Actually, these are blurred circles. Apparent when you set the "fuzziness" slider to zero.
Metaballs are different. They are essentially a visualization of electric or gravitational fields. For the traditional formula in 2D, each pixel is colored based on the weighed sum of the inverses of the distances to the center of each "ball".
Yep, metaballs. I'm planning on upgrading to the "double density relaxation" algorithm to make it more lava-y. I've never done that before, and the algorithm is pretty complex...
Yep, it uses the same trick as metaballs to cause the blobbing and sets the contrast really high. This makes the colors pretty weird... I started with a color picker but it was a pretty poor experience.
At first sight the thing which differs most from an actual lamp is that if two blobs collide they merge and then 'unmerge' only to continue with same shape and in in the same direction as before the collision. Takes away some of the magic, still: nice.
They seem very sensitive on granularity of the slider (esp brightness), however the response of them effecting anything seems like the environment is bogged down drawing the window and ignoring slider input until it can catch its breath.
Right now it's just using the metaball trick (high contrast and blur filters), so fuzziness is as close as that will get. A future version will have more realistic lava that correctly "blobs". I'll make sure and add sliders for those :)
I had to buy brakleen, candle wax, candle dye, distilled water, ethylene glycol, dish soap, food coloring, and a capping machine to fix mine. What a PITA. Old lava lamps bought off eBay. I should've just hit the refresh button and waited.
