
Pyrotechnic Screen Saver
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By Steven De Toni March 1996




 This program is cardware
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If you like this program, I wouldn't mind hearing from you. Please send a post card from your area to my home in New Zealand.

Send Mail to:
	Steven De Toni
	17 Garden Heights Ave
	Glenview
	Hamilton
	New Zealand

If you have Internet access my address is:
	steven@cs.waikato.ac.nz


 Introduction
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Have you seen those fire work displays on a MAC and thought MAC's are too good for such a cool program! Have you thought that a programmer should put things right and show the real grunt of a P.C over a MAC. If the answer is yes to the above question and many others, then this program is for YOU.

With this program you can dazzle your MAC people in drooling for a copy. The screen saver is written for the Windows environment, and as such is limited to it's processing power (i.e. DOS programs run at least 4 times faster). However, Windows did provide functions that helped make this program possible. 

What you get in this screen saver is two types of fire work, the sky rocket, and the ground flower pots. The sky rocket offers the most spectacular of the displays. Both fire works can be configured to customise performance and display output.



 Installation
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Place the 'Pyro.scr' file into Windows system directory. To configure the program, go into the display manager program and setup program under the screen saver section.



 System requirements
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This program will run on 386 and up processes and on Windows systems. 

Optimum system:
Fastest Pentium and video card you get your hands on.
Lots of memory, probably min of 8 megs. 

The Speed is required to calculate 1000 odd objects(pixels) 10-15 times per second. Thus the program must do about 20000 calculations per second, and a fast processor is very helpful. 

N.B. This program does multi-task and this does reduce some of the programs performance.




 Configuration Window
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Object Number:	Number of objects that will be displayed on the 		     screen at a time.

Flare Number:	Number of flare(pixels) that are displayed for a 			flower pot, and a sky rocket explosion. Reduce 			this number if your system lacks the grunt of a 			decent processor.

Trail Length:	Number of elements in a flares trail. For best 			results set this value to between 5 - 20 pixels.

Life Length:	The number of update cycles before a flare object 			dies. Total life of a object is (trail length + 			life length). The life number is used as a random 			max seed value.

Pixel Size:	For best results and definition of flare objects, 			it requires quite large pixels. If your system has 			the grunt, try increasing the pixel size to obtain 			a better output result.

Colours
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For best results use this program in 16bit and 24bit modes as I'm not too keen on mucking around with 256 colour mode.... such pain in selecting the colours.


 Program Construction
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This program was written in C++ for speed, is there any other language suitable for such speed! The main running routines are written in C with C++ objects. The result of this combination is a fairly small executable program, OWL and MFC equivalents would be several times larger .... and probably slower. In fact to achieve the required speed, fixed point math was used upon integers, this should provide good performance on all systems (i.e. 16 bit systems and above).


 Bugs
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Bugs, what in my program! Well yes there is a small bug, and occurs sometimes when entering the About window. I can't find the source of this bug, but if it occurs for you just ignore it or just don't go into the about window. 

??



 

 


