bad bad mouse

Wed, 09/30/2009 - 02:02 — cracksloth

as a first post, i wanted to send out a quick thanks to the community and development team - thanks for the great visuals and support - you guys are great!

secondly, i wanted to ask if anyone had any ideas regarding a problem i have.  i want to be able to run ES as a fullscreen window without having it automatically terminated on mouse move (the standard screensaver behavior).  Is there a switch or a config file setting i can change so that it only terminates on pressing ESC or something similar?  There are several reasons I want to do thins but the biggest one is that I want to run electric sheep as a background while having a music player in the foreground.

using autohotkey, i created a script to launch ES and bring the player to the top but as soon as i move my mouse, it's all over.  possible solutions i have explored:

  1. use a program like vitaldesktop to run ES as the desktop wallpaper.  unfortunately, i run an alternate shell on some of my machines and this only works while using explorer.  also, vital desktop doesn't play friendly with desktop widgets even when running explorer.
  2. use sheepwatcher to run ES... but i can't find a way to run the program fullscreen.  perhaps this is an option AC can add?  i have no idea how to contact him though (unless he reads here).  his site and documentation is probably intentionally emailless.
  3. find a program like sheepwatcher that can display a screensaver in fullcreen - but i couldn't find one.
  4. find a switch for the screensaver that would allow a "terminate on ESC"

does anyone else have any ideas on this?

 

-cracksloth

‹ cant vote on sheeps although programm otherwise seamlessly working Yet another one of these... ›
Sat, 10/10/2009 - 15:49 — cracksloth

Well, it looks like no one

Well, it looks like no one has any ideas.  Too bad.  It would be nice if AC eventually incorporated this into his program but in the meantime, I scrapped together a little script to do what I want (written in Autohotkey and pasted below).  Essentially, it just sandwiches a transparent window between my music player (a pandora client) and Electric Sheep.  That way, ES doesn't track that the mouse has moved.  A bit of a hack but it works.  I'm throwing it here in case someone else searches for a similar solution in the future:

 

;Run, C:\Program Files (x86)\vsxu_player_0.1.18\vsxu_player.exe
;WinWait, vsxu editor, , 5
;WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, on, Pandora
;WinActivate, Pandora

Run, C:\Program Files (x86)\Pandora\Pandora.exe
Run, C:\Windows\ElectricSheep_2_7b18.scr /s

Gui,Destroy
Gui,Color,000000
Gui,-Caption +AlwaysOnTop
Gui,Show,% "X0 Y0 W" A_ScreenWidth " H" A_ScreenHeight
WinSet, Transparent, 70, pandora.ahk

WinWait, Electric Sheep Screensaver, , 5
WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, off, Electric Sheep Screensaver

WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, off, pandora.ahk

WinWait, ahk_class ApolloRuntimeContentWindow, , 5
WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, on, ahk_class ApolloRuntimeContentWindow

WinActivate, pandora.ahk
Return

Esc::
WinClose, ahk_class ApolloRuntimeContentWindow
WinClose, Electric Sheep Screensaver
ExitApp
Return

 

 

Sat, 10/03/2009 - 17:06 — cracksloth

no advice or solutions?

no advice or solutions?

Thu, 10/15/2009 - 22:37 — arakcheev

Ass backwards way of doing

Ass backwards way of doing this... but...

 

 

If you run it through Ultramon and set it to run in preview mode (set the screensaver to "Ultramon", use ultramon's preview check box).  Then let the sheep run. You'll get a stupid windows spinning mouse icon, but you can easily hide that somewhere. Your mouse will no longer affect it.

 

 

At least that's what happens on my rig. I have to alt+tab.

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