SOMA News

1 April 2010 E-Mail.

We are all so used to view the SOMA as a puzzle in 3D using pieces of odd shapes Now however Kelley Nielsen of San Jose, California, USA has produced a Screensaver that will show SOMA on the unused screen.
What a super idea - how did you get the idea.??
"I don't remember when I had the idea, although it was a few years ago.
I was brainstorming for possibilities to expand my package, and I thought of another puzzle
since the XScreenSaver package has a tangram and a snake puzzle.
That got me remembering the Soma set I had when I was about 12 years old, and I got interested in it again."


The screensaver feature the Soma cubes. The pieces fly in from off screen / out of the fog, assemble themselves into a figure that rotates for awhile, then fly apart and the whole thing begins again.
It requires OpenGL, is intended to run on Linux/Unix, and is distributed under the MIT/X license.
Kelley have also written a translation program that takes a text file containing the solutions you have provided on your website and outputs a header file containing 3d coordinates, rotation vectors and angles for use with OpenGL.

Menu screen

Describing her work, Kelley tell me that as it is now, it include a text file containing solutions A0001 through A0100.

The pre-release package is here:
http://home.comcast.net/~shegeek/xtrascreenhacks/xtrascreenhacks-0.4-pre.tar.gz

Future versions may hold more solution files so that the user can have a choice of which one to use, and possibly improve the translation program so that it can handle the HTML.



By the way. The project home page is here:
http://home.comcast.net/~shegeek/xtrascreenhacks/index.html
And the Freshmeat record (where most people download it from) is here:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/xtrascreenhacks/


It is free for anyone to use, and even to modify and redistribute as long as the terms of the MIT/X license are followed.


Thank you to Kelley, for the impressive work.