Patterns to produce "meaningful" patterns

[Aslaville]

I've been playing around with libpng for a while now.

I've mainly be working around the file format, headers, compression, interlacing and what have you. Well as I hack around this, I just generate some random image data which may not be very appealing

Now, coming to the question, are there some patterns I could use/implement code for to produce some at least "appealing" images

[manasij7479]

Fractals

[Matticus]

There's some discussion on map-generation techniques here -> Map generator in C (text mode)
Maybe this will inspire something.

[Alpo]

I used this to create a sin wave:

for (i = 0; i < pointsSize; i++ ) {
    points[i].y = sin(i * 3.1415926 / 180) * (bufferHeight / 4);
    points[i].x = i;
}

In my program I used a timer to draw one line past the current line end each time the timer signaled. Then when I reached the end, I would clear the buffer and start again. This produced the effect of a sine wave drawn across the screen. Currently the amplitude of the wave should be half the buffer size. You might need to update the points[i].x value to take into account the width of the buffer though (I just changed the extents of the screen).

Don't know if this is something like what you wanted though? Good luck in any case!

[brewbuck]

Settings the color/brightness of a pixel based on the XOR of its X and Y coordinates produces a pleasing self-similar pattern.

[Aslaville]

Settings the color/brightness of a pixel based on the XOR of its X and Y coordinates produces a pleasing self-similar pattern.

Got this :