How do you create a funky moving background?

Question

I'm trying to create something similar to what you would see if you loaded a song in Windows Media Player (the cool abstract background that moves and produces various colors). I have no idea how this can be accomplished in libgdx. I've seen other games, such as puzzle games, on the Android store that having moving backgrounds to add visual effect so that the background isn't so static/boring. How can I achieve a similar effect without consuming a ton of RAM or without high CPU usage?

Answer 1

I'm not going to go into details, but what you should be looking into is something like WinAMP's MilkDrop plugin presets and porting them to a shader.

A good selection of example shaders (and how to write them) can be found at https://www.shadertoy.com/. These examples run on WebGL and use the GLSL language to render procedural content that is usually fast enough to run in parallel with whatever you're rendering in addition.

Do beware that not all of them are freely reusable, so get the author's permission first if you want to reuse them.