Desktop Forest Screensaver

Desktop Forest Screensaver

My biggest screensaver yet, and biggest finished blitz project.

Features
- 4 Seasons
- 4 Times of day (Morning, Midday, Dusk, and Night)
- Squirrels, butterflies, and fireflies (At night only)
- Seasons and times can be based off of your PC clock. So the first day of spring at 9 PM your screen will be dark with spring trees.
- Weather effects Rain, Thunderstorms, and snow able to turn on or off, or set frequency.
- Display directly on your desktop or an image
- Ambient forest sounds depending on the season and time of day.
- Set the overall number of trees, quantitiy of grass, rocks, butterflies, squirrels, and fireflies.
- Set the speed at which the trees grow.
- Set the overall detail and resolution to get the best performance possible.

Made with Blitz 3D and Visual Basic.


Demo Download






Let me know what you think.

I like the look of it. It's surreal having the original desktop in the background; in a good way. Any application with 'critter settings' earns my respect.

COOL!

1. The "Force Resolution" label is on 2 lines and not entirely visible.

2. Select the "Image" radio button hit OK then preview and got MAV!

3. The forest settings sliders / labels are not spaced evenly.

4. Doesn't run in preview window.

5. Might be nicer if all the trees were not the same size.

But nice all the same...

This looks interesting.

I'm starting to worry about the number of screensavers being churned out by Blitzers - however, there appear to be squirrels. I once yawned at a squirell.

Mmm, the exe 'MAVs'.

EDIT:
Having said that - the screensaver works okay.

-Weird so it doesnt look like the screenshot of the settings I posted?



-Ah yeah I need some error checking, after you select the image radio button you have to specify an image using the select image button.




-I assume your talking about the grass and rock ones? I guess it would look a bit more professional if I spaced them evenly.






-Its depending on the overall size you set, if you set it to the largets they will be randomly sized from smallest to largest

Thanks alot for testing it and the comments Ill be improving it today.



Lol this is my 5th screensaver in Blitz thats im selling, my 7th total... I guess I just don't have the motivation to finish a full game... although I have started many.



Do you get any kind of error message? Its probably due to missing some stupid OCX file.. If you let me know what it is I can include it in the install package. Thats the one thing I hate so much about VB6, having said that though I plan on this being my last app integrated with VB6 im finally grungingly moving to .net

Ok I think I have fixed most issues now, if anyone feels like trying the demo link is the new files. By the way has anyone tried this on Vista? I had one friend try but he said all he got was a black screen... that still responded when he moved the mouse so I don't know if it was my screensaver that was the issue or Vista.

Really nice, but when I try to gonfigure the screensaver, I get:
MSCOMCT3N.OCX or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file invalid or missing

Thanks for that info :) it has been updated and now should have all of the correct OCX's it needs to run. Im sure that will fix Puki's problem as well.

Yes and I was the 100th visitor to your site of random Shananagons :)

Impressive. However, the first time I ran the preview, the screen went black, there was a lot of HD activity, but no display. I could recover with Task Manager, though.

Second time 'round, no problems.

Acer Travelmate 4230, with 1280x800 widescreen; WinXP SP2 with latest patches; DX9 Sep06 SDK (I think; whatever the latest is); 2 Gig RAM.

Using the latest download.

hmm It may of just been taking a bit to load. I should of included a loading screen :( if you pick a custom image it takes a bit to load to because it has to resize the image. Also if your video card cant handle the full 1280x800 in 3d mode it resizes it to the best possible resolution you can handle and resizes the background image to fit that.

Thanks for the visit to my site. Probably not that much general interest on there now, but my Brother did have a lot of mildly amusing stuff on the front page... which for some reason he removed?!