A month or so ago before I got too far into my WPF research I wanted to figure out how the performance of WPF compared to - say a 486DX 33mhz from 12-13 years ago. That was about the time I really got into coding, and about the time one of my buddies showed me how to code a fire algorithm in inline assembler in Borland Pascal. So, I looked online for some way to render bitmaps in memory and display them in WPF - and that led to the WPF Fire application whose source is attached (.exe can be found in the bin folder of the attachment as well).

The fire algorithm is pretty simple. You have a color palette of 0 through 255 representing black to white with reds and oranges in between (or you can do black to white with gray shades to make it look like smoke). The way it works is that the bottom row of pixels has their colors randomly assigned to either 0 or 255. All the other pixels on the screen have their colors based on the average of the colors of the pixels to the left, right, and directly beneath - we also decrease the value of this average a bit too so that the fire gradually fades out from bottom to top. Since we are averaging the values around each pixel and the pixel below it makes it appear as though the flames are moving from the bottom to the top. What is neat about this simple algorithm is that you could use it in conjunction with other things. For example, you could remove the randomly assigned pixels at the bottom which fuel the fire, and instead have white balls bouncing around the screen for example which would appear to have fire trails based on the averaging pixel passes.

Now that .Net 3.5 SP1 is out there is a DirectX panel you can use in WPF - I'm sure that would be 10x better for coding something like this - but since I have no real intention of revisiting this playtime app I figured I would share it and see if anyone out there might hax0r it into something cool (please let me know if you do).