XScreenSaver(1)
NAME
bubbles - frying pan / soft drink simulation
SYNOPSIS
bubbles [-display host:display.screen] [-foreground color]
[-background color] [-window] [-root] [-mono] [-install]
[-visual visual] [-simple] [-broken] [-3D] [-file file-
name] [-directory directoryname]
DESCRIPTION
Bubbles sprays lots of little random bubbles all over the
window which then grow until they reach their maximum size
and go pop. The inspiration for this was watching little
globules of oil on the bottom of a frying pan and it also
looks a little like bubbles in fizzy soft drink. The
default mode uses fancy ray-traced bubbles but there is
also a mode which just draws circles in case the default
mode is too taxing on your hardware.
OPTIONS
Depending on how your bubbles was compiled, it accepts the
following options:
-foreground
Colour of circles if -simple mode is selected.
-background
Colour of window background.
-window Draw on a newly-created window. This is the
default.
-root Draw on the root window.
-mono If on a color display, pretend we're on a
monochrome display.
-install
Install a private colormap for the window.
-visual visual
Specify which visual to use. Legal values are the
name of a visual class, or the id number (decimal
or hex) of a specific visual.
-delay microseconds
How much of a delay should be introduced between
steps of the animation. Default 1, or about 1
microsecond. Actually, this is the delay between
each group of 15 new bubbles since such a delay
between each step results in a very slow animation
rate.
-nodelay
Same as -delay 0.
-simple Don't use the default fancy pixmap bubbles. Just
draw circles instead. This may give more bearable
performance if your hardware wasn't made for this
sort of thing.
-broken Don't hide bubbles when they pop. This was a bug
during development but the results were actually
quite attractive. (This option is only available
if you have the XPM library available and the
imake generated Makefile has defined HAVE_XPM).
-3D Normally, the simulation is done completely in two
dimensions. When a bubble swallows up another
bubble, the areas of each are added to get the
area of the resulting bubble. This option changes
the algorithm to instead add volume (imagining
each to be a sphere in 3D space). The whole thing
looks more realistic but I find it attracts atten-
tion to the flickering of each bubble as they are
move and are redrawn. Your mileage may vary.
-file filename
Use the pixmap definitions in the given file,
instead of the default (if one is compiled in).
This is ignored if -simple is specified. If the
file is compressed (either with compress or gzip),
it is decompressed before use. (This option only
works if you have XPM compiled into your binary
and you have compiled with BUBBLES_IO set in bub-
bles.h. This is not the default).
-directory directoryname
Similar to -file except the file is taken randomly
from the contents of the specified directory.
(Again, this option is only available if you have
XPM and BUBBLES_IO was set when compiling. See
above).
-quiet Don't print messages explaining why one or several
command line options were ignored. This is dis-
abled by default.
NOTES
If you find the pace of things too slow, remember that
there is a delay even though you specify no -delay option.
Try using -nodelay although beware of the effects of irri-
tation of other users if you're on a shared system as you
bleed their CPU time away.
Some tools to assist in creation of new bubbles are
included in the source distribution. These can either be
loaded with the -file or -directory options (if available)
or they can be used in place of the distributed default
bubble (bubble_default.c). You might like to copy these
scripts to a permanent location and use them. Read bub-
bles.README.
Rendered bubbles are not supported on monochrome displays.
I'm not convinced that small bubbles, even dithered prop-
erly are going to look like anything more than a jumble of
random dots.
BUGS
There is a delay before something appears on the screen
when using rendered bubbles. The XPM library seems to
take a long time to make pixmaps out of raw data. This
can be irritating on slower systems.
The movement of the bubbles looks jerky if an incomplete
set of bubbles is used.
The hide/display algorithm could do with some work to
avoid flickering when -nodelay is set.
ENVIRONMENT
DISPLAY to get the default host and display number.
XENVIRONMENT
to get the name of a resource file that overrides
the global resources stored in the RESOURCE_MAN-
AGER property.
SEE ALSO
X(1) xscreensaver(1)
DISTRIBUTION POLICY
This work is Copyright (C) 1995, 1996 by James Macnicol.
Distribution is allowed under the terms of the GNU General
Public License. Look at the sources for the legalese.
AUTHOR
James Macnicol lt;J.Macnicol@student.anu.edu.au.