| 1 | I've always liked this little program. An aquarium for your screen, with |
| 2 | fish swimming around on your desktop. It traces its history to the the xfish |
| 3 | program, written around 1987 by John Bradley. Jonathan Greenblatt ported it |
| 4 | to X11 in 1988 and it made its way into the contributed program collection |
| 5 | by about X11R6. Eric Bina worked on the color maps and root window support |
| 6 | and added a lot more fish around 1992. TJ Phan added Truecolor support in |
| 7 | 1996. Vincent Renardias contributed a man page, and Joey Hess packaged it up |
| 8 | for Debian. |
| 9 | |
| 10 | When I learned xfishtank had been orphaned, I decided to adopt it, or at |
| 11 | least give it a decent home. I've tried to reflect the history in the git |
| 12 | log. If you know of intermediate versions not represented here, send them |
| 13 | along. |
| 14 | |
| 15 | Pushed to github Feb 2012 by Jim Rees. |
| 16 | |
| 17 | Build and install should go something like this: |
| 18 | tar xfvz xfishtank.tar.gz (or git clone the repo) |
| 19 | cd xfishtank |
| 20 | xmkmf |
| 21 | make |
| 22 | sudo make install |
| 23 | |
| 24 | Here's the README as I found it. Also see README.debian for more recent |
| 25 | history. |
| 26 | |
| 27 | |
| 28 | ********************** FUN WITH FISH ********************* |
| 29 | |
| 30 | There are lots of programs for lots of platforms to make fish swim in the |
| 31 | background of your screen. This is a modification of an old one called |
| 32 | xfish (also called Xaquarium), that I have added more features to. |
| 33 | |
| 34 | To not confuse you (or confuse you more) I will call this modified xfish |
| 35 | "xfishtank". ['A rose by any other name...' and all that] |
| 36 | |
| 37 | |
| 38 | How is this different? I started with you basic xfish, and I kept the |
| 39 | bubbles (actually I re-wrote some of the bubble code, but it LOOKS the same). |
| 40 | I changed the rest of the code to allow any number of multicolored fish to |
| 41 | swim around. Each fish can have up to 255 colors, but on startup the program |
| 42 | takes all the colors from all the fish, and squeezes them down to all fit |
| 43 | into the default colormap as best it can. Any fish can be any size in |
| 44 | width and height. To make them look more like they are swimming, fish are |
| 45 | animated (Very simple 2 frame animation) [I got this idea from watching |
| 46 | the AfterDark fish on the Mac]. Fish CANNOT swim over each other, they |
| 47 | will turn around if they are about to collide. I had a version that |
| 48 | had fish swiming over each other, it was WAY to slow to be something to run |
| 49 | on your background while working, so I deleted it. |
| 50 | |
| 51 | xfishtank -help to see the command line options. |
| 52 | |
| 53 | |
| 54 | ********************** NEW FUN WITH FISH ********************* |
| 55 | |
| 56 | Since the original version, I have received various comments and bug fixes. |
| 57 | This version I know runs on SGIs running 4.0, Sparcs running 4.1, |
| 58 | Decstations running 4.1, and RS6000s running 3.1. However, there were mongo |
| 59 | memory leaks in the X server distributed with the RS6000, so I had to compile |
| 60 | the X11R5 server and use that. |
| 61 | |
| 62 | As you add more fish (especially very colorful fish) the total color use set |
| 63 | becomes quite large (greater than 255). I added 2 new options to help you |
| 64 | deal with this. By default xfishtank would find the total color use set |
| 65 | for all the fish you requested, and then start allocating out of the default |
| 66 | colormap until it filled up, it would then match the rest of the colors to |
| 67 | whatever colors it could get. This first come first serve color allocation |
| 68 | can give really bad results for large color sets. I added the -m option |
| 69 | to allow you to specify that the program should cut the color use set down |
| 70 | to the number you specify with the -m option before starting to allocate |
| 71 | out of the default colormap. The algorithm used by -m is considerably better |
| 72 | than first come first serve. Also, having xfishtank use ALL the available |
| 73 | cells in the default colormap can be bad. The -C options lets you limit how |
| 74 | many cells xfishtank will take out of the default colormap. |
| 75 | In the first come first serve senario colors are allocated for the fish, |
| 76 | in the order of appearance in the FishList file, and then from the backgound |
| 77 | picture if one exists. |
| 78 | |
| 79 | Finally, due to popular demand, I put back in my clipmask code. By setting |
| 80 | the -d option (for Do clipping), xfishtank will swim its fish over whatever |
| 81 | you already have on your root window. WARNING: This will slow down your |
| 82 | machine! The reason I took this code out originally was it slowed my |
| 83 | machine down too much for me to comfortably work. But if you think you have |
| 84 | a really spiffy fast workstation, go ahead and give it a try. |
| 85 | |
| 86 | If you use the -d option and notice some flicker (which I expect you will), |
| 87 | this is because xfishtank is just doing an XClearArea, and letting the root |
| 88 | redraw its background. If you know what you want your background picture to |
| 89 | be, use -p <image_file> instead of -d. The image_file needs to be a gif |
| 90 | image. Since xfishtank now knows what your background is, xfishtank with |
| 91 | the -p option should have much less flicker. However, it suffers the |
| 92 | disadvantage that you can't change the background picture without restarting |
| 93 | xfishtank. |
| 94 | |
| 95 | The intrepid explorer of the source code will notice that there are some |
| 96 | options not described in xfishtank -help. In particular -o -and -D. These |
| 97 | options aren't described because they were stuff I was fussing with and couldn't |
| 98 | get to work. I left them in on this release so that if someone else wanted |
| 99 | to try and get them to work, they could see what I had already tried. The -o |
| 100 | option lets fish try and swim on top of each other. It looks ugly no matter |
| 101 | how I do it, if you can fix it, great. -D is a special option that is only |
| 102 | active if you have also specified -d and -p. Normally you never want to specify |
| 103 | both -d and -p because it doesn't make the animation any better, and it |
| 104 | slightly messes up fish to bubble intersections. However, if you specify |
| 105 | -d -D -o -p you will get as close as I could get to proper fish intersections. |
| 106 | And when you see how crumby these are, and how slow it makes your machine |
| 107 | you will know why I gave up. |
| 108 | |
| 109 | Ok, I'll fess up, I'm lying, I did actually get good fish to fish intersections |
| 110 | but only by writing a completely different version of xfishtank that has |
| 111 | each fish be a shaped override-redirect window, that moves itself, and changes |
| 112 | its shape-mask to animate. This looks REALLY COOL, but grinds any and all |
| 113 | X servers to a complete standstill. |
| 114 | |
| 115 | |
| 116 | ********************** NEW FISH PICTURES ********************* |
| 117 | |
| 118 | This release contains a grand total of 29 fish! These fish were carefully |
| 119 | created through lots of hard work, and the help of many many people who |
| 120 | sent me pictures of fish, non-copyrighted gifs of fish, and allowed me to |
| 121 | borrow their scanners. I'm not going to try and name them all here, there |
| 122 | are lots of you, and I'm afraid I may miss someone. You all know who you are, |
| 123 | and you have my heartfelt thanks, I couldn't have done this without you. |
| 124 | |
| 125 | |
| 126 | ********************** TROUBLE WITH FISH ********************* |
| 127 | |
| 128 | There is a scarcity of good fish pictures in the world, and they are all |
| 129 | protected by lawyers. Here is the solution I propose. |
| 130 | |
| 131 | Any of you with talent can edit up any pictures you want, somehow get them |
| 132 | into GIF format, and import them into your xfishtank. The program |
| 133 | "giftofish" that I am supplying here takes as input any 2 GIF files, |
| 134 | and creates a xfishtank header file for that fish. The 2 files must have |
| 135 | the same width and height, and must both have the same background color. |
| 136 | The pictures are assumed to be the two frames of an animated fish swiming right. |
| 137 | Put this new header file into your fishmaps directory, edit the FishList |
| 138 | file to add the prefix of that header file, and increment the total fishcount |
| 139 | on the first line of that file. Now recompile xfishtank, and your new fish |
| 140 | will be used. Also, the program fishtogif will extract the two gifs from |
| 141 | any fish header file so you can touch up what you already have. |
| 142 | |
| 143 | Other fish sources: |
| 144 | The AfterDark fish on the Mac are beautiful. If you |
| 145 | have already shelled out the money to Berkely Systems Software to buy those |
| 146 | fish, and you also want to see them on your UNIX box, here is what you do. |
| 147 | If you can transfer the Mac fish files to UNIX, run the "gofish" program |
| 148 | supplied here, it will write out the fish into two intermediate files. |
| 149 | The files will look strange, they are my own format, just feed them to the |
| 150 | giftofish program (which understands that format), and it will create a |
| 151 | fish header file for you. |
| 152 | OpenWindows 3.0 comes with some fish pictures. If you have purchased |
| 153 | Openwindows, and want to use those pictures, the program "rasttofish" |
| 154 | supplied here will read one of their sun raster fish pictures, and produce |
| 155 | a xfishtank header file for it. Note, the Openwindows fish are only one |
| 156 | frame, so the won't be animated. |
| 157 | There is apparently a PC Windows program with some swimming fish. |
| 158 | The individual fish are stored in .fsh files. The program pcfshtofish |
| 159 | will turn one of these .fsh files into an xfishtank header file. |
| 160 | |
| 161 | |
| 162 | ********************** THANKS ********************* |
| 163 | |
| 164 | A really big thanks to well over 100 wonderful people who after downloading |
| 165 | the last version of xfishtank took the time to send me such pleasant, |
| 166 | complimentary, and supportive e-mail. This version was never planned, but |
| 167 | all of you have made me feel better about writing this code than anything |
| 168 | that any employer has ever paid me for. |
| 169 | |
| 170 | |
| 171 | As usual, mail any problems, questions, complaints, reccommendations, and |
| 172 | cookies to me. |
| 173 | |
| 174 | Eric Bina |
| 175 | 508 E. Michigan, #35 |
| 176 | Urbana, IL 61801 |
| 177 | |
| 178 | ebina@ncsa.uiuc.edu |
| 179 | |
| 180 | (217)344-9101 |
| 181 | Work(217)244-6133 |
| 182 | |
| 183 | |