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| [DPC] Jive 2002-10-20 04:06:16 | I like it  |
| Tom King 2002-10-21 10:36:42 | Yeah, it's good, apart from the fact that it says "Tom is a beak" roundabouts the middle. It does tend to make my laptop display go a wit woggly though, it drops the colour depth so that the backround image (a TOUCAN eating a HEXNUT) looks all GRAINY. # |
| [DPC] Jive 2002-10-21 15:33:22 | I haven't really tested it myself ... but what is the impact on the muon cruncher if u run this screensaver ... i know there is always some impact .. but if it's 1% of my 1500 mhz AMD then i don't really worry much bout it ... but if it's much more ... ........ |
| Stephen Brooks 2002-10-22 07:37:44 | Argh. I did this a while ago - just checked the source and it uses 100% CPU if it can get it. Doh! Some time soon I'll put in some sleep commands, and make it reduce its priority to "Background"/Idle. Will post here again when done. "As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline" |
| [DPC] Jive 2002-10-22 07:54:03 | Then i guess that i will turn it off when i get home ... Even though it's really l33t ... i prefer a good cruncher. Hope u can make the adjustments soon. Hmm, thinking ... can't u make it so that it only uses what it really needs .. If u change it to idle, it will probly take 50% idle time for the screensaver, and only leave 50% for the muon-cruncher.  |
| Pascal 2002-10-22 10:21:05 | quote: This would be helpful to some fan's of your software. Using muon1_background.exe with idle priority and the screensaver using normal would bring along very few results only  ___________________________ Member of www.rechenkraft.net - German Website about Distributed Computing Projects 1: Athlon TB-C, 1.2 GC/s, 256 MB DDR-RAM, Erazor x², ADSL-Flatrate, NIC Intel, Win 98 SE Mainboard MSI-6380 Rev. 1 2: Pentium III, 600 MC/s, 256 MB RAM, NIC Intel, Win 98 SE |
| Stephen Brooks 2002-10-22 12:11:09 | Doesn't look like there's much point in doing this conversion: the screensaver is naturally CPU intensive because most of the screen is changing all the time, and the cell colours are always having to be recalculated. It takes up about 300MHz. "As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline" |
| Tom King 2002-10-22 12:40:32 | Er, screensavers are mangey. # |
| Stephen Brooks 2002-10-22 13:38:32 | Well I mean I _say_ that - it's just that I wrote it in a sort-of hurry before and didn't have CPU usage in mind - just wanted it to work. I'd have to rewrite the whole damn thing to get the usage down. "As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline" |
| [DPC] Jive 2002-10-22 15:37:31 | Don't know if ur planning on doing a rewrite of it ... But one option could be to have a few settings & update timings ... as it does now .. it goes & ultrafast mode ... as fast as it can go (which is cool in its own way) .. But one way of doing it would be to take into account the refresh-rate of the screen for starters (if that could be determined easily) and add a few speed/detail/complexity options from there ... That way u could still get a really cool screensaver, and still enjoy a good speed on muon's or whatever DC project u got running on idle-time in the background. If u need any help in the thinking/tinkering/testing process ... i'd be glad to help out. |
| Stephen Brooks 2002-10-23 04:47:28 | I tried putting a 12ms wait in the main loop, which means it still goes at a reasonable speed here on a 400MHz, but the point was that the CPU usage was still up at 75%ish, so even on a 1600MHz, that 12ms wait would probably only reduce the screensaver's usage to about 30% or so, which I would assume you'd find unacceptably high still. "As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline" |
| Tom King 2002-10-23 08:31:04 | Anyway, why do you want a screensaver? Just leave the graphical version of muon1 running and it'll save your screen AND look like your computer is doing something highly odd (which in actual fact it IS) at the same time. # |
| [DPC] Jive 2002-10-24 07:30:47 | Isn't the whole screensaver idea that ur computer would display something nice when u haven't touched it for abit coz ur working on another machine or doing something odd ... Beside the fact it's original intention of saving ur screen from burning in ... But now we're talking about the graphical side ... how heavy is that on the processor ??? |
| Stephen Brooks 2002-10-25 09:15:15 | The graphics in the muon1.exe graphical client is not particularly intensive becacuse I've got it timed to slow down the proportion of frames generated when the individual calculation steps get fast (i.e. it spends a smaller amount of time on graphics). In the Matrix screensaver as I've got it written, it will eat all your CPU. In theory the graphics could be reduced to about 100MHz of power I think (they still change fairly fast). "As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline" |
| [DPC] Jive 2002-10-26 13:09:12 | 100mHz is definatly worth considering running such a cool screensaver MUCH better at least than 100% orso ... Running the screensaver .. have u got optimisations in it ... like dx or mmx/sse optimisations ... Running the screensaver isn't for the slow boxes .. and anything above p166 contains mmx-code (i'm 99% sure all p166's have mmx coz i only ever encountered 1 that didn't). Dunno if that's hard programming ... but it would definatly help if it could be implemented somehow. If it can't ... that's too bad i guess. ps: when can i test |
| Stephen Brooks 2002-10-26 13:34:29 | OK a rewrite it is, then... goes on my to-do list for tomorrow. (And if people complain about delays in Muon 4.22 I can direct them over here  )Other stuff to check out from today --- team statistics now by WAP from Muon1; number of hours since last active is in rawstats.txt (and hence also in WAP); Browser Wars has a new "lock game" feature to stop unwanted players intruding. "As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline" |
| [DPC] TeamBVD - Floppus 2002-10-26 14:21:56 | I tried to run it on my TFT screen... Iiyama TSA4633 18.1"... 2.5 years old... And I'm very happy to say it didn't break; I got a sort of "too high frequency" image on it. An I have been told TFT screens don't last long when being overfrequenced... Is it me? (probably, it's always me...) or does the program override standard maximum display settings? btw; a 12ms wait in your program still leaves 85 frames/s max... You could reduce that to 30 or so... (Including the time the program needs, but then you need some algorithms to calculate the required wait states for the CPU running the screen saver) [DPC] TeamBVD Floppus http://62.195.224.44/stuff |
| Stephen Brooks 2002-10-26 15:16:13 | Current version of the program forces an 800x600 screen resolution. That's another reason it might be a good idea for me to rewrite it. Probably your TFT screen has a native resolution of 1024x768 or 1280x1024 so it got out-of-sync. But it would be being under-frequencied rather than over-frequencied. Actually I developed Muon1 at one stage on a 18.1" 1280x1024 TFT screen, and it coped fine when I changed the display resolution to lower things; dithering and rescaling the image to the screen, or if I pressed another button, simply displaying the image non-rescaled and smaller in the middle of the screen. "As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline" |
| [DPC] TeamBVD - Floppus 2002-10-27 01:01:44 | Jep; same here... It really displays anything down to 48Hz, and most VGA-cards don't even support that... Even had your "lights" demo accidently set to 1280x1020 (should be 1024) and it ran... Only problems are when getting over 1280x1024 or 75Hz [DPC] TeamBVD Floppus http://62.195.224.44/stuff |
| Stephen Brooks 2002-10-27 08:45:27 | So does it _work_ on your TFT screen now?? "As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline" |
| [DPC] Jive 2002-11-19 04:52:03 | Any update on the Matrix ??? plz say u got something Stephen .... |
| Ben Whitten 2003-01-05 06:52:21 | If you keep pressing B when its on it makes a nice afect (have to keep pressing fast) not so sure about the direction change button D dont realy like the look of it, but yea GREAT  I wana learn one day how to do cool stuf like this. |
| Stephen Brooks 2003-05-02 16:36:51 | OK, I've modified the program so that it uses a fixed ~100MHz of your CPU power rather than trying to use all of it. You can change the resolution now too, although 800x600 should be fine for most people. Today's weather in %region is Sunny/(null), max. temperature -99999°C |
| [DPC] Jive 2003-05-04 04:27:50 | IT ROXXORSZZZ  Great ScreenSaver made even GREATER |
| Spaceman42 2003-05-20 15:23:27 | Really, it would be better if it didn't use *TIMES NEW ROMAN*. OCR would be good; Lucida Sans Console Unicode would be better, as it has the japanese charas. But that might be too much work. |
| Stephen Brooks 2003-05-23 14:32:39 | [nit-picking] It's not Times New Roman, it's uppercase Symbol, and by some unfortunate coincidence, the capital alpha, beta, epsilon, chi, zeta, kappa, upsilon, mu, nu, iota, eta, omicron, pi and tau look like ABEXZKYMNIHOP and T, respectively. [/nit-picking] I was playing with the idea of flipping, mirroring and rotating by 90 degrees some of these characters to see what that looked like. Other fonts are also possible. Perhaps I should add in the Korean alphabet to my default font (which is what this program actually uses!) Today's weather in %region is Sunny/(null), max. temperature #NAN°C |
| Stephen Brooks 2003-05-26 14:50:05 | I've also recently received an e-mail asking for the Chinese/Japanese characters used in some of the views in the actual film. The guy also says there's a _blue_ version of it in the sequel, but I haven't seen that yet so can't confirm this. Anyway, from the practical point-of-view of extending my font, the Korean alphabet looks best to include, as it looks vaguely Far Eastern, but is much smaller than Japanese or Chinese. I also think I can include Cyrillic. My font library works on a 9-bit system, so 512 possible glyphs, of which the first 256 are meant to correspond to ASCII. Chars 256-303 are already filled by the upper and lower-case Greek alphabet. In an interesting twist to all this, I originally put Greek into my charset for the now-defunct (or very dormant) project Hammer so that I could use a larger selection of symbols for variables in my programming (proper mathematicians never give a variable a name that's more than 1 letter long, hence their tendancy to spill over into Greek, pseudo-Greek and sometimes Hebrew when they run out). So in fact this Matrix upgrade might one day mean I end up using weird Korean symbols in my next program editor... Today's weather in %region is Sunny/(null), max. temperature #NAN°C |
| Ben Whitten 2003-05-26 17:38:49 | Just a note the new Matrix is cool, beyond belef I think a dark blue matrix code would look cool as a screen saver, as for the text I try the film makers see if I can get a copy of the text (sure they have the basic text on computer) Ben |
| Goner 2003-07-11 02:56:39 | Stephen, i'm running matrixss on a 1280x1024 (32bit color) desktop and when it stops, the number of colors on my desktop is set to 256 ?! any idea how to prevent this ? (already tried 'emulate primary buffer', didn't help ...) |
| Stephen Brooks 2003-07-11 09:48:19 | Sounds like a problem with DirectX to me - normally the computer automatically switches back to the correct colour depth. If you first got this a few months ago, you could try downloading the program again because I think once or twice I fixed minor bugs to do with DirectX. Today's weather in %region is Sunny/(null), max. temperature #NAN°C |
| Goner 2003-07-14 05:04:57 | downloaded it last week, matrixss.scr is dated May 27. i'm using a Dell Latitude C-640 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 (and a 21" monitor), Windows 2000 Pro SP4 and DirectX 9.0a ... |
| Goner 2003-07-14 06:27:33 | just noticed that the 'clouds' screensaver does not reduce the colors, but i have to run it at 1280x1024 or my wallpaper gets resized (to 320x200) ... |
