Electric Sheep........anyone think possible?
 

Ok, if you dont know about the electric sheep project screensaver you should google it and check it out. Its a free, open source screensaver that creates and shares amazing fractals with all other users running the screensaver at the same time. Its already running on ubuntu, would something like this be possible to port to the n800? or am i just dreaming ( of electric sheep) :)

heres a link where they have a tarball for download
http://community.electricsheep.org/node/128

Re: Electric Sheep........anyone think possible?
 

Porting would be a fairly modest effort. But LCD screens need no saving, and a automatic turbocharged battery drainer and network bandwidth eater like electric sheep is about the last application you could possibly want on a battery-operated device with a low volume data plan...

Sevo

Re: Electric Sheep........anyone think possible?
 

I just thought it would be cool, cause I use my n800 at work, and most of the time i have it plugged in cause the wireless is always on. Occasionally I'll take it out on the lot with me, but most of the time its a desk fixture :) + i have an unlimited data plan

Re: Electric Sheep........anyone think possible?
 

This would be fun to play with, but would be a huge resource / power hog (even assuming you disabled the client-side distributed rendering). The screensaver is basically a bunch of looped MPEG2 files... Lots of CPU power to play, lots of flash to store them.

You might be able to achieve a similar effect by downloading some loops, and forming them into a static playlist. (Assuming one of the available media players can do that.)

Re: Electric Sheep........anyone think possible?
 

Figured I'd test this out.

Sheep pack 2170 plays beautifully in mplayer, although transitions aren't seamless as mplayer releases the screen between mpegs.

Render+play = not happening on the N800, heh. Not for any meaningful values of render.

What I'd recommend doing is using VirtualDub to join a number of sheep by hand and then play that file...it'll look pretty and be entirely useless, but that's rather the point, isn't it? :)

Re: Electric Sheep........anyone think possible?
 

cool, thanks for the tips!

Re: Electric Sheep........anyone think possible?
 

I would love to have sheeps as wallpapers (probably rendered at a much lower framerate) on my N900; perhaps the rendering of new sheeps and the downloading of new batches could be restricted to only while the wallcharger is plugged and the device is connected to WiFi in order to not drain the battery nor use up too much GPRS bytes or minutes.