Random Fish Replacement

[Digital Lungfish]

"if he did that, what would I do with my website?"

LOL, good point Morgan. Somehow though, I think you manage to stay "afloat".

Besides, what if you and your site were to close up shop for some reason? People would still have the fish facts to fall back on. It's just a thought though, as always it's up to Jim to see if it fits into his scheme of things.

- DL

[Digital Lungfish]

"markm is saying that we don't have time to add any more of these features right now if Jim is going to stay on schedule with all the other things on Jim's planned wishlist."

Oh I know, I just wanted to make sure that the other people here on the site didn't get the wrong idea and think that producing results and development are actually two different things.

- DL

[riz]

Well, I've got a poor man's solution to this problem...

I downloaded a screensaver randomizer called Serandom Screensaver Manager... I created a second fish.scr file (named it fish2.scr) and chose Serandom to cycle through the two screensavers (but the same) every 99 minutes (can select 1-99 minutes)

So basically every 99 minutes, Serandom chooses between the same two fish.scr screensavers and since the program quickly unloads and reloads, wallah! new fishies swimming in the tank evey 99 minutes!!!

Hope this helps,
riz

[FishyBusiness]

Hmmm. That might be a good idea for some people that want this feature.

I'm a bit confused, why is it so difficult to replace 3d objects?

When I'm moving around a level on quake I don't have to reload the program each time a new monster walks on the screen, it just appears.

Surely your not trying to tell me that the whole of Quake3 is loaded into the video ram before the program starts, now that would be impossible...

Just wondering...

[Shinsa]

My guess would be realism. I'm sure unloading and loading in a new fish would cause the other fish swimming to stutter. Jim?

[Jim Sachs]

On some cards, video ram gets hopelessly fragmented, causing a crash or lockup. This might not be a problem if all the fish textures used the same number of bytes because each texture could smoothly move into the bytes vacated by the previous fish. But some fish textures are 128x128 and some are 128x64, so I had a lot of trouble with this until I started completely rebuilding the scene each time the user chose new fish.

[Shinsa]

I understand fragmentation. I also know there are ways of "defragging" memory, just like defragging a hard drive. Would these options work as well? Or would the subroutine for defragging memory be too mcuh? I suppose it might, would probably be bigger than the screen saver itself? Don't mind me, answering my own questions... Just think I'll post it anyway, to keep someone else from asking it too... LOL