Screamer is a declarative live coding language for creating visuals using ray marching. It builds on top of marching.js, a JavaScript library that compiles GLSL shaders. In comparison to marching.js, screamer is intended to be more concise and enable faster iteration / experimentation.
In music, a "screamer" is a sped-up march used in circuses to "stir audiences into a frenzy".
Try the playground. Here's a few keyboard commands worth knowing:
Ctrl+Enter: Execute the current line (as defined by where the cursor is placed).Shift+Ctrl+Enter: Execute all lines.Alt+Enter: Execute current code "block". Blocks are delimited by blank lines in the editor.Ctrl+.: Clear the current scene.Alt+C: Enable camera controls. Use WASD + the arrow keys to move through the 3D scene. HitAlt+Cagain to disable the controls and return to editing.
Read / play with the interactive reference. The reference will describe all the various functions found in screamer. In general, its main programmatic elements are:
- Configuration: Used to control global properties of the renderer, for example, post-processing effects and render quality. Applies to all subsequent renderings.
- Geometries: mmmm enough said
- Combinators: Operators used to combine geometries or to nest combinators.
- Modifcations: Single-character operators to transform geometries and combinators in various ways.
- Variables: Values that change over time that can be modified with math expressions; these changes are declared once and then applied continuously ("reactive" programming).
- Math: A small assortment of operators and functions primarily intended to manipulate variables over time.
( and ) begin and end a group, which can have modifications (like repeat and scale) applied to them. This is a simple way to make groupings explicit to the language parser.... if you have trouble running complex lines of code try grouping elements together. They can also be used to gorup expressions in math operations.
// is the operator for a single-line comment.