
For me, Fugu was a great learning experience, and was my introduction to Lua — which has grown on me so much I use it extensively in Moonman. I still think that a program of Fugu’s kind (interactive, code-based and real-time), combined with the expressiveness and simplicity of Lua, would dramatically enhance our ability to explore procedurally generated and animated forms. Some features I would have liked to implement in Fugu are skeletal animation, spatial attractors, and some ad hoc physical models. I strongly believe that the inclusion of these elements would’ve enabled the generation of some truly bizarre, amazing and complex organic structures. My interest is primarily in computer games these days, and one of my goals is to build a game with a significant procedural animation element. (Abstract, like Fract, but organic and visceral). For this I’ll probably use the ideas I learned when building Fugu. So keep an eye out! ;)