Using a bit of a brute force process. Each snake is 200 segments. Each segment has a magnetic repulsion towards every segment of every other snake (if they are close enough to warrant collision detection calculations). Not ideal, speed wise, but still runs at 60 fps with four snakes intertwined, and can handle several more if they are off wandering solo.

ah the ol' megnetic repulsion... i would never have figured. yeah works pretty damn well. was just trying to imagine what would be involved if you were to do it through proper collision detection and my head started to spin.

Its OpenGL and GLSL. For now, the geometry is in VBOs and I have two light sources effecting the texture rendering on the shader.

Not naive. I *barely* know what I am doing. :P The geometry stuff happens in vertex buffer objects. I am only using shaders for texturing and lighting.

Me too! I have some ideas but will need a better physics implementation to get it to work the way I want. So who knows.