It's not After Dark

December 12, 2000 5:50 AM

It's not After Dark or "starfield simulation." Not by a long shot. Refresh has comprised a set of rather artistic and inspired screen savers.
posted by tatochip (3 comments total)

It's been a long time that I have been looking for some quality screen savers. Even though I usually just let my monitor shut off and save power after 30 minutes, I do appreciate a quality screen saver. But I have never been impressed with the slide shows, and cheesy animations that I have found. These screen savers are great!

I especially like the innovation and variety of them... Scott Snibe's Emptiness Is Form has really grabbed my attention. Then Entropy8Zuper's cameraSS 2000 is interesting in how it uses a webcam ...

Have any other screen savers used live webcams like that? Does anyone know of any other quality selection of screen savers?
posted by crog at 9:14 AM on December 12, 2000

I downloaded every one, and over half of the Windows implementations use a poorly-written screensaver module with severe memory leaks. After starting and stopping them several times, your computer WILL crash. Besides, I don't really consider a looping Quicktime movie a screensaver. Emptiness is Form and Miriam Dym's All Spin were my favorites.

I'm fond of several of the screensavers at 3DFiles. Most are way too high on the gee-whiz 3D factor, but some are sublime.
posted by waxpancake at 10:01 AM on December 12, 2000

VIM is probably the highest-tech screen saver I know of. Get it here.

What's interesting about it is that it saves its state, and it evolves with time. The VIM (a pretty girl) learns and changes as her intelligence matrix is developed. Also the gardens she plants are preserved. (For her to start acting reasonably intelligently takes weeks of cumulative runtime.)

But the state is only saved if you pay and register. If you run for free, it starts from scratch every time you run it. Even so, it's damned cool. (Windows only; requires DirectX 7, works with DX8. Very CPU intensive and graphics intensive.)

Michael Colicos is about to release a new version of it which should be considerably more impressive than the current one (VIM33D). She'll actually have facial expressions, and he's going to introduce rain, lightning and fire.

It's AI, but it's a different approach to AI; not neural nets or any other approach ever taken. It's something completely new, and it is adaptive. Colicos created it. He's a professor at UCSD, does this partially as a research project and partially just for the fun of it. He doesn't make enough in registration fees to actually live off of, as should probably be obvious.

posted by Steven Den Beste at 10:38 AM on December 12, 2000