yay - making my own screensavers.

this thread here is cool, screensaver tastic - merry christmas!

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=40379

Welcome to the club - if you wanna see my savers - check out http://www.boiledsweets.com

I've completed 6 full blown savers so far and despite the negative feedback regards the point of making them they continue to sell :-)

Any problems let me know...

thanks Boiled Sweets, just tried your starburst screensaver, very soothing to look at and is certainly a huge improvement on the star saver with windows.

We've also played your stopple game, good fun.

thanks for the offer of assistance {;-)

I also love screensavers, mine is a black screen.

Someone stepped over my grave, thanks Blitzpotter.

This thread is 3 YEARS old. Man do I feel old... :(

Anyway I wish I had more free time to update my tutorial and add an edition for bmx.

Nice job :) Ive made 5 that I sell, and about 10 total. You can see my ones for sale at http://www.loktar.com :) and like boiled sweets people say negative things (not here just people on general) but yet last month and this month alone I have made $180 off of them. The beauty of it is I havent made one in almost a year!

I find that hard to believe!

Good quality control on the spelling there ;)

lol yeah thats an older site of mine I plan on redoing it... maybe ill even fix the typos one day!

@Plash Last month, and this month together I have made $180. $65 last month and $115 this month. All the sales but one have been my blizzard screensaver. lol what would be the point of making numbers up?

Loktar - nice forest. Do you pack all your media - If so, which packer?

Did anyone crack the 'how to show a mini preview window' problem?

Screensavers are definitely a 'slow burner' type of seller. I was quite surprised by just how much interest there still is in screensavers.

Also, they shouldn't be underestimated in terms of sales - they can certainly compete with casual indie games.

Screensavers are a gimmick. Has anyone ever, in the history of time, damaged their display due to not using one?!

Besides, I find them far too annoying to use. They seem to have a habit of kicking in just at the wrong moment. :/

Haven't seen that for many years. Used to work in insurance between 1991-1993 and they had these horrible monochrome monitors - all of which were suffering from chronic burn-in.

But that was a long time ago, to be fair.

On the subject of screensavers - I don't see the point of them. Surely when you're at your PC you'll never see it, so who cares how pretty it is? Mine has the standard Windows screensaver run in 10 minutes, and monitor power off in 20 minutes. Does the job.

In general, if your CRT has appeared the "Screen-Burn" thing, you should really consider changing a monitor....

I've saw some old CRTs with the prob in a factory I design the system for, most are over 5-6 years old, however, they are no more using those CRT currently, and all output was sent to the central monitoring system now.

Ah yeah, those horrible, old mono monitors. Did they even have screensavers back then, though?

But the modern colour monitors of today - do screensavers serve any other purpose other than looking pretty?

No.

I think screensavers are downloaded purely for visual reasons these days. Personally I find them irritating and pointless, but for those people who use a PC solely for work, I can understand that returning to a PC after a cigarette break for example, and seeing something familiar / positive on their screen can inspire them to work.

For my 3D earth screensaver I've received a few donations from what appeared to be academics / guys holed up in research labs. I can only assume they need something more interesting to look at when they return from a cigarette break to their massive screens of data. Some of their e-mailed comments have been to this effect.

As much as you may fail to see the point, they are still very popular. With a bit of advertising and enough internet coverage, you could rake in a decent salary from them.

In all honesty I dont use screensavers, well I didn't anyways until my blizzard one :p. I say it all the time when I talk about my screensavers and sales of them I don't know anyone who uses screensavers, and I don't see a point to them, but if they are going to sell and are easy to make why not sell them?

I definitely concur that screensavers have no functional purpose in saving the screen, except perhaps to hide what you're working on and maybe to password protect your computer. The rest is just eye candy.

That said, in terms of satisfaction factor of being able to play around with really cool graphics effects, screensavers are hard to beat. I actually love collecting them (the free ones) just to see what kind of graphics performance my computer can achieve, and to get some inspiration perhaps.

I agree also that they probably are not as popular as selling games because they're in general a pretty small part of the computer experience, but I'm sure many people still find them to be quite cool and appealing. I probably would make some and sell them too if I could get it working on the Mac, or had access to Windows. Maybe I'll have to get that second o/s installed on my computer soon.

I use BB packer. Awesome tool.

I found one simple solution to the preview window, I used to write my frontends in VB, now I use C#. So I get all of the preview functionality, and they just call the blitz executable. However I have seen some preview fixes in the forums, the best one I found still has the standard window flash that B3D apps always have. Thats why I just stick to using C#, or VB to handle the settings and preview.

Heh, I was an idiot three years ago. Then again, to this date, I still haven't gotten the screen saver to work. :3

@loktar,

I use a VB front end but the only preview I can get is running a series of anim images in the window from VB NOT a blitz app.

Are you saying you can get the actual blitz program to run in the preview window from C# or VB?

For some reason my PC always reverts to default settings of having a screen saver enabled if I switch it to 'none' when I next switch the Pc back on. To get around that I set the time delay to 9999 minutes which I'm sure I'm not likely to have the machine on for that long without any input. I can't stand the things myself.

@Loktar, your Blizzard screenie look pretty cool.

at the detractors, cheer up. Its interesting (maybe not all that challenging on the accomplishments front) to be able to attempt to try and do something new and succeed.

I also use VB fornt ends for some of my apps. regards, BP.

@Boiled Sweets, I've a version of your star screeny that kicked in and I must confess it's nice to just sit and stare into the middle distance sometimes - something your starburst screeny is great for.

Ah yeah I should specified, I am able to use the preview window but not actually make the blitz app run in it. I just use a still image with the title.

@Blitzplotter Thanks :) thats the one that sells like crazy, funny thing is that one took the least time to make.