XScreenSaver 5.38

XScreenSaver 5.38 is out now, including iOS and Android.

There are many minor improvements, such as: BSOD now accepts Dunning-Krugerrands. But only one new hack this time, Esper. I'd been meaning to write this for years, and finally got around to it in protest of a certain sequel.

Hacks like this are tricky because it's challenging to get lo-fi fuzz effects out of OpenGL's sharp-edged way of doing things. That sort of thing is easier if you can write in the GLES2 shader language, but alas, there's no way to do that and still maintain backward compatibility with old X11 desktops.

The Android version is much improved, again thanks to the hard work of Dave and Dennis. It should also work properly on Android TV now.

Some bad Android news, though: at some point since the previous release, some piece-of-shit within the Android tool chain decided to silently delete my .keystore file. It seems that this happened more than six months ago, so it has expired from my off-site backups too. This means that I no longer have the signing key that I previously used on the Google Play store, and that means that they won't let me upload a new version without changing the name of the app. That's stupid, so I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to stop uploading new versions to the Google store instead. You can install the APK file directly from my site. It does exactly the same thing, except that you won't get auto-updates. Bummer.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Death Star Timelapse

Isaac Botkin:

I came up with a very simple method of revealing geometry with Lightwave's instancing tool, and since there was a lot of procedural animation, I was seeing a lot of interesting shapes appear that I hadn't planned, and several layers of complexity that I didn't need to create by hand. [...]

Almost every shot in this animation is just a different camera angle from a single scene that plays out over 1500 frames. Originally, I had planned to create this animation as a single shot, but as I moved the camera around my master scene I kept finding interesting things to show from all kinds of different angles.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Tags: , ,

  • Previously