Electric Sheep still works great to this day. The lifetime membership is worth it if you want nice enough sheep with 0 effort, but there are countless HD packs on archiveorg and elsewhere

Porting the ElectricSheep AfterEffects Plugin from Windows to OSX was my true first open source contribution (1999?). And that only happened because my friend was friends with its author and it came up when he was showing off some fractals movies. Then I said, “Oh I can help you with that.”

That OSS plugin itself was riding on the OSS ElectricSheep. All collaboration and distribution was via tarballs, although is on GitHub now. It was a trip seeing some code I wrangled make its way into commercial media, just organically.

The ElectricSheep project weaves so many cool tech threads together. Only thing is was missing compared to modernity is decentralized genome propagation.

Scott Draves, its author, has some great artist content too. He also spearheaded Polyglot notebooks, early on in that kind of interface.

Yeah, for example Unity uses C#, so you can used a managed CUDA library. If you're using a C engine like Unreal etc. its even easier since you can just include the code.

But having said that, a giant drawback to using CUDA in gaming is that the overhead of transforming and copying your data to/from CUDA kills off a lot of the performance, so while its still great its not nearly as good as writing compute shaders.

They are a topic of their own, the code can start off quite basic but with recent additions you can now also do some really advanced thread management and coordination.

They still come with big overhead to moving data around, but in general they're better suited to the use-case than CUDA.