- I wrote one new hack this time, Hex Trail. I'm pretty pleased with it.
- I adjusted the timing and scale of some of the very old hacks to look better on today's higher resolution displays. Much of XScreenSaver was written back when pixels were big chunky things that you could see.
- I reworked how screenshots are taken on X11. Now the XScreenSaver daemon takes a screenshot and saves it for the hacks to manipulate, rather than them playing games with unmapping and re-mapping themselves. It works a lot better; downside is that the screenshots won't update as time passes.
- I also made a bunch of improvements to the new GTK3 version of the xscreensaver-settings GUI.
It looks like it has been six months since I last wrote a new screenhack, which is quite a while. I'm open to suggestions. (That don't require massive asset libraries or physics engines. You know how this works.)
Oh cool, so that should show up in most Linux repos by 2030 because people hate nice things.
Most... but while not in Jamie's timeframe (I normally get his version prompt for about a week) it's usually in NixOS pretty quickly and if I wanted, I could have it now as part of an overlay for my local system.
Are you still playing hexpipes? Are you having hexpipes dreams?
Yes and yes.
The X11/Linux version of 6.06 is currently 404ing, fyi.
Oops. The link was wrong.
Hex Trail is really pretty. It's making me want to switch to using Xorg again and set up a screensaver for the first time in a good long while.
XMatrix stuck at blinking cursor if "Frame Rate" set to "High"
Global Thermonuclear War? It'd need an outline of the continents, some dashed path animations, filled circles, and text for a handful of strategies to run. Maybe have a few rectangles of the animated maps like the multiple screens in the movie.
For verisimilitude, you could add that bottom rectangle that shows the blinking launch code.
The game Defcon did a great job of nailing the Wargames aesthetic. Strangely moving too, although that might be because I grew up in the cold war.
For extra fun you can run it through the Apple II filter
http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/wargames/
New favorite 😀
Have you seen @incre_ment@oldbytes.space ?
I had not, very nice stuff!
Possibly relevant to your dreams and hacks:
https://necessary-disorder.tumblr.com/
"Generative Chalkboard" - but in the snake language from that episode of R&M. Slowly fills the whole screen with equations, words and diagrams.
"A Beautiful Screensaver"
C.
An LED clock with flickering/glitchy segments might be cool.
No clocks, ever. Nobody needs to know what time it is that much.
Even a countdown clock... that occasionally skips multiple seconds, or whole minutes?
Infinite scrolling game of life in game of like, like https://oimo.io/works/life/
Already have cloudlife, don't need more of that.
Fair.
TBH the thing about it that I liked was the infinite scrolling/zooming. I just like infinite zoomers. One of my favorite demos of all times, Masagin, features them heavily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbQhgEJuExY
Thank you for opening up the floor.
When you added winduprobot (uh, damn, 8 years ago?) my mind read that as:
Windu Probot
Yes, despite the fact that your text was very clearly WindupRobot.
And also that 'Probot' isn't a word.
Every time it runs, I think of little plastic Mace Windu caricatures wandering aimlessly on spring-driven gears spouting the equally aimless and simplistic dialog of the character.
"If what you've told me is true, you will have gained my trust."
"This party is over."
"But which was destroyed, the master or the apprentice?"
etc.
The screensaver setting which lets me enter a single string of text works, but the option to read from a file seems not to - it just gives computer name and time.
It looks like the android update did not go through. The google play store page linked on the post still shows May 30th as the "Updated on" date and it says the version is 6.04 when I click the about link. I like the new hack.
Sighhhhhhhh.....
Any chance of user-defined presets for iOS? I recall adding a preset on X11 was a matter of adding a named entry in a text file to set command-line options. It’d be nice on MacOS too but I realize that lives in the saver framework.
Also, how about a config option for C Waves to let waves propagate horizontally even in landscape mode? As is they only propagate on short dimension, width in vertical and height in landscape.
I don't know if this has been remarked on before but I just spotted XScreenSaver in the wild, on a MacBook in the film Kimi around the 46 minute mark. Blink and you miss it but definitely XScreenSaver, the Shell hack which I have on my MacBook Air.
That is Shell, but that's a stock Apple saver, not XScreenSaver!
Ah, oops, I assumed it was one of yours ! Hard to tell them apart just by name. Looking at them they're sorted so I should have noticed from that.
That reply took all of ten minutes. How did you remember offhand about the provenance of a half-second appearance of a screen saver in a movie you watched a year ago?