Ubuntu (or Linux) version
 

Years ago, when I was still running Windows, I enjoyed your Marine Aquarium.

Just recently I remembered it and just wondered if there's a version for Ubuntu (or linux for that matter). Turns out there isn't.

I asked for it and this is the response I got:

Would you like to see the aquarium on Ubuntu (and Ubuntu Touch) or other linux distributions?

A port on Linux would be fine ... same thing with MorphOS but i presume Jim need special requirements for 3D support (OpenGL4 ?)

Marine Aquarium uses DirectX.

Jim, thanks for your answer. So it would be hard to exit "windows world only"...

To me, DirectX12 is good for Windows users and Nvidia/ATI industry (except Windows XP users of course ;-)

OpenGL/Open GL ES is good for Windows / Linux / MacOS X / phones / etc... users

This morning, i watched this conf (oriented of course but i agree with most of the intervenants ) :

Moving Your Games to OpenGL -Rich Geldreich (Valve), Dan Ginsburg (Valve), Peter Lohrmann (Valve), Jason Mitchell (Valve)

Moving your Games to OpenGL (pdf, 65 pages)

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-...nd-not-DirectX

Most of Indie games makers choosed OpenGL of course ;)

Arnaud aka _bigdan_
an old french amigan who still use MorphOS and MacOS X in 2014

We've already got Mac and Android conversions, which use OpenGL. As far as Linux or Ubuntu versions - I don't really see it as a huge market. Are there really millions of Linux-only users out there eager to pay for ANY program?

We are legions using ubuntu and Linux. Billion of user not million. Do you think that the number of user is the most important thing ? Quality and security are not in windows.

Note that windoow maket is going down. Do you know that vbulletin of you favorit forum is running under ....

I think the point Jim was making was with regard to payment, not with regard to number of users. It doesn't matter if billions of users want free software versus millions of users who want free software. And that does seem to be the way things are going. Nobody wants to pay for good software any more.

The number of PAYING users is the important thing. There are millions of Linux users, but few will pay for software.
Linux is a great server OS. But it's not bulletproof or idiotproof enough for desktop. If you switch everyone from Windows to Linux tomorrow, they would be screaming to switch back the next time they try to install a new Video card, new Sound card, or play a favorite game (even through WINE).

I started computing in 1987. The first and only virus infection I ever suffered was in 2004 with a Win XP system -- the infection occurred without my interaction, just by the fact that the computer was connected to the internet.
That's when I resolved to quit the Windows world altogether and forever. (I do keep a small offline XP partition for MA3, however.)
I have been a happy Linux user ever since. Je ne regrette rien.

The current estimate of Linux desktop users is 72 million, nowhere near a billion. If it were a worthwhile market, we'd be seeing Linux versions of Photoshop, etc.

Linux isn't a good desktop o/s (and I had my own distro briefly) as there are too many compatibility issues with libraries and you are usually stuck with just the programs available for your distro. It's always fun when you install software on linux and the installer starts compiling things, then starts complaining about missing libraries, then when you add them it breaks other stuff... BTW I got Enlightenment E18 running on Linux Mint 17 Mate in just a few hours last month, with much compiling... Gotta love Windows installers...

If you do want to try Linux on the desktop I'd suggest starting with linux mint 17 kde or the latest Elive beta (which is a real pain as they try really hard to get money out of you before you can play with it and see if you like it). Do this in a virtual machine like VMWare Player (BTW use the Ubuntu settings for Mint, IIRC Debian for Elive).

P.S. My notes on the trivial simple addition of one piece of software (E18) to Linux Mint 17 Mate, note the four extra things I had to manually install before I could install the thing I wanted:
(In a shell)
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vase/ppa
cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d
sudo chmod 666 vase-ppa-trusty.list
open vase-ppa-trusty.list in text editor and change the “trusty” entries to “saucy”.
(optional) sudo chmod 644 vase-ppa-trusty.list
Add file extra.list just containing the line:
deb http://uk.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy main universe
e.g. by:
sudo echo 'deb http://uk.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy main universe' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/extra.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libtiff4
sudo apt-get install libefl
sudo apt-get install libpoppler43
sudo apt-get install evas-generic-loaders
sudo apt-get install enlightenment
If have auto-login set need to go to Control Centre, Window Manager, Options tab and choose Enlightenment as the default session. Note there is no save button.
Reboot and will get Enlightenment configuration questions.
Note advice was don't install Connman, stick to the Mint network manager, don't seem to get the option.
Next to make it look nicer...
Trying this theme: http://e17-stuff.org/content/show.ph...content=100923

P.P.S. How to install (program of your choice) in Windows:
(Double-click)
Setup.exe

Thanks for the heads-up. I was just about to waste ten years of my life on it.

Yeah, sorry, the time machine is in the shop or I'd have posted that earlier... :-)
(I probably should have put IMHO, but I'm sure people could assume that and I'm confident it's a good opinion for 99.9% of people...)

BTW my version was derived from Crux (which got a bit better known later on when Arch did the same, I started on version 0.9-something), but my one never made it into circulation as the product it was for died a death due to Sigma's linux drivers being too poor for production use (long, sad story)...

What do you use for your desktop and have you re-installed a few new versions over the years or changed to a rolling dist? I went (IIRC) SLS->Slackware->Caldera->Suse->(Misc) with some uClinux on the side (for Blackfin mostly). Caldera was perhaps a high spot.

(One side effect - I've just had my mind jogged about the elf vs. a.out wars, boy that seems a long time ago... I'd forgotten all that until the nudge.)

I believe that people will pay the price for the quality screensaver that this is.

I can run the aquarium on my linux ubuntu 14.04 desktop under WINE flawlessly.
If there was a linux version I would happily pay for additional license key.

Unfortunately that's an excellent reason *not* to rewrite the Aquarium to work on Linux.

As an early adopter under NT4 at work, and later Win2k at home, I lost home use when MS dropped support for Win2k and I then moved to Ubuntu Linux. My work computer up through Win7 continued to provide my Marine Aquarium "fix" until I recently retired. I had previously checked out this thread a few years ago, and gave up hope for a Linux compatible version.

However, as may be seen above, ukstevef wrote, in part: "I can run the aquarium on my linux ubuntu 14.04 desktop under WINE flawlessly."

Aha! I thought, if it will run under Ubuntu using Wine, it should run under Mint MATE (derived from Ubuntu) using Codeweavers Crossover (commercial version of Wine) even though as far as I know neither Wine or Crossover provide DirectX emulation. (LInux uses OpenGL, I believe.)

So, setting up a new account here, because I couldn't find my old password, or even be sure of which ancient email address I registered under, I planned to provide confirmation of operation. No such luck so far. Aquarium 2 installs under Crossover 15.0, but does not function when opened. I have upgraded Crossover to 15.2 and will test the latest Aquarium against that at my next opportunity. However, given the different window managers in use between Mint and Ubuntu, and possible interactions with nVidia's drivers, considerable luck may be needed.

kas

Update 1
 

Having found my keycodes for versions 99(E - L), 1 and 2, I decided to do some experimenting.

It is possible to install versions .99L, V2, and V3 under Crossover on Linux Mint 17.3 MATE, and very likely most other distributions that Crossover supports. As installed, none of these installations will do more than present the initial keycode entry menu (and in the case of ver. 3, the configuration menu). The reason for this is pretty obscure, and not obvious in Wine's documentation that I've found so far. It is necessary with Wine to use an /s switch to get an executable screen saver to run even as a video window. This can be done by constructing a suitable command that can be built into a link (lnk).

Note that Crossover constructs individual "bottles" for instances of Wine tailored to particular programs using one of several Windows flavors.

Version 99L when commanded to run with the /s switch operates, but with two deficiencies: it is always night in the aquarium and there is a horizontal pattern in the background. Bubble sound works.

Version 2 when run with the /s switch crashes. I did not investigate it further.

Version 3.3 was my primary target to get running. With the /s switch in play targeted at drive_c/Windows/system32/MarineAquarium3.scr within the bottle established for this program under Crossover, the executable provides a black window, and presents the first menu for installing the keycode in a second window. The TESTFISH keycode when submitted opens the configuration menu. When this menu is OK'd the video window presents an even more beautiful dynamic seascape than the V2 and earlier versions did. Fabulous! Right clicking allows toggling between window'd and full screen operation.

In my case, s key actuation reports that Marine Aquarium is running at 60 fps (appropriate for my HP IPS monitor) with 1920 x 1200 x 32 resolution. This is using pure hardware video processing on my PC's GeForce 9800GT. I am using the nVidia 340.96 driver.

However, there is no sound. The bubbles are running, the sound is "ON" in the configuration menu, but nothing is heard. No guitar is heard either. Wine's console audio tab for this bottle contains an audio test button that when actuated produces a sound. Mint uses Pulse Audio and the Wine instance operating ver. 3.3 is using winepulse.drv as expected. An unrelated program in a different bottle generates sound normally.

So, at the moment I have a beautiful moving art form with quiet bubbles. This is worth the price itself. I will continue to pursue any hints I find for getting the sound running. (Of course, if I need a real keycode to turn the sound on, I guess I'll discover that soon.)

kas

Found a solution to the issue of the missing bubble sound and guitar music. The solution was to install DirectMusic into the same bottle using CrossOver's installer. This process also seems to install DirectX9.

Now to send money.

Pretty clever. I'm amazed any of it works at all.

Thanks for the compliment. I suggest though that almost all the cleverness involved (exclusive of all the cleverness in Marine Aquarium itself) should be attributed to the persons who spent a good part of their lives developing Linux, Ubuntu, Mint, Wine, and CrossOver to their present maturities, along with those who developed the many software products to use with them.

Lest this exercise be deemed confirmation of jleslie's view of Linux' unsuitability for general use presented earlier in this topic, my effort was to make a software program do something it wasn't intended to do. For most common personal computer tasks, Ubuntu and Mint are perfectly suitable operating systems, and require less installation time, less daily "maintenance" time, and particularly less malware countermeasure time than I had to expend when I used Windows.

But enough OS religious rant and back to the result. Once I obtained the new keycode, I turned on more fishes and showed my wife what the product looked like. She was amazed and became an instant fan in spite of hating computers.

Now to wait for an affordable 1000-gal tank proportioned high-resolution OLED monitor to allow a light weight, no spill, no work marine aquarium. :)

Thank you Jim for this magnificent art.

kas

Update 2
 

Having obtained for spousal entertainment a 55-inch LG OLED TV, I had to build a home theater personal computer (HTPC) to source Marine Aquarium video. TV selection, part selection, part availability, and assembly has taken a lot of time since my last input here, but the result (still in stress testing and without any overclocking) is operating and demonstrating Marine Aquarium as I write this on a nearby PC. Fish count is maximum, frame rate is 60 Hz, IPS Monitor resolution is 1920 x 1200. Video card is only slightly warm.

Salient particulars are:
Linux Mint 18.1 64-bit MATE
Kernel 4.10.0-20
nVidia driver 381.09

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
Asus Crosshair VI Hero motherboard
Asus ROG Strix OC GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
(for more detail, see my build on www.overclock.net forums)

Additional time will pass before this build is considered ready to drive the TV, but results so far are promising.

Update
 

With HTPC connected to the 4k TV and some experimentation to get the TV into functioning PC mode, I observed that the result of running MA was a black screen. Today I got around to reinstalling MA, this time without enabling screensaver mode.* The menu appeared, no fish. I forgot about the process, described at Codeweavers Crossover forum, and I think above, of adding the /s to the launcher command.

With that fixed, windowed and full screen fishies are abundantly doing their thing. Overkill (for running MA) GPU isn't even running its fans. 30 fishes are in use, along with bubbles, panning, etc.

Again, thank you Jim for this safely dry but otherwise exquisite display.

------
* With the 2k monitor I used when building the HTPC, the screensaver box was checked during installation. This had two effects. In windowed mode, the window couldn't be moved. In full screen mode, MA seemed to hold off the actual Mint screen saver, though without providing any of the login capability. It also after a few hours killed the upper and lower trays (perhaps in concert with the Mint screensaver trying to run), so more sophisticated means of restarting were sometimes required.

Glad to hear you got it working.

I guess it is worth noting that close up at 4K resolution, one can see some pixelation in certain elements of the scene. (We may have discussed this in some other thread.) The elkhorn coral is one example. Certain fishes seem to be more finely rendered than the coral. The scorpion fish needs some teeth when it opens its rather cavernous mouth facing the viewer (or do they gum their prey?).

The difference in size between a fish near the front glass and the same fish behind the plane of the coral is appropriate for a close observer with a smaller monitor (aquarium). When the screen diagonal is 55 inches and is observed from 8 feet away, the perspective is like viewing a portrait taken with a wide angle lens from up close.

Page 11 of your Readme.txt alludes to an an eyepoint that has a default value, but no method of changing it is obvious. Is it in some .ini file or registry entry that I can find in my pseudo C drive? I'm guessing that if the -20 were changed to a larger negative number, the difference in front-to-back fish scaling (unavoidable pun, sorry) would be reduced.

If this parameter is accessible, perhaps it would help if you clarified the inherent coordinate frame.

Thanks

kas

The eye point cannot be changed, because it would make visible a lot of behind-the-scenes ugliness in the background. The 3D objects are just 'Hollywood sets' which only look realistic from a very limited angle.

Lionfish have no teeth :)

Thanks for the clarification. I guess I can live with the perspective. :TU:

Latest version, 18912.3.3.6341 works properly on Ubuntu 18.04 with Wine 4.0 except for sounds.

How to start:

There's also an entry in the AppDb: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManag...ation&iId=4892

Zounds
 

I may have addressed this here earlier in this thread, and at the Crossover Linux write-up on Marine Aquarium 3.3. Assuming that Wine operates similarly to Crossover Linux which is derived from Wine, then the container needs to include DirectMusic, which will likely require DirectX. I don't know how to include it in Wine, but Crossover makes it easy.

Marine Aquarium operates for me in various Mint MATE 64-bit builds, including 17.3 and 18.3.

It'd be awesome to have serenescreen again - this time for Linux
 

I'm another Linux user who is willing to pay for good software.

FWIW, the Humble Indie Bundle folks found a lot of pent up demand for for-profit video games on Linux; I imagine it'd be similar for really nice screensavers.

I have a license (somewhere) for Serene Screen for Mac - but I don't use a Mac anymore. I pretty much only use Windows when coerced.

Please?

I haven't had a reason to investigate this myself, but I think Crossover for Linux has a Mac to Linux mode similar to its Win to Linux mode. If so, then you may be able to experimentally verify if your Mac version of Serene Screen will play on Linux.

Another successful user of MA 3 on Linux Mint 18.3 with Wine here.


As mentioned before, sound requires DirectMusic to operate and I achieved this by using Winetricks to install the required library files.


I no longer run a Windows machine, so it was great to be able to get this amazing application to run under Linux.


In the thread about Linux, it is mentioned that there is no interest in creating a version of MA for Linux because of the perceived lack of interest in Linux users paying for software. However there is another post mentioning that Roku have ported MA to their 4K devices, which are basicly Linux machines, so obviously work has been done in porting to Linux. Perhaps what was meant was that MA has been ported to Linux running on ARM and similar CPU (as has been done with Android which is also an ARM based Linux-like system AFAIK) but has not been ported to i386 based CPU running Linux.


Maybe someone can clarify the actual situation.


I have been hoping I can get MA 3 running on a tiny computer as a fixed function virtual marine aquarium on a large screen TV, such as one of the cheap ARM computer sticks, but it's a work in progress. The Windows compute sticks would likely work better for this application, but they are still quite expensive.


Without checking through all the posts on the Forum, I get the impression that the music that was included in earlier versions of MA Windows is either no longer supported or else not supported in non-Windows operating systems. I would appreciate if someone could clarify the situation with the background music as well.

I'm impressed by your perseverance in getting it to work on Linux. Sales of all versions are nil, so there's no way a special Linux version would be created. My only income is from the licensing deal with Roku. I provided them with the Android code, which was done by a Japanese developer from the Mac code, which was done by Jim O'Connor from my DirectX code. So with so many generations losing a little refinement each time, the final result is simply not as good as the Windows version.

I wrote and embedded the music in the Windows version, using Direct Music, as you say. I don't think the music routines ever made it to the translations.

MA is such a remarkable and beautiful artwork, I was compelled to find a way to display it, once I no longer had Windows machines. However I followed the work of others on this forum and elsewhere to get MA operational under Linux but did not develop anything myself. That's so sad you are no longer able to receive income from your original creation. Do you think transitioning to a donation format might be useful? If I hadn't already purchased your Windows version, I would have donated as I found your creation so amazing and I am sure there would be many others. Would crowd-funding of a special Linux version be a possibility? Do your techniques lend themselves to the creation of other dynamic artworks? It would be a shame for the principle to end with MA, especially in an era of pandemic awareness, where greater isolation at home begs for solutions to bring the world and forms of entertainment to the home in a virtual sense. Maybe something like flowers blooming in a garden over time but changing dynamically. I have dabbled with creating a video of a pan of a static photo with some background sound, to give it a bit of life and make it more interesting as I doubt I will ever see the object of that photo in real life, however that was an extremely basic thing and not dynamic and ever evolving like MA. Thanks for that clarification: I have not seen any mention of background music in the Android version of MA, only the bubble column sound.

The original plan was to have 5 SereneScreen programs: The saltwater tank, a freshwater tank, a butterfly habitat, a terrarium, and an aviary. Because the saltwater tank did so incredibly well for the first 5 years, I used the money to start building my castle and never got around to creating the other programs. Then the recession of 2008 wiped out sales, so I had to fire the crew that was working on my house and work on it alone for the past 12 years. Now I'm too old to start programming again, so I'm trying to start my real career -- making movies.

It would be great to see all 5 SereneScreen programs come to fruition.

Can you think of a way this could happen: perhaps by handing over to enthusiasts to develop further and maybe selling all 5 apps already installed on a cheap ARM stick, like the Tronsmart, with a simple remote for navigation and free updates provided as additional files, added via the micro-sd slot (with all the other Tronsmart capabilities available if required) and all for display on a large screen TV?

Good luck with the new career in any case.

I'm not sure what you mean by "handing it over" to someone. Any software developers are free to create any programs they want.

You have done all the groundwork in creating the concept, structure and program architecture: any software developer would have to re-invent the wheel, as it were, if you are unable to hand over documentation of the app.

I think this issue belongs in the Source Code thread.

As a matter of interest, MA Android runs well on a cheap Tronsmart MK808B+ compute stick at 1920x1080p60, so you don't need a full-blown PC to display the aquarium on a large screen TV. It isn't quite as good as the Windows version but it's close enough to enjoy.

Question
 

did this work out of box, or did you have to tweak anything? I get sound but just a black screen.

I can get it to work under WINE w/dsound, directmusic on one monitor only, but it does not play with multi monitors well and stutters, but has sound, PlayonLinux works flawlessly with dsound, directmusic installed and on multi monitors but has no sound. With playonlinux i can use the max 30 fish...which surprising because on Windows 10 i can do 20 at most before it starts stuttering.