Dying of the Lights

An ancient civilization had conquered the stars, building huge monoliths to harness their energy. These mega structures now lie in decay, as their lights begin to dim. What happened to these civilizations? We may never know. We can only bear witness to their ends.

The code for "Dying of the Lights" explores the effect of heredity on structure and color. The base data structure is a quadtree in which child nodes inherit properties from its parent. The evolution of each node depends on the structure of the paren, and not all nodes will survive. The structure is then exploded into their final resting place as they slowly orbit the star.

The piece can be animated by hitting "Space" to slowly watch the Dying of the Light. Performance of the animation depends on the complexity of each piece, and the technical specifications of the device.

The viewer can also control the frame depth and color of the final display, as well as show / hide several additional easter eggs in the details.

Controls:
[UP / DOWN] - Adjust frame depth
[LEFT / RIGHT] - Adjust frame color
[D] - Show / hide details
[SPACE] - Animate

*Higher resolution images can be generated by adding &x=[width]&y=[height] behind the url. Larger images may not be rendered well on devices with less memory.

Common sizes at 300dpi:
A4 = 2490 x 3510
Letter = 2550 x 3300

LICENSE:
This code is licensed under CC-BY-SA-NC 3.0

NOTICE:
This code makes use of the XORSHIFT prng algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xorshift)
It also uses the Roboto Slab font from Google fonts (Apache 2.0: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
Also, much thanks to thecodingtrain for their quadtree tutorial