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
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
15 Pushed to github Feb 2012 by Jim Rees.
17 Build and install should go something like this:
18 tar xfvz xfishtank.tar.gz (or git clone the repo)
24 Here's the README as I found it. Also see README.debian for more recent
28 ********************** FUN WITH FISH *********************
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.
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]
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.
51 xfishtank -help to see the command line options.
54 ********************** NEW FUN WITH FISH *********************
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
116 ********************** NEW FISH PICTURES *********************
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.
126 ********************** TROUBLE WITH FISH *********************
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.
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.
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.
162 ********************** THANKS *********************
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.
171 As usual, mail any problems, questions, complaints, reccommendations, and
projects / xfishtank.git / blob