Irrlicht Screen Saver

[stevebondy]

While teaching myself 3D programming with Irrlicht, and working through tutorials, I made a simple scene of the earth with the moon rotating around it. It looked cool and I thought it would make a nice screen saver, so I did that, and now, if you want, you can have that.

It's available for download on my website, and I posted a short blog article on it as well.

The source code is available if anyone is interested. I was focused on learning stuff, and not on clean code, so it's not the prettiest. If I come up with another screen saver idea I'll rework it into a better framework. It would be fairly easy to modify it to load .irr files, so a single screen saver could offer a choice of scenes, or randomly selected scenes from a specified folder. Could be a cool promotional tool for Irrlicht.

I wrote it to display a fixed 20 frames per second to limit CPU usage (a little greener that way). The code is adapted from Lucian Wischik's material. I followed his example and included all of the textures in a zip file, compiled into the executable. This led to learning how to load a texture from a zip file, which is in a resource, which was kind of cool.

Anyway, there you have it. I'd be happy to answer any questions, and to hear any comments.

Steve

[Seven]

Steve,
I have to tell you that your website is one of the most professional sites I have looked at. Clean, polished and easy to navigate. Very well done.

[stevebondy]

Steve,
I have to tell you that your website is one of the most professional sites I have looked at. Clean, polished and easy to navigate. Very well done.

Thanks a lot Seven. That's exactly what I was aiming for, so it's nice to know that I've succeeded.

Steve

[tonic]

Nice to hear you have modified Irrlicht to be a screensaver as well. It would be nice if you'd share the source code.

I tried the screensaver and it installed fine and also the little preview screen showed something. The settings dialog also worked fine. However, when I tried to Preview it, I got a crash at that point... and after that, also re-init of the preview screen lead to a crash as well. This comp is 32bit Windows XP Pro and some very recent nvidia geforce card.

[stevebondy]

Hi tonic,

Sorry for the lateness of this reply. I've discovered that I am not getting notifications from the irrlicht forums, so I wasn't aware of your post. I'll have to look into that - any idea what email address thread notifications come from?

Anyway, as for the screen saver, I put a rebuilt version on my website for someone else that was experiencing problems just recently. You can try downloading and installing again and see if it's better. Other than that, I have also placed a debug version on my website. If you download and install this it will create a log file (c:\EarthMoonSS.log) that you can send me to help me sort out what's going on.

I'd be happy to post the source code. It's not the prettiest code in the world, but I could clean it up a bit and then make it available.

Regards,

Steve

[hybrid]

Notifications are not workin due to SF restrictions. Sorry.

[stevebondy]

I've uploaded the source code for the screen saver to my website for anyone interested.

Have fun

Steve