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1I've always liked this little program. An aquarium for your screen, with
2fish swimming around on your desktop. It traces its history to the the xfish
3program, written around 1987 by John Bradley. Jonathan Greenblatt ported it
4to X11 in 1988 and it made its way into the contributed program collection
5by about X11R6. Eric Bina worked on the color maps and root window support
6and added a lot more fish around 1992. TJ Phan added Truecolor support in
71996. Vincent Renardias contributed a man page, and Joey Hess packaged it up
8for Debian.
9
10When I learned xfishtank had been orphaned, I decided to adopt it, or at
11least give it a decent home. I've tried to reflect the history in the git
12log. If you know of intermediate versions not represented here, send them
13along.
14
15Pushed to github Feb 2012 by Jim Rees.
16
17Here's the README as I found it. Also see README.debian for more recent
18history.
19
20
21 ********************** FUN WITH FISH *********************
22
23There are lots of programs for lots of platforms to make fish swim in the
24background of your screen. This is a modification of an old one called
25xfish (also called Xaquarium), that I have added more features to.
26
27To not confuse you (or confuse you more) I will call this modified xfish
28"xfishtank". ['A rose by any other name...' and all that]
29
30
31How is this different? I started with you basic xfish, and I kept the
32bubbles (actually I re-wrote some of the bubble code, but it LOOKS the same).
33I changed the rest of the code to allow any number of multicolored fish to
34swim around. Each fish can have up to 255 colors, but on startup the program
35takes all the colors from all the fish, and squeezes them down to all fit
36into the default colormap as best it can. Any fish can be any size in
37width and height. To make them look more like they are swimming, fish are
38animated (Very simple 2 frame animation) [I got this idea from watching
39the AfterDark fish on the Mac]. Fish CANNOT swim over each other, they
40will turn around if they are about to collide. I had a version that
41had fish swiming over each other, it was WAY to slow to be something to run
42on your background while working, so I deleted it.
43
44xfishtank -help to see the command line options.
45
46
47 ********************** NEW FUN WITH FISH *********************
48
49Since the original version, I have received various comments and bug fixes.
50This version I know runs on SGIs running 4.0, Sparcs running 4.1,
51Decstations running 4.1, and RS6000s running 3.1. However, there were mongo
52memory leaks in the X server distributed with the RS6000, so I had to compile
53the X11R5 server and use that.
54
55As you add more fish (especially very colorful fish) the total color use set
56becomes quite large (greater than 255). I added 2 new options to help you
57deal with this. By default xfishtank would find the total color use set
58for all the fish you requested, and then start allocating out of the default
59colormap until it filled up, it would then match the rest of the colors to
60whatever colors it could get. This first come first serve color allocation
61can give really bad results for large color sets. I added the -m option
62to allow you to specify that the program should cut the color use set down
63to the number you specify with the -m option before starting to allocate
64out of the default colormap. The algorithm used by -m is considerably better
65than first come first serve. Also, having xfishtank use ALL the available
66cells in the default colormap can be bad. The -C options lets you limit how
67many cells xfishtank will take out of the default colormap.
68In the first come first serve senario colors are allocated for the fish,
69in the order of appearance in the FishList file, and then from the backgound
70picture if one exists.
71
72Finally, due to popular demand, I put back in my clipmask code. By setting
73the -d option (for Do clipping), xfishtank will swim its fish over whatever
74you already have on your root window. WARNING: This will slow down your
75machine! The reason I took this code out originally was it slowed my
76machine down too much for me to comfortably work. But if you think you have
77a really spiffy fast workstation, go ahead and give it a try.
78
79If you use the -d option and notice some flicker (which I expect you will),
80this is because xfishtank is just doing an XClearArea, and letting the root
81redraw its background. If you know what you want your background picture to
82be, use -p <image_file> instead of -d. The image_file needs to be a gif
83image. Since xfishtank now knows what your background is, xfishtank with
84the -p option should have much less flicker. However, it suffers the
85disadvantage that you can't change the background picture without restarting
86xfishtank.
87
88The intrepid explorer of the source code will notice that there are some
89options not described in xfishtank -help. In particular -o -and -D. These
90options aren't described because they were stuff I was fussing with and couldn't
91get to work. I left them in on this release so that if someone else wanted
92to try and get them to work, they could see what I had already tried. The -o
93option lets fish try and swim on top of each other. It looks ugly no matter
94how I do it, if you can fix it, great. -D is a special option that is only
95active if you have also specified -d and -p. Normally you never want to specify
96both -d and -p because it doesn't make the animation any better, and it
97slightly messes up fish to bubble intersections. However, if you specify
98-d -D -o -p you will get as close as I could get to proper fish intersections.
99And when you see how crumby these are, and how slow it makes your machine
100you will know why I gave up.
101
102Ok, I'll fess up, I'm lying, I did actually get good fish to fish intersections
103but only by writing a completely different version of xfishtank that has
104each fish be a shaped override-redirect window, that moves itself, and changes
105its shape-mask to animate. This looks REALLY COOL, but grinds any and all
106X servers to a complete standstill.
107
108
109 ********************** NEW FISH PICTURES *********************
110
111This release contains a grand total of 29 fish! These fish were carefully
112created through lots of hard work, and the help of many many people who
113sent me pictures of fish, non-copyrighted gifs of fish, and allowed me to
114borrow their scanners. I'm not going to try and name them all here, there
115are lots of you, and I'm afraid I may miss someone. You all know who you are,
116and you have my heartfelt thanks, I couldn't have done this without you.
117
118
119 ********************** TROUBLE WITH FISH *********************
120
121There is a scarcity of good fish pictures in the world, and they are all
122protected by lawyers. Here is the solution I propose.
123
124Any of you with talent can edit up any pictures you want, somehow get them
125into GIF format, and import them into your xfishtank. The program
126"giftofish" that I am supplying here takes as input any 2 GIF files,
127and creates a xfishtank header file for that fish. The 2 files must have
128the same width and height, and must both have the same background color.
129The pictures are assumed to be the two frames of an animated fish swiming right.
130Put this new header file into your fishmaps directory, edit the FishList
131file to add the prefix of that header file, and increment the total fishcount
132on the first line of that file. Now recompile xfishtank, and your new fish
133will be used. Also, the program fishtogif will extract the two gifs from
134any fish header file so you can touch up what you already have.
135
136Other fish sources:
137 The AfterDark fish on the Mac are beautiful. If you
138have already shelled out the money to Berkely Systems Software to buy those
139fish, and you also want to see them on your UNIX box, here is what you do.
140If you can transfer the Mac fish files to UNIX, run the "gofish" program
141supplied here, it will write out the fish into two intermediate files.
142The files will look strange, they are my own format, just feed them to the
143giftofish program (which understands that format), and it will create a
144fish header file for you.
145 OpenWindows 3.0 comes with some fish pictures. If you have purchased
146Openwindows, and want to use those pictures, the program "rasttofish"
147supplied here will read one of their sun raster fish pictures, and produce
148a xfishtank header file for it. Note, the Openwindows fish are only one
149frame, so the won't be animated.
150 There is apparently a PC Windows program with some swimming fish.
151The individual fish are stored in .fsh files. The program pcfshtofish
152will turn one of these .fsh files into an xfishtank header file.
153
154
155 ********************** THANKS *********************
156
157A really big thanks to well over 100 wonderful people who after downloading
158the last version of xfishtank took the time to send me such pleasant,
159complimentary, and supportive e-mail. This version was never planned, but
160all of you have made me feel better about writing this code than anything
161that any employer has ever paid me for.
162
163
164As usual, mail any problems, questions, complaints, reccommendations, and
165cookies to me.
166
167Eric Bina
168508 E. Michigan, #35
169Urbana, IL 61801
170
171ebina@ncsa.uiuc.edu
172
173(217)344-9101
174Work(217)244-6133
175
176
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