Happy Accidents.

[Shockwave]

I was thinking mainly about tiny programs, things such as 32 byte intros and how many of them are accidental happenings. When I first started programming I often had happy accidents.

I remember a very old program I wrote on the Spectrum in Z80 assembly language that merged some garbage with the screen, the results were a really nice disintegration of the display. It wasn't what I expected to happen and I never understood why it worked for a long time, but was happy with the result!

Then I think about RDC's experiments with Chladni and the other guys here who are experimenting with various types of textures, some of that has to be accidental right?

What about the Xor texture? Who invented that? It's brilliant.

These days I don't have so many accidents as things tend to happen pretty much as I want, but I was just thinking if anyone else has them. If so, have you managed to use them in a demo or intro?

[rain_storm]

Yeah I discovered the xor texture by a happy accident I had already seen it before but was surprised at how simple it is to generate I would definately use it in a large demo since it only takes a few bytes to produce. there must be hundreds of these gems just waiting for a scener to stumble onto them. They only really happen when you are arsing around just for fun rather then when you are at work on an effect that you have a clear picture of what it is going to be.

[ninogenio]

they are only accidents till someone puts a name to them 

and yeah i used to write daft little programs in yab when i didnt know wtf i was doing, that had accidents that i thought was cool. they are the times i can say i really really had fun with a launguge cause i didnt care i just farted about.

would be an intresting comp though, code a accidentle effect thats never been seen or heard of before and it doesnt matter how crazy it looks.

[ferris]

The greetings effect in Purple (other than the floor) was an accident; as were other parts.

[Stonemonkey]

Not really demo related but the replays in yabasic dart were a complete accident, it was originally planned as a 2 player only game and i came up with a way of testing it myself by getting it to record a lap with player 1 then replay that as i did another lap with player 2. Only after a little while of using it for testing did i realise what I'd done.