Right now I’m sitting, writing about Qt’s new animation classes released in 4.6. Looking at the snow, writing about this, makes me wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to implement animations that delete themselves and their items when the item leaves a given bounding rectangle.

Why? Then you can define a bounding rectangle, e.g. the screen, and create snow flakes with randomized animations and just let them drop.

I remember doing something like that back in the STOS/AMOS days. You created a sprite, defined an animation pattern and then forgot about it (as I recall). This was great for the 2D shooters of the time with aliens attacking in predefined patterns. Not 100% sure how the surviving aliens (yes, you have to take bad players into account, including me) where handled. The ones you hit could be taken care of in a collision detection handing function called from the inner loop… well, nostalgia might make me look at this in a forgiving light.

Anyway, the snow is falling. There will be more tomorrow. It will probably be cold all the way to Christmas. Looks like we’re in for a white Christmas.