README

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