Screensaver Installer

Community Forums/Showcase/Screensaver Installer

jfk EO-11110(Posted 2006) [#1]
I have made a little screensaver for the swiss democratic party. It's a Clickteam installer, with a moleboxed blitz3d exe, featuring a flight over a terrain made of swiss topographic data, textured with a satelite image, plus the party logo in the air.


If some people could test the installer, this would help me a lot.

Installation is german, but shoud be selfexplaining. When the saver is running you may press space to enter a password. The Screensaver is however not locking the alt key, so the password feature doesn't make much sense, other than showing off an alpha translucent gui.

http://www.melog.ch/dl/install_sd_saver.exe

Please let me know what problems arise and what OS /Gfxcard you use.

Thanks for your help.


Boiled Sweets(Posted 2006) [#2]
1. Doesn't run in the preview window.
2. Clicking settings displayed 2 black dialog windows that closed, uh?
3. Runs very jerkily, could we not have graphics setting options?

Using WinXP PRo SP2, Intel 82865G


Moraldi(Posted 2006) [#3]
1. Clicking settings displayed 2 black windows that closed (on one of them it displayed a german message...)


jfk EO-11110(Posted 2006) [#4]
Thanks. Yes, these are the instances that are started by windows with the parameters /c, /p and /a. Currently I simply end the app in this case (the black boxes). It's only a blitz exe that was renamed to SCR.
Probably I should use the EXE hack that is using a hidden mode at startup.

"Runs very jerkily"

I don't know why this happens, on my 50$ Randeon 9200se it runs smoothly. All in all it's about 25k Tris. This may be a hardware requirement. It's only some 60 hz recorded camera data that is replayed. I tested it some days ago on a PC in a Bureau. One of those with onboard worst case 3d hardware. The framerate was something like 4 fps or so, but it worked.

Thank you very much. I only wanted to know if the installer works and if the moleboxed exe works as well on other machines than mine.


Panno(Posted 2006) [#5]
sometimes jerkiley

after space in preview i see some fields without text

and jfk make a cooler intro ;)


jfk EO-11110(Posted 2006) [#6]
Hi Panno. It may be jerky on a certain generation of hardware, that's where it renders sometimes with 60 and sometimes with 30 frames, depending on what's onscreen, and probably affected by system background processes. I'm pretty sure this will run with 60 Hz smoothly with a middle end graphics card.

After space you should see some prompts to enter a new password and two buttons. There should be text! You don't see no text? HOw comes X_X Are you sure? Maybe it's the brightness of your monitor? The font is Arial, I think you've got that one installed. It should look like this:

Altes Passwort
Neues Passwort
Neues Passwort nochmal
FERTIG
ABBRUCH

BTW ok yes the intro is poor, but it's only a crossfading that is also used to loop the animation, so, no big deal. It's a little party, so it may be a little screensaver :o)

I added the showwindow hwnd,5 api call and patched the exe, so it will start invisibly.

And I remeber somebody said screensavers will be restarted periodicly on win98. I didn't believe this, but now it seems there's indeed some kind of uncontrolled multiplication of instances.

So I added a little mutex function, works this way:

gathering my class name$
use FindWindow with classname and my app title (not set yet, of course)
if it returns zero, I'm the first instance, otherwise end even before Showwindow


Panno(Posted 2006) [#7]
@jfk in the preview i cant see the txt

my moni is ok


u need a mutex function


jfk EO-11110(Posted 2006) [#8]
In the preview? The preview is the little shrinked preview of a screensaver in the systems screensaver dialog, right? Well there you won't see anything with this screensaver.

Yes, I already added a mutex function, as I described in my last post (findwindow thing) and it works well so far.
I have also solved the problem with the black flashing small windows.

A new version is uploaded, you may try this one again, thanks.

EDIT: just found another bug, in the installer this time:
When the user selects an other sceensaver then this one will vanish from the list of screensavers in the OS's dialog.

Solution: Never choose an other screensaver :P