spiralmonkey Posted December 10, 2005 Share Posted December 10, 2005 hey all, i've been working on an aquarium screensaver for about a year now. i've been using houdini for a lot of the development (the aquarium and fish and motion prototyping we all done with it). It's only for windows XP right now, but if people could give it a run. if it crashes it has an easy bug reporting feature. Right now i really need beta testers. it supports multi-monitors. here's a still: download it at DreamAquarium.com thanks, and be sure to let me know if ANYTHING doesn't work for you. Tell your friends and your mom too! -alan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Visual Cortex Lab Posted December 10, 2005 Share Posted December 10, 2005 a w e s o m e thanks... does it run for a tryout time or its unlimited? (sorry for asking.. you might want to get some money for it.. i was just wondering)... btw.. really nice.. i dont usually use screensavers... but i'll keep this one running specially since its done with Houdini ... would be nice to have some feedback about the work done too ... cheers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaJuice Posted December 11, 2005 Share Posted December 11, 2005 Very nice spiralmonkey! I played with the settings for a bit and everything seemed to work fine. Kudos! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sibarrick Posted December 11, 2005 Share Posted December 11, 2005 Cool, seems to work fine for me too, windows 2000, very nice work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfwood Posted December 11, 2005 Share Posted December 11, 2005 Hey Alan, one thing that might be helpful is a little section that specifies Required and Recommended Hardware. Normally before I download any sort of graphic/audio/game-ish software I like to be able to see if my machine should be to handle it. Plus it lets the user know what to expect. If I'm getting 15 frames per second, is it because my computer sucks or something wrong with the screen saver, etc. Very nice. On a Dual Athlon 2000MP+ with a Quadro 4 750 XGL Video card at 1024x768 32bit Directx: 55-80 fps OpenGL: 29 fps (According to Fraps) Windows 2000 Small bug- If I go into settings and pick a specific resolution, it doesn't remember the setting, and goes back to Automatic. Oh...one last thing... Feed Fish....Best Feature Ever. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sibarrick Posted December 11, 2005 Share Posted December 11, 2005 If we are putting in RFE's already, how about letting the user drop the food whereever they want? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfwood Posted December 11, 2005 Share Posted December 11, 2005 If we are putting in RFE's already, how about letting the user drop the food whereever they want? 23151[/snapback] It would be funny if the tank slowly built up on algae....and you had to put in one of those tank cleaner fish in to clean the "glass". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spiralmonkey Posted December 12, 2005 Author Share Posted December 12, 2005 It would be funny if the tank slowly built up on algae....and you had to put in one of those tank cleaner fish in to clean the "glass". 23158[/snapback] ...or you'd have to use your mouse to scrape it off. Yeah, there's lots of fun stuff you could do. I've had other requests for using the mouse to feed the fish too. i like that idea. unfortunately i have a "no new features until the bugs are fixed" policy right now. oh, and that problem with it not remembering your screen res settings on W2K has been fixed in the latest download. i have no idea what the required hardware would be other than 'a good graphics card'. that's why the algae thing will probably be a no-go for now - a semi-transparent plane that covers the entire screen is too much to ask of a graphics card at this point. in terms of cpu it's virtually nothing. I guess i should calc how much vid ram it uses though. i'm really suprised to find how poor quality the graphics of many new desktop machines are, because it's all gone intel integrated graphics (graphics chip built onto the cpu). ...and right now it's free because i need beta testers, although i should put an expiration on it. as far as i'm concerned everybody on this list is welcome to it for free. besides, i anticipate it will be much better in the future too, so i don't mind if people keep the beta version. right now it's a good way to spread the word and get feedback. and as for the work done, sheesh, it's been so long since i actually worked on the fish themselves i can't even remember how they're done. i've been dealing with directx, dual monitors and installers for so long now. i don't even think i could easily verbalize it anyway. it was really tricky and required A LOT of fresh starts before i arrived at my current solution, which i'm KINDA happy with but not entirely. I basically have 10 matrices which run the length of the fish, and rotations travel down it at approx. the rate at which the fish moves forward. There's also a constant compensation applied to the matrices which continually tries to 'right' the fish (make it so the dorsal fin points up) which simulates the swim bladder's effect. i did all the prototyping for the code using houdini though, which was pretty sweet. i often do algorithm prototyping using sops. One of the tricky parts of these fish was the collision avoidance, which will get tricky again soon. ironically collision avoidance actually gets a little harder when the fish aren't moving so much. later! alan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Visual Cortex Lab Posted December 12, 2005 Share Posted December 12, 2005 I had an error just during my lunch (screensaver starts automatically after 1 mins) the aquarium wasnt there.. but a popup wih the following error instead: Bad Matrix Bad matrix. Its on a IBM Thinkpad R40 (ATI radeon 7500) and XP sp2. cheers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LEO-oo- Posted December 12, 2005 Share Posted December 12, 2005 Nice job - I like it. On my P4 2,95GHz with 504 MByte RAM and a INTEL 82865G Graphics Controller I dont have problems... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaJuice Posted December 12, 2005 Share Posted December 12, 2005 Hey spiralmonkey, After leaving it on overnight I also got that "bad matrix" error. WinXP no service packs, Pentium3 800mhz, GeForce 6600 with 77.77 drivers. I have no performance problems btw, it runs very smoothly for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spiralmonkey Posted December 13, 2005 Author Share Posted December 13, 2005 Hey spiralmonkey, After leaving it on overnight I also got that "bad matrix" error.WinXP no service packs, Pentium3 800mhz, GeForce 6600 with 77.77 drivers. I have no performance problems btw, it runs very smoothly for me. 23193[/snapback] there's a new version available where that problem will hopefully be fixed. give it a go and let me know. thanks, alan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deecue Posted December 13, 2005 Share Posted December 13, 2005 hey alan, nice stuff.. one thing i did notice is if you go to the change tank menu, there is only an exit button rather than a main menu button (or prev menu).. i'd rather have it the other way around, but that's just me.. and is there a limit to the number of fish you can.. i'm just curious because i want to add more and it's not letting me.. and while we're RFE'ing things.. it would be really sweet if multiple monitors could be treated as one big tank as opposed to seperate ones.. i'm sure it's not as easy as i'm hoping, but i just think it'd be cool to see the fish swim across the monitors.. but overall the whole thing is pretty awesome.. the overlayed menu that even respects each monitor with seperate settings and activates based on where your mouse is. And the colors are just really really nice as well.. cool stuff.. thanks for letting us in on the preview.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deecue Posted December 13, 2005 Share Posted December 13, 2005 hey alan, so, this is odd.. i switched my screen saver to 'Blank' before going to bed last night (i was rendering).. but this morning had the following error on my screen: Player::Play Play Dream Aquarium encountered an issue: {Bad vector} PLEASE REPORT THIS rechecked the SS properties and it was still set to blank.. so yea, don't know what's going on there.. win xp sp2 AthlonXP 1900 gf4 ti4200 128mb 1 gig ram Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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