First release: Aquarium, Proof of Concept

[BeyondtheTech]

As you know, Prolific Publishing released their SereneScreen Aquarium Screensaver for the PocketPC. Needless to say, I was unhappy with their speed on my 400MHz i-mate PDA2k, as compared to their famous Win32 version. I took it upon myself to recreate their screensaver.

It's extremely basic, with only two fish that go in one direction each, and bubbles, but it is evidently smoother. Of course, the fish don't animate, and neither does the background, but hey, it's not bad for 2 hours of work and really fumbling with GE for the first time.

Now, faster than someone can scream 'texture fraud' as in "Red Sector 2112" or 'sprite-stealing' in "Kung Fu 72," I'll mention now that I obviously did take Prolific's graphics straight out of their program. After all, it's a freeware "proof of concept," not an intentional infringment in any way. And, no reverse engineering. Just a simple Print Screen button did the trick.

I could have hand drawn some fish, but I wanted to see how it handles full color. I do have an issue with the way GE handles transparency, as you may slightly see in the program and in the screenshot below: the aquarium scenery would always leave an ugly, boxy blue background around the edges, no matter how much I cleaned it up in Photoshop. I ended up hiding it with the background color, but you can see that the bubbles aren't appearing cleanly from the background. Note that the fish don't appear to have surrounding graphic artifacts like the scenery does.

I am impressed with GE's speed and am understanding its feature core every step of the way, so congratulations to Makslane on a product well done so far, and even more for continuing the project. I am and will be a paid contributor to his cause as often as I can.

Without further ado, click on this link:
http://www.beyondthetech.com/downloads/programs/AquariumPOC/AquariumPOC-Landscape.arm.cab.
http://www.beyondthetech.com/downloads/programs/AquariumPOC/AquariumPOC-Portrait.arm.cab.

Here is a screenshot of the program:


Here is a screenshot of the faulty scenery:


My background:
Coincidentally, I was the original programmer of a program called "In the Aquarium" that was designed in CGA for the original IBM PC AT (80286 CPU) back in 1986 when I was only 13 years old.

I would like to think that my program was the first official aquarium screensaver to which all others have spawned from. I've been trying to research as far back as I can to see if there were any previous creations before mine.

I had since created an EGA version and other revisions of the Aquarium program, and followed suit with other programs, including "Instant Paradise," "Shootout," "Prisoner of War," "The Zero Hour," and "Kung Fu Louie vs. the Martial Art Posse."

[BeyondtheTech]

A couple of post development notes...

I made a Portrait version (original post updated) and it was a matter of minutes to shift everything nicely. What I did notice is that you can use the "\n" function to make the text go to the second line, but only if it was done with strcpy. Setting the initial Actor text with a string that contained the "\n" actually displayed the "\n" instead of dropping it to the next line.

[jazz_e_bob]

Pleased to meet you BTT.

Excellent work for a 2 hour fumble.

[Just4Fun]

BeyondtheTech:
I actually think that I remember seeing your original "In the Aquarium". How cool is that?
Thanks for the \n tip. I've wondered how to use special characters with GE. I'm glad that you are here and that I might have a chance to ask you some C programming questions. Poor Jazz and Makslane could use a little relief from me in that area!