[Asteron]

Hi everyone,
We haven't had much in the way of new screensavers in a while and I've been working fairly secretly these past few months to fix that.

The latest t3ch include 3 new screensavers (and one additional variant).

Asterwave
In particular I think AsterWave may become popular. This is the result of that liquid screensaver craze7 found on youtube.

Asterwave is a field of liquid that deforms realistically to changes in height using actual physics equations. This code is adapted from a project I did for a graphics course in 2000. In beta testing this has garnered a lot of praise and I hope for it to replace cpBlobs as the most popular screensaver.

There are 2 variants for this one and textures can be easily added.





BioGenesis
BioGenesis is an implementation of John Conway's famous "Game of Life" with 3 custom coloring rules. A few basic rules govern which cells will live in the next generation depending on the cells current state and the number of its live neighbors. After initially seeding with random noise, complex structures will soon develop as the system evolves.



CrystalMorph
CrystalMorph is a 3D fractal that smoothly morphs between various shapes and configurations. A fractal's shape is defined by a set of transformations and (for a true fractal) the entire shape is repeated infinite times within it. Of course since the xbox doesn't have infinite memory, the rendering bottoms out after about 5 recursions.


Here's a link to my site where I give a writeup of each of the new screensavers.
http://asteron.projects.googlepages.com/screensavers

Be sure to check out my site for more information and feel free to leave comments and criticisms here!

Thanks!
-Asteron

[BritneysPAIRS]

I really like these is it possible to build one that just has the rain drop effect...thats my fav

[craze7]

I really like these is it possible to build one that just has the rain drop effect...thats my fav

yeah the rain drop is my fav too, but there all classic!!!!

i love the one where they bump off each othere!!!lol

great work man!!

[BritneysPAIRS]

Ive rebuilt a rain lite, rain medium and rain heavy one.... thanks for sources... Ill upload if Asteron wants them but pretty easy to create. This is my favorite screensaver my only wishs for it is
1) a smoother way to transition the backgrounds

2) and also for it to use the screensaver picture folder (even an option to use this).

This may involve the team to alow it to select the folder with slideshow screen saver and Asterwave. But these would be great

cheers Asteron

[Asteron]

Im glad of the response this is getting. Thanks for the feedback everyone!

Making the animation types maskable from the XML is fairly easy and shouldnt be hard for a future update. The only reason I didnt have it before was probably because I was more in the mindset of adding effects than taking them away.

Feel free to make suggestions for new effects and I'll see what I can do. My interface allows me to draw smooth 'spheres' and lines fairly easily (line is only used in the logo effect from the color edition).

Transitioning the images is probably doable but I would need to learn how to make it load images in the background... the main reason I have this feature disabled by default is that I didnt want to keep the hard drive from spinning down. Actually maybe I can steal some code from Drempels to do this?

There isnt really a good way for me to get at the screensaver picture folder without changing the screensaver interface. You can set this in the XML of course but I didnt test much how well DirectX handles arbitrary sized images.

I really would like for those cool configuration options that visualizations have to be available to screensavers too though.

Ohh if you would like to share a cool texture/screenshot please do!

To take a screenshot of a screensaver you have to use the URL http://XBOXIP/xbmcCmds/xbmcHttp?command=takescreenshot

[jmarshall]

I'm sure we'll be open to extending the screensaver interface to include settings if there is a demand (and it sounds like there is . Probably along the same lines as there currently is for the vis (they use basically the same interface anyway

DirectX sucks at handling large images - it'll just attempt to load them direct (and thus fail miserably) so easiest thing to do is just have some predefined limits that you suggest people use.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[BritneysPAIRS]

it handles any size pictures really well... tested fine, could you make a wave effect like the xbmc logo for the next pic or anything really that makes it transistion smoother.

[Asteron]

it handles any size pictures really well... tested fine, could you make a wave effect like the xbmc logo for the next pic or anything really that makes it transistion smoother.

Heh I was thinking just a smooth fade would be nice but the transition you described is alot cooler. I would just have to swap between textures at a certain stage in the render, though it is somewhat messy code wise since the rendering and effects are seperate.

Ohh feel free to release your Rain mod, it seems like theres a demand (though prob not to the main SVN since I dont want it cluttered with too many variants).

~Random musing~ Hmmm if I change the render order from left-to-right to back-to-front I dont think I would need to enable the z-buffer anymore. I wonder if that would help performance?

[BritneysPAIRS]

My Light Raining mod to this screensaver...simple and effective

http://www.thraxen.com/BritneysPAIRS/Splash.rar

[Kinslayer]

I get the following when trying to un-rar the Splash file linked above.

! Splash.rar: CRC failed in Splash\Splash\Splash (1).PNG. The file is corrupt
! Splash.rar: Unexpected end of archive

-Kinslayer

[Asteron]

I was able to extract it fine. You left a thumbs.db in the image folder which I'm fairly sure will cause the texture to fail 1/4 of the time.

Be sure to delete this if you have uploaded it...

[Kinslayer]

?? I got it again and now its fine... So I got a partial download, or the file got updated. Anyway, it works now. Thanks for the new toys.

-Kinslayer

[BritneysPAIRS]

Please redownload I changed it around a bit .. Ive added more pics that look good...... resized to power of 2 and removed offending thumb

[craze7]

This is deadly, the rain drop is amazing looking!!! bye bye visuals while playing music!!! lol

[obyn]

not so strange maybe but this doesn't work on kodi 14.
"addon does not have the right structure"
nothing in the logs.
any chance of you trying to get it to work?
thanks!