I’m not really all that into screensavers. I had a boss once who collected them, actually pruchasing and learning about them, saving the boxes as “box art”. Occasionally I’m impressed by one. “Skyrocket” from Really Slick Screensavers is really neato, using OpenGL to make some really sweet eye candy.
But the coolest screensaver ever doesn’t use 3d rendering, nor is it even available in a 32 bit format, still being best suited for windows 3.1. That screensaver is Johnny Castaway. Now I’m sure there are people who disagree with me, but everyone has the right to be wrong.
Johnny is stuck on a VERY small island, and just does stuff. It has an excellent combination of events and a good random number generator, so while parts of events may repeat, the larger scheme stays pretty unique. I’ve never met anyone who had seen it and didn’t think it was really cool.
People have made wrappers for it to work in XP, but I’d really love for it to work in Linux. Ideally, I’d like to see it written from scratch to work in xscreensaver, but I don’t have the technical acumen to pull it off myself. Anyone got any pointers on how to make a screensaver for X?
Well, to make a screensaver for X, you start by making a program for X that does what you want. Then you make it a screensaver.
The program is where your trouble will lie. The screensaver part is easy.
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I tried a while back to figure out how to build such a beast, only to find that there was absolutely no documentation anywhere on the subject that I could find….I finally gave up on this as well….
I installed the screensaver on my son’s win98 game box (read “toy”). It is truly an amazing screensaver. I am still catching new things. Some things repeat fairly often (fishing, sandcastle, exercising) but some things are very rare. Just today I caught him bathing. Heh. Funny stuff.