Ive been wondering for a while now if it is possible to have a completely animated desktop background. A short mpg / avi / divx or whatever else looping... Something like a waterfall or a rainy street would look quite atmoshperic. Water ripples perhaps on a pond or flowing lillies. Falling snow? : )
Anyway, how would I achieve such an effect ? Do I need to modify the current shell severely do to so? In which OS would it be easier to set up 98 2k XP ? Or do I use a replacement shell like litestep ? Is this even possible at all?
no special program is needed. active desktop can do that. it's doable by using a html file wich can be anything accually and setting it as your desktop background. if you want a movie you can put a mpeg movie in the html file or a flash file thats set to 100% width and hight. for the mpeg movie you can have it made in your screen resolution but if your at something large like me 1600x1200 thats an overkill. i've been thinking about makeing something like that you wanted for some time so i might make it a test project for 2002.
for the ripple effect, there are several apps to do just that, google "ripple win32".
for an avi/mpeg, there's active desktop, with its inevitable performance hit.
you can also try setting a screensaver to be your backdrop using the saver module with litestep; using albedo with winamp as a background; using an tv card set to backdrop playing a video.
You can set a flash animation as backdrop, most easily with active desktop, most elegantly with flashdesk.
You can just do 10 second cycling of sequenced wallpapers with any of the wallpaper changers for a slowly progressing animation.
In any *nix, you can use xanim w/ the +root flag to set an animation as background. (Far less of a performance hit, as well - I've done this with 1024x768 animations).
For small segments of the background, lslive (doesn't require ls to run) can drop looping gif's on your desktop and have them function as shortcuts; verona desktop enhancer & its successor desktopx supposedly offer this functionality as well.
Reveal can have animated objects on your desktop, but in its last incarnation, looping an animation sequence more than 21 times will crash the shell.
Hope this helps. You can find any of these apps with a google search, of course.
For the Mac people that want to do this too, it is possible under OSX, with a program called SaverLab. It runs screensaver modules and places them on your desktop's background. The only drawback I have come across is that it hides your desktop icons, but you can just pull up a Finder window or use another file browser (Coela, SNAX, etc) to get them. If you guys want to see the end results, tell me and I'll post another screenshot.
To run Drempels you need; DirectX 5.0 or greater, Windows 9x/ME/NT/2k operating system. Your CPU (processor) must support the MMX instruction set. Almost all CPU's faster than 300 MHz support this, and all Pentium II or later chips do.
To run DreamRender you need; Either Windows98, WindowsME or Windows2000. A 3D accelerator card (DreamRender works well with 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, 3Dfx Voodoo 3, 3Dfx Voodoo 5500, ATI Rage Pro, ATI Radeon, NVidia TnT2, NVidia GeForce, S3 Savage cards and even the Matrox G400)
I have some problems with dreamrender. it works fine, but it makes images look shitty
i made a "dream" with this winter-ish image i made, because i wanted to have snow falling through it. but, even though the image was definetely big enough, DR made it look like ass.. (ie pixelated)
