Nostalgic vibes... like the rest of this place actually !
Good old After Dark, eh ? Man I miss these screensavers...
This is my take on the now classic Flying Toasters screensaver from After Dark. Everything was made from scratch, which leads to some differences compared to the original, like the lack of collision between toasters (I don't remember if toasts ever collided with each other given that they all share the same speed), and visual appearance most importantly since I made those graphics myself in Blender !
I thought this would be a very straightforward project at first. I mean at its core it's a canvas, a callback function, and three objects. You might, if you're either an astute reader or a programmer yourself, recognize this as "hubris", or more colloquially "famous last words", and you wouldn't be wrong ! I discovered in very short order that canvases do not support animated media of any kind natively (whether GIF1, APNG or WEBP apparently), so I had to split the toaster animation into individual frames and load them one by one in an array that I iterate over.
To be completely honest, I'm not fully satisfied with the random spread used to spawn the flying objects. They sometimes spawn right on top of each other and it bugs me to no end ! Maybe I'll fix that someday...
As for the wallpaper itself, I actually never had After Dark myself. I do remember having a friend in the early 00s with a (relatively) old Macintosh2 who had it installed, though, and I also remember specifically looking for this thing for a long time before moving on with my life. I only recently found out that the After Dark 10th Anniversary Edition was available on the Internet Archive, and of course it won't work on a modern OS. Sigh.
Maybe I should remake more wallpapers to pass the time ? Don't think I have the skills to do 3DMaze but hey, I won't know before I try.
1: Considering JIF exists, I pronounce it "Guif"
1: By which I mean an actual old school Macintosh, not the transparent iMac G3s that were more common at the time. Maybe I should write something about those