Rob: I am not a native english speaker, so your use of the word spectacular throwns me a little off. Your use of the word seems to imply that something is worse than a downscaled version of mona lisa, robot ascii art and some random java applet. Understanding these subtle nuances in a language can be tough.

I have no intention of collecting my prize, so give it to someone else or do whatever you please.

technogeek:
There are two major parts to my entry. One part handles the window setup, direct3d initialization, shader compilation, effect parameter interpolation, music etc. The only rendering performed here is the rendering of a fullscreen quad (two triangles). This part is written directly in x86 assembly.

The other part is the pixelshader bound to the quad, which does the actual rendering of the effect. For each pixel I calculate a primary ray vector based on its coordinates, which I then manually raytrace/raymarch to find an approximate intersection point with the implicit surface. An approximate normal is calculated which is then used for some fake'ish lighting :)

As the color of each pixel is calculated independently based only on the coordinate of the pixel and the parameters of the implicit surface, it is sort of like the good old days before the use of hardware rasterizers :)

Everything is linked and compressed using my own tools. Short story is that it is a specialized version of one of my other tools: http://www.crinkler.net/
I will not bore you with the details of the long story :)

Hi everybody

Here is my contribution: http://daimi.au.dk/~stubbe/tbc/tracie.exe

It is a two minute procedural animation with music. The visuals are made using a pixelshader 3.0 shader and the music is just some midi notes. Everything squeezed into this self-contained executable using my own cruncher :)

To run this you will obviously need a pixelshader 3.0 capable graphics card. You will also need a fairly recent version of the directx runtime (more recent than febuary 2005). Note that it is not distributed using windowsupdate, but if you have any of the more recent games installed you probably already have it. If not, here is the download link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&displaylang=en

If everything else fails, here is a video for people with legacy hardware: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~stubbe/tbc/tbc_-_tracie.avi