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Screensaver?

Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 11:44 pm
by snoopy
What screen savers do you guys use, and what does one have to do these days to just get a .scr file that doesn't have all the spyware crap piggybacked on it? (I'm looking for something new and good)

Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 11:46 pm
by Grendel

Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 11:55 pm
by Top Gun
D3 Saver x 2

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 12:00 am
by snoopy
Looks like the D3 saver looks for Reg keys that don't exist on my comp to decide if descent is installed or not- anyone have those key by chance?

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 2:05 am
by Duper
Matrix Emulator if I use one at all. Typically don't though unless I'm locking down the computer for some reason.

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 5:30 am
by Vindicator
Default Windows XP screensaver. Never found a need for anything else. I am boring.

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 5:31 am
by DCrazy
Vindicator wrote:Default Windows XP screensaver. Never found a need for anything else. I am boring.

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 8:05 am
by Nitrofox125
Cycling half the library from www.skins.be :P

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 8:06 am
by CDN_Merlin
turn power off. I haven't used a SS in ages.

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 9:01 am
by aldel
Well, how about that, people do still use screensavers. Now if I could just get them to pay for them...
snoopy wrote:Looks like the D3 saver looks for Reg keys that don't exist on my comp to decide if descent is installed or not- anyone have those key by chance?
It uses the value named "Path" under key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\Descent 3.exe", which I believe is always defined if D3 is installed (am I wrong?) It needs this value to find d3.hog, which contains all the objects and textures.

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 9:06 am
by Avder
I shut my monitor off or set power management to do it after 10 minutes of idle

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 9:09 am
by aldel
Actually I'd been meaning to advertise my new screensaver here. It runs Conway's game of life on the surface of a torus. It's really cool looking and has worked on every machine I've tried it on, but when my wife tried to run it at work it crashed her machine, so I'd appreciate it if lots of people would try it out and let me know if it doesn't work.

download page

Screen shot:

Image

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 10:26 am
by Topher
oo, that's teh cool!

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 10:28 am
by Avder
What, do all the red dots simulate like, cities or something?

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 11:21 am
by Krom
No screen saver, monitors power off when idle.

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 12:24 pm
by Foil
Sweet!

(And it works fine on my system, running Win2000.)

My degree is in Pure (Theoretical) Mathematics, so I know about Conway's Game of Life, and how it works.

I'd never thought of putting the game on any other surfaces. Have you gotten any weird results, or found any stable patterns which would not be possible on the standard plane? Hmm......

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:22 pm
by KompresZor
Krom wrote:No screen saver, monitors power off when idle.
x2
I haven't used a screen saver in a long time.

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:37 pm
by Mobius
SETI

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 3:05 pm
by Krom
Mobius wrote:SETI
Don't use it as a screen saver, makes it slower.

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 3:24 pm
by aldel
Foil wrote:I'd never thought of putting the game on any other surfaces. Have you gotten any weird results, or found any stable patterns which would not be possible on the standard plane? Hmm......
Actually, Life on a torus is equivalent to Life on an infinite plane, with an infinite repeating pattern of live and dead cells. But there are a few things that typical Life simulators can't handle, since they don't support infinite numbers of live cells (funny how that works). For example, a single row of live cells, extending infinitely in both directions, leads to an interesting pattern of moving and colliding lines.

Unfortunately my screensaver can only start with randomness, not predefined interesting patterns. I'll have to fix that in a future version. For now you can experiment with infinite repeating patterns using a Life simulator that supports wraparound at the edges. I don't know if this is a very common feature; I haven't looked. One program I know of that supports it is this one, which I wrote in high school. It runs under MS-DOS and is a bit short on features, but you can't complain about the download size.

I'm not sure how well Life would work on any surface other than a 2D plane or a torus. I don't think there's any other surface that can be divided up into a rectangular grid, where every cell has exactly eight neighbors. Is this wrong? Would a double torus work? I'm having trouble visualizing it and I don't have any double tori lying around to draw on.

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 3:26 pm
by Will Robinson
some 3d xp thingy it's not bad for a corporate logo kind of thing, runs real smooth and it's a total waste of wattage which is truly american ;)

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 3:27 pm
by Tricord
Krom wrote:No screen saver, monitors power off when idle.
x3

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 3:53 pm
by suicide eddie

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 6:42 pm
by Sage
3D Christmas in the City:
http://msn.computeractive.co.uk/downloa ... ks/1159928

a rather fine screensaver in light of the holiday spirit.

the programmers that made it must have been bad though, because it doesn't run decent on anything above 640x480. And the music that it's supposed to loop craps out after about and hour. Then it starts repeating the last 5 seconds of the song over and over...

I still like it though!

I also really like Sea Storm 3D:
http://www.voodoofiles.com/8054

Image(i'm a bandwidth theft)

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 7:01 pm
by Vindicator
aldel wrote:Actually I'd been meaning to advertise my new screensaver here. It runs Conway's game of life on the surface of a torus. It's really cool looking and has worked on every machine I've tried it on, but when my wife tried to run it at work it crashed her machine, so I'd appreciate it if lots of people would try it out and let me know if it doesn't work.
On my dual monitor machine the torus is never displayed on only one monitor. Its always on both screens (with one half displayed on each monitor), and it never bounces more than about halfway across each monitor.

Image

where the green line is the division in the monitors. It stays in that general area. Otherwise it works fine on my XP pro machine.

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 7:08 pm
by Hattrick
Krom wrote:No screen saver, monitors power off when idle.
X4

Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 10:15 pm
by Xamindar
why, xscreensaver of course! :P

Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 12:51 am
by roid
i just installed your screeensaver aldel, it works great and i htink i'll keep it for a little while. i llike it :)

this is what i do with screensavers, i'll use them for a few weeks then tire of them and just go back to turning the screen off, which is how it's generally always setup. (ie: that matrix screensaver that was going around, lasted a week, then back to screen shutdown :))

(haha, my mother demanded i install it on her pc as well, it's spreading liek cheeze on fire)

Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 7:17 am
by BUBBALOU
I use only one screen saver Xp Screensaver , looks cool, no bs

Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 12:31 pm
by Sligar
Arg, D3 saver doesn't work for me, it just draws a bunch of dots. I checked the path in the registry and that looks ok, I wonder what the deal is? Is it an XP thing?

Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 4:53 pm
by Top Gun
It works fine in XP for me, and I know it's not XP-exclusive. Did you check all of the options for it? Enabling/disabling some of them might do the trick.

Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 4:56 pm
by Arbitar
lol I use the "NO Saver" ... its no screensaver all the time. No really. I hate screensavers.

Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 6:23 pm
by Nitrofox125
Is it possible to get burn-in on LCD monitors period?

Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 7:11 pm
by aldel
Sligar wrote:Arg, D3 saver doesn't work for me, it just draws a bunch of dots. I checked the path in the registry and that looks ok, I wonder what the deal is? Is it an XP thing?
Is D3 installed and working properly? And do you have decent OpenGL drivers installed? That's all I can think of that might be wrong.