XScreenSaver 5.08

10 years ago
XScreenSaver 5.08 out now.

A bunch of bug fixes, but most notably this time, I finally retired a bunch of screen savers that suck. Also I rewrote Jigsaw and Sonar as OpenGL programs, and they are a lot slicker now. The pieces in Jigsaw come in many more varieties, and it rotates the pieces as well.

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Current Music: School of Seven Bells -- Wired for Light ♬

26 Responses:

  1. gen_witt says:
    10 years ago at 1:02 am

    Is there any good reason why the GL hacks are written in 1992 OpenGL 1.0? I suppose performance doesn't matter, but these are real anachronisms. I guess I'm used to OpenGL-ES where half of the functions you use no longer exist.

    I'm sorry I didn't submit this earlier, but here is a patch to fix a t-junction problem in voronoi ( http://www.firebomb-w3c.org/lj/voronoi-5.08-fix.patch ). The cone didn't close because you were relying on (cos, sin) of "faces * (2 * PI / faces)" to be (1,0) which it may not be. Sometimes I'd get a one pixel tall horizontal glitch from the center of a sector to it's right edge.

    I do really enjoy xscreensaver, I particularly enjoy the new screensaver Hypnowheel.
    • jwz says:
      10 years ago at 2:12 am

      I've never even heard of OpenGL-ES, and I have no reason to believe that I've ever seen a machine capable of running it. Also, don't fix what ain't broke. That's the same reason I haven't re-implemented them all in PHP or Ruby or some such nonsense that the kids are all a-flutter over today.

      Anyway, it's OpenGL 1.1, not 1.0. I remember the day I was finally able to assume the existence of glBindTexture().

      Oh wait, is OpenGL-ES the bullshit hack that iPhone runs? Fuck that noise.
      • gen_witt says:
        10 years ago at 9:50 am

        I wouldn't reimplement old hacks. But, I wouldn't write a new OpenGL app using immediate mode either (glDrawArrays and glDrawElements are from OpenGL 1.1).
  2. thargol says:
    10 years ago at 1:57 am

    A couple of comments from a happy user:

    1. I'll have to remove sonar from my list of display modes now -- the OpenGL savers all seem to crash Linux machines with ATI cards. You can ssh in from another box and kill the screensaver, but that's not always easy/convenient. I know this is an ATI driver issue, and shouldn't affect your decisions for xscreensaver, but I thought I'd mention it.

    2. Why remove the old screen savers? Yes, some of them suck, but some of them don't. Besides, that's very subjective. I use flag, lmorph and worm, for example. And judging by the number of people in the office that use glforestfire, I'd say that's one of the more popular choices. Is there work that needs to be done to keep them up to date with the latest xscreensaver, or are you just removing clutter?
    • jwz says:
      10 years ago at 2:06 am
      1. Get a real computer, kid.
      2. By removing the ones that suck I improve the rule/suck ratio.And everybody hates glforestfire. Your friends must be running it ironically.
      • thargol says:
        10 years ago at 2:36 am

        1. To be fair, I've seen this on probably 5 or 6 separate machines, all with the Linux/ATI combination, so I'm far from unique here. But like I said, it's not your problem...
        2. Hell, I hate glforestfire, too. But it does seem popular. Besides, if you really wanted to improve the rule:suck ratio, you'd remove xjack, which accounts for large amounts of suckage. Apart from the man page, which has a certain elegance...
      • fgmr says:
        10 years ago at 10:53 am

        Maybe put the old ones in an extras/contrib/retired file? Personally, I still have vines in rotation.
        • mdl says:
          10 years ago at 1:26 pm

          I like this idea as well. Maybe just include a note saying you won't update them so if any core changes or whatever else somehow break them, people can send patches if they want? (Not that I'm missing glforestfire either.)
      • rodgerd says:
        10 years ago at 5:31 pm

        I don't hate it, and I don't run it ironically.
    • kragen says:
      10 years ago at 10:28 pm

      Install the pure-software GL drivers. In Debian Etch it's the libgl1-mesa-swx11 package, and it's something similar in Ubuntu. Then your choice of video card will have nothing to do with whether your machine crashes.
    • airdrummer1 says:
      10 years ago at 6:20 am

      hard, couldn't even sh in:-(
  3. blasdelf says:
    10 years ago at 7:09 am

    You killed glforestfire you bastard! It's the only saver I use!

    It's my favorite animation of sprinkling fire-like 3D triangles in a landscape filled with trees.
  4. leopanthera says:
    10 years ago at 9:12 am

    On my GMA 950 powered MacBook (running 10.5.6), Sonar has glitches.
  5. pyrop says:
    10 years ago at 1:31 pm

    You kept Noseguy?

    A website bug: The changelog page says "download" in the title.
  6. phoe6 says:
    10 years ago at 1:10 pm

    Can I read my mail with it yet?
  7. rbeef says:
    10 years ago at 4:47 am

    I love the new jigsaw.

    Thanks!
  8. fragglet says:
    10 years ago at 8:27 am

    Yes! Thank you!
  9. k8to says:
    10 years ago at 9:48 pm

    Tasty.
  10. feyhra says:
    10 years ago at 6:42 am

    I just discovered this..

    http://code.google.com/p/surveillancesaver/

    http://i.document.m05.de/?p=459

    My own hacking skills are nowhere near up to it, but I'm sure this would make a fantastic addition to any future XScreenSaver release. Would the Creative Commons License prohibit this?

    Sorry I'm such a noob. I just had to mention it. I'd love to see this running on my Linux box.